Leonard Pierce's Top Ten Worst Movies Ever

1. INDEPENDENCE DAY (1996)
2. THE POSTMAN (1997)



After the half-billion-dollar disaster that was Waterworld, it’s a wonder that any studio would give Kevin Costner money for anything, let alone another massively budgeted post-apocalyptic sci-fi epic. But Warner Brothers ponied up the jack, and auteur Costner decided to show them what he could really do. Wasting another quarter-billion dollars, and bringing eternal shame to the MPAA voters who had, less than a decade before, awarded him a Best Director Oscar, Costner created one of the worst films of all time. Wasting a decent source novel by David Brin, The Postman is noisy, stupid, indulgent, witless, and interminable, and it ends with one of the biggest cop-out endings in motion picture history; but what makes it truly special (by which I mean wretched) is what a colossal vanity project it is for its director/star. Cramming the movie with his relatives, he turns his character from a relatable idealist to an impossibly perfect superman who is loved by everyone who encounters him. It’s the kind of manically overindulgent ego-stroke that used to kill entire careers in the old Hollywood system; unluckily for moviegoers worldwide, it didn’t do the same for Costner.

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On occasion, the Screengrab lets me bring you news from the rich world of film writing in my home town of Chicago. In the Tribune this week, foreign correspondent John Crewdson — inspired by Rendition — contemplates whether or not 'message' movies are really effective vehicles for spurring social change, and film blogger Michael Phillips talks to Mark Ruffalo about how his religious upbringing influenced his art. In the Sun-Times, Miriam Di Nunzio gets Malcolm McDowell to make the curious admission that he doesn’t think Caligula "is as bad as it once was" (has it somehow gotten better over the years?), and local legend Roger Ebert wins a Gotham Award from the Independent Feature Project. And in the Chicago Reader, Jonathan Rosenbaum, as part of his upcoming "Unseen Orson Welles" project, brings us the Italian neo-Marxist Giorgio Agamben’s choice of "the most beautiful six minutes in the history of cinema." — Leonard Pierce