Hayden Childs' Worst Movies Ever (Part Two...plus 5 honorable mention bad movie haikus!)

6. LIFE IS BEAUTIFUL (1997)



Long ago I was happy and carefree, way back when Roberto Benigni was the sorta-annoying Italian guy from those Jim Jarmusch movies. He made funny jokes, I made funny jokes, everything was good, see?  But now that happiness is gone forever. The day that I saw Life Is Beautiful, my love - strike that, let’s say “tolerance” - of Benigni became a tearful nightmare. You could call it the day the clown cried. See, the premise of the movie is that Benigni is trying to convince his child that the Nazi concentration camp they are in is all a big, jokey game. Actually, that's only the second half of the movie. The first half is about Benigni trying to woo his lady through a bunch of wacky pratfalls. The second half is Benigni making light of the Holocaust through wacky pratfalls. It's the craziest genocide of a people ever! You'll laugh, cry, puke in horror, and never be able to watch Down By Law again!

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In a long profile published as the cover story of The New York Times Magazine, Lynn Hirschberg nominates Philip Seymour Hoffman as the leading character actor of our day. Lord knows he can't be faulted on effort. At 41, Hoffman still divides his time between stage and screen and can be seen in two big movies released this fall, Synecdoche, NY and Doubt--down one from this time last year, when he could be seen in Before the Devil Knows You're Dead, The Savages, and Charlie Wilson's War. He's also "a very active co-artistic director of the LAByrinth Theater Company, a multicultural collective in New York that specializes in new American plays. LAB mounted five productions last year, thanks in large part to Hoffman’s diligent involvement with every aspect of the process, from fund-raising to directing to acting." Hirschberg caught up with him in London, directing a West End production of a play called Riflemind, which he had previously staged in Australia. "“I don’t get nervous when I’m directing a play," Hoffman told Hirschberg. It’s not like acting. If this fails, I wouldn’t be as upset by it.” Incidentally, Riflemind was written by Andrew Upton, who's Mr. Cate Blanchett, who, like Hoffman, was in the cast of The Talented Mr.Ripley. "“On that movie," Hoffman recalled, "we shot only one or two days a week,” Hoffman recalled. “Much of the time, I was in Rome with Cate and Andrew. I have a hard time having fun, but that was heaven. And I must really like Andrew — my girlfriend, who is in New York, is about to have our third child, and I am here.”

Whatever else he's had going on in his personal or professional life these past twelve months, so far as movies are concerned, for Hoffman 2008 was probably the year of Synecdoche, Charlie Kaufman's dizzyingly ambitious dark comedy about the promise of making sense of life through creativity and the dangers of living in your head. Hardly a universally acclaimed, unblemished success, it's one of the few recent movies that seemed worthy of some of the arguments it inspired.

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The Dark Knight joined the exclusive $500 million club with its weekend take of $11 million. It’s still nearly $100 million behind the only other member of that club, Titanic. Tropic Thunder remained on top of the box office for a third straight week, taking in $14.3 million and keeping the Vin Diesel vehicle Babylon A.D. down in second place. In a sign that we may soon be free of the tyranny of the spoof movie, Disaster Movie finished in seventh.

For some reason, I have failed to mention Todd Solondz’s sequel to Happiness in this space. Let me rectify that immediately. Todd Solondz is making a sequel to Happiness.

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It used to be a novelty worth commenting on that someone would make a movie based on a video game. Now, of course, in the Uwe Boll era, it's commonplace to make a movie out of a video-game franchise; for that matter, we also have movies based on amusement-park rides, board games, and for all we know, the lunch special at the Warner Brothers studio cafeteria. Video games based on movies are likewise no big deal anymore; any franchise picture worth its salt has a console adaptation on the shelves often before the movie actually gets made, and in at least one instance — the upcoming Ghostbusters game — the console game actually stands in place of a movie sequel.

Unfortunately, as Karina Longworth points out at Spout.com, indie films are left almost entirely out of the equation. In a highly amusing piece, she points out the notable dearth of video game adaptations based on successful independent films — and suggests ways in which this problem might be rectified.

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