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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As I mentioned recently, the apocalypse as a motif is fantastic and I plan on asking it to be my valentine next month. I also mentioned that in film, the apocalypse is more often than not a launching pad for some truly heinous genre crap.

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It's hard to think of a movie more divisive — both at the time it was filmed and today — than Stanley Kubrick's adaptation of Anthony Burgess' dystopian social satire A Clockwork Orange.  The novel was already controversial enough (the film, as brutal as it seemed upon its release in 1971, actually toned down much of the book's violence, and substituted a consensual sex scene for Alex's rape, in the novel, of two preadolescent girls), and while the film did what it could to make a savage treatment of youth violence palatable to censors, it still earned an X rating in the United States and raised such objections in the UK that Kubrick voluntarily withdrew it from release, and stipulated that it not be shown there again until after his death. 

Even beyond that, both book and movie are plagued with inconsistencies, misinterpretations, and resentment:  the novel was released in the United States without its critical final chapter (it was finally restored in 1986), which entirely changes the reader's perceptions of what had gone before.  Kubrick himself had only a minimal interest in remaining faithful to his source material (which had been given to him as a gift by his friend and favorite writer, Terry Southern), while Burgess — paid only a pittance for the film rights — had his own misgivings about a movie version of his then-notorious book. "I feared that the cutting to the narrative bone which harmed the filmed Lolita," he said, "would turn the filmed A Clockwork Orange into a complementary pornograph — the seduction of a minor for the one, for the other brutal mayhem.

The writer's aim in both books had been to put language, not sex or violence, into the foreground; a film, on the other hand, was not made out of words."  A Clockwork Orange was, indeed, made not out of words, but out of images, and it was those images — often of vicious sociopathic behavior to which the viewer is made an uncomfortable witness and even accomplice — that defines the movie just as the elegant (and deliberately deceptive) use of language defines the book.

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Soon you’ll be nestled all snug in your bed, and perhaps visions of sugarplums will dance in your head. Being a Screengrab reader, however, it’s more likely that you’re entertaining visions of the snazzy new Stanley Kubrick Directors Series DVD box set waiting under the tree. But if Santa decides you’ve been more naughty than nice and leaves you a copy of the Uwe Boll Collection instead, there’s no need to lose that holiday spirit. As our gift to you, we’ve put together a very different Kubrick collection consisting of the prickly auteur’s early shorts and rarely-seen first feature. It may be lacking in Malcolm McDowell commentaries and spiffy digital remastering, but we assure you it is the finest YouTube has to offer.

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Monday was Guy Fawkes Day. What the hell is Guy Fawkes Day, you may be asking if you are not British, or the product of an inferior educational system? The Fifth of November is what it is, the anniversary of the Gunpowder Plot by one Mr. Fawkes to blow up Parliament. Americans, comic book fans, and people who were hung over in their Survey of European History classes may remember it best from V for Vendetta, where the eponymous terrorist V decides Guy Fawkes Day is the perfect time to throw his own fireworks display at the Houses of Parliament, touching off a popular revolt against the tyrannical government of a future England (not entirely without similarity to modern America). Hollywood films have always had a bit of a, shall we say, delicate constitution about films that portray violent revolution, which, despite the circumstances of our own founding, seems to smack a bit of pink. Other countries haven’t been so squeamish; here’s some good films to watch when you’re ready to stick it to the Man.

BRONENOSETS POTYOMKIN [THE BATTLESHIP POTEMKIN] (1925)

A classic in every sense of the word, Sergei Eisenstein’s phenomenal silent movie about an uprising of sailors against the czarist regime virtually invented the modern art of montage, gave us the endlessly influential “Odessa Steps” sequence, and stood as a towering achievement of Soviet cinema, even outlasting its censors and detractors in Russia itself. But one of the most astonishing things about it is that it was made less than eight years after the Russian Revolution, arguably the most important upheaval of the 20th century. The notion that such gorgeous and powerful art could be put the service of the purest propaganda would haunt writers and critics for decades – and would be put to the test again when Leni Riefenstahl began work on her Triumph of the Will.

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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