Steven Spielberg had never failed on this level before. In fact, he’d never really failed before. He’d been given some advice about the movie from John Wayne, who had declined to act in it due to ill health. Spielberg would recall that the Duke “said he felt it was a very un-American movie, and I shouldn’t […]
Well, this is going to get me some fans. I despised Robin Williams. Every time he did stand-up, every time he was on a talk show and in nearly every movie he was in, it was a constant case of “Look at me! I’m the center of attention! No one else is as important as […]
Gore Vidal’s 1968 novel Myra Breckinridge was a landmark novel, an attack on the traditional norms of gender and sexuality, while also a biting satire of Hollywood. It was also seen as incredibly pornographic, so the idea that a movie could be made from the book seemed pretty out there. After all, two weeks into writing […]
People like to rag on Christian Slater. I’m not one of those people. If his name is on the movie, I’ll watch it. Call it bad choices or bad luck, but the Slate does not suck. Granted, most of the movies he’s done of late do, but he himself, does not. He, like Bruce Willis […]
I wanted in my heart of hearts to love this movie. I mean, it starts with a Spanish-language version of “Rock You Like a Hurricane” while the titular Hellboy battles a lucha libre vampire. That bloodsucker turns out to be Esteban Ruiz, an agent for the Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense. His last words […]
After Terminator 2: Judgement Day, the monolith known as Arnold Schwarzenegger could do no wrong. But where do you go after you move from Austria to here with no money, take over the world of bodybuilder and then become the biggest movie star in the world? You make fun of yourself. That’s where the original script […]
Nobody is demanding the Snyder cut for this, his most revealing film, a total exploration of the id that presents a dual world of women battling against, well, something while they’re also being abused in what we’re to assume is the more real of the two fake worlds. But throughout, it just looks like you’re […]
Much like how I never got It Follows and worship Under the Silver Lake, Richard Kelly followed up Donnie Darko with the impenetrable Southland Tales, a movie seemingly designed to appeal to literally a handful of people. How did this happen? Was no one saying no? And more importantly, where are the people obsessing over this movie? As for […]
The lesson of this box office failure: Don’t hire a psychic as a consultant and don’t allow a church to finance your film. Did John Travolta learn nothing from this film before embarking on Battlefield Earth? The Sun Myung Moon, the head of the controversial Unification Church, and one of the church’s members, known as […]
$165 million worldwide against a production budget of $175 million. Yep, that’s a box office failure. Yet the 1967 film that preceeded this one is also one of the biggest failures in movie history. It tripled its original budget, ballooning to $17 million ($132 million in today’s money). And the movie only made back $9 […]
