My Year of Flops (2 page)

Along with providing a forum for jokes, japes, and jests, My Year Of Flops had a serious goal. I wanted to fight our cultural tendency to associate commercial failure with artistic bankruptcy. I wanted to give flops something everyone deserves but precious few ever receive: a second chance. When I look at failures, cinematic and otherwise, I see myself. I welcomed the opportunity to provide a sympathetic reappraisal of some of the most reviled films of all time.

During the first year of My Year Of Flops, I found acceptance and validation from readers who cheered me on throughout my quixotic quest. Internet commenters, those nattering nabobs of negativism, transformed into perspicacious proponents of positivity. An online community that all too often resembles an easily agitated lynch mob turned into a band of angels. For I had created not just a blog project but an entire weird world of failure, regret, and bad ideas: a floposphere for pop-culture rubberneckers and schadenfreude enthusiasts. Fulfilling
my wildest dreams, My Year Of Flops steadily grew to become that rarest and most wondrous of creatures: a moderately popular ongoing online feature. It was such a surprising success that readers wouldn't let go after the initial year was over, so I was “persuaded” to continue it indefinitely as a twice-monthly feature at avclub.com. At gunpoint.

Then My Year Of Flops became something even more rare and more wonderfultastic: a book. Not just any book—the book you currently hold in your hands! That you bought! With money you earned doing chores and robbing student nurses! And are going to read! Using your brain bone and imagination!

After much consideration, consultation with our pastors, and several rolls of the 12-sided die, we here at
The A.V. Club
have decided to augment 35 of what
SCTV
's Guy Caballero would call My Year Of Flops' “Golden Classics” (which is to say, columns, aka Case Files, that already ran online in some form) with 15 brand-spanking-new Case Files of films too explosively floptastical for the Internet. But that isn't all! In a bid to break up the oppressive tyranny of my literary voice, we've included mini-interviews with some of the people involved in the flops I've covered. You angrily demanded Austin Pendleton's wry recollections of the making of
Skidoo.
We happily acquiesced.

The flops have been grouped according to genre, beginning with the first Case File, on
Elizabethtown,
which also provided the series with a ratings system dividing all films into three nebulous categories: Failure, Fiasco, and Secret Success. As Orlando Bloom stiffly declaims at the start of
Elizabethtown,
anyone can achieve failure, but a fiasco requires mad-prophet ambition and woeful miscalculation. At the top of the scale lie Secret Successes, films that have been slandered by history yet remain worthy of critical rehabilitation.

After chapters devoted to drama, comedy, superhero/science fiction/action films, musicals, the unsexiest sex films ever made, and family films that qualify as child abuse under the Geneva Conventions, we have a murderer's row of the most notorious flops ever
made. Even a book about flops needs a happy ending and redemptive arc, so I conclude with the fairy-tale ending that fate wouldn't grant the films I've documented. There's an entry on
Joe Versus The Volcano,
a life-affirming fable about a miserable Failure who becomes a Secret Success because of a Fiasco. And I close with a reconsideration of the film that began it all—
Elizabethtown
—and then a blow-by-blow account of the three-hour-long director's cut of
Waterworld.

I never intended
My Year Of Flops
to be a book about the 50 biggest flops or worst films of all time. There are plenty of books like that. This is not one of them. Rather, it's a deeply personal, deeply idiosyncratic journey through the history of cinematic failure populated both by the usual suspects (
Gigli, Battlefield Earth, Ishtar
) and intriguing semi-obscurities like Johnny Cash's
Gospel Road
and Thomas Vinterberg's
It's All About Love.

I chose many of these flops not because their failure casts a huge shadow over pop culture but because they reflect the mythology of their creators and the cultural epoch they inhabited in fascinating and revealing ways. With each Case File, I set out to write about much more than the film addressed, to use an entry to explore, for example, the curious communion of Otto Preminger and the free-love movement in
Skidoo
or the perils and limitations of literary adaptations epitomized by
The Scarlet Letter, Breakfast of Champions,
and Adrian Lyne's
Lolita.

Welcome to my wonderful world of flops. I'm psyched to explore the curious geography of celluloid bombs with you. It's a colorful realm of pee-drinking man-fish, inexplicably floating Africans, psychedelic disco/biblical freak-outs, time-traveling action heroes, an effeminate green alien only Fred Flintstone and Marlon Brando can see, and Rosie O'Donnell in leather bondage gear. Ignore all the road signs warning you to stay away. You're in Failure Country now, with me as your disreputable guide. Enjoy the ride.

 

MY YEAR
OF
FLOPS

Chapter 1

Disastrous Dramas

Bataan Death March Of Whimsy Case File #1: Elizabethtown

Originally Posted January 25, 2007

After that opening piece of voice-over narration, Cameron Crowe's 2005 flop
Elizabethtown
goes on to illustrate by example just what a fiasco looks and feels like.
Elizabethtown
was cursed from its inception. Crowe cast, then uncast, Ashton Kutcher (in the role eventually played by Orlando Bloom) and Jane Fonda (in the role Susan Sarandon ultimately played) in the lead roles: Kutcher as a soulful superstar-shoe-designer-turned-suicidal-pariah who travels to Kentucky
to bury his dead father, and Fonda as his mother, an eccentric who spirals into impish lunacy once she's widowed. Like Crowe's
Jerry Maguire, Elizabethtown
is a populist morality play about a cocky young man humanized by failure who becomes a success in life only after failing spectacularly in business. After a disastrous early screening at the Toronto Film Festival, the film was drastically shortened and its ending altered.

So by the time
Elizabethtown
arrived in theaters, it was already a wounded duck. Going into the film, I thought, “How bad can a Cameron Crowe movie be?” Before
Elizabethtown,
I could say without reservation that Crowe was one of my favorite filmmakers. I don't just love his movies, I want to live in his world. The universe of
Almost Famous, Jerry Maguire,
and
Say Anything
is an infinitely humane realm ruled by an endlessly benevolent deity: Crowe himself. It's a world where no existential quandary is so great that it can't be solved by the perfect combination of classic rock song and dream girl. It's a world of happy pop epiphanies and gentle humanism, bravely devoid of protective irony or sneering cynicism.

In
Elizabethtown,
all Crowe's formidable virtues as a filmmaker betray him. His palpable affection for his characters devolves into pathological emotional neediness. Every frame and character screams, “Love me, love me, love me!”
Elizabethtown
feels like an X-ray of Crowe's soul set to the soundtrack of his life.

Crowe has never been afraid to go for big, pop-operatic moments that bound past realism in their quest for immortality. There's nothing naturalistic about lines like
Jerry Maguire
's “You complete me,” “You had me at hello,” and “Show me the money,” or John Cusack playing “In Your Eyes” on a boombox outside Ione Skye's window in
Say Anything.
Yet they spoke to moviegoers' deep, unfulfilled hunger for grand theatrical gestures and outsized declarations of love.

With
Elizabethtown,
Crowe subscribes to the logic that it's never enough merely to try; no, one must try way too fucking hard. It isn't enough that Drew is the corporate pariah behind a failed shoe; no, he has to be the man behind the greatest athletic-shoe debacle of all time,
a nearly billion-dollar fuckup. Similarly, Crowe can't just have Drew contemplate suicide; he has to have his sad-sack protagonist create a homemade suicide machine with knives affixed to the handlebars that's 90 percent exercise bike, 10 percent gimmicky instrument of permanent self-negation. It's like the secret love child of Dr. Kevorkian and Rube Goldberg. In
Elizabethtown
's universe, even suicide can be oppressively whimsical.

And he can't just have Drew's mom go a little loopy following her beloved husband's death. No, Crowe has Drew's mom use her late husband's memorial to introduce the world's first You-might-be-a-widow-manic-and-raw-with-grief-if … stand-up comedy routine. For example:

In writing and directing
Elizabethtown,
Crowe somehow managed to silence his inner censor and cynic, the naysayer in each of us that implores, “Don't write that. People will make fun of you. Do you really expect a line like, ‘This loss will be met by a hurricane of love,' to be met with anything other than a tornado of derisive snickers?” That's both admirable and insane. Crowe never lets audiences forget that they're watching not just a Cameron Crowe film but the Cameron Croweiest
film in existence, a movie so poignantly personal it makes even the autobiographical
Almost Famous
look like cynical work-for-hire.