Lady Razz

It was one of the most cringe-worthy moments in the history of cinematic award presentations.  It was a major insult to the intelligence of many, and it could have been avoided if someone who clearly knew better had shown restraint.

Yes, having to acknowledge with a Worst Picture Razzie a filmed stage performance of Diana, The Musical that should never have been done is enough to make anyone cringe.

What, what did you think I meant?  😃

I once suggested that Broadway musicals would never come back to Broadway in a pandemic-ravaged New York theater scene, but I was wrong.  I also was wrong that Diana, The Musical would never make it to Broadway after COVID prevented its planned March 2020 premiere.  But I wasn't as wrong about any of that as you would have been if you thought a cheesy musical based on the short life of one of the most sainted and martyred women of the twentieth century would work.  And it didn't. Diana, The Musical opened in October 2021 and closed after 33 performances.  And yet, someone had the not-so-bright idea of filming a performance of it to show on Netflix.  And so the Golden Raspberry Award Foundation (GRAF) awarded to Diana, The Musical Razzies for Worst Picture, Worst Actress (Jeanna de Waal), Worst Supporting Actress (Broadway Veteran Judy Kaye), Worst Director (Christopher Ashley) and Worst Screenplay (Joe DiPietro and David Bryan).  That's five out of nine nominations, folks.  You can go here to see what the other nominations were. 

(Aside: Basketball player LeBron James won the Worst Actor Razzie for his role in Space Jam: A New Legacy, which should serve as a warning to future basketball stars interested in working with Bugs Bunny and his friends: If it's not Michael Jordan with the Looney Tunes gang, it's just not the same.)

The GRAF called Diana, The Musical an "all-singing, all-dancing, all-awful, royal mess," but theater critic Jesse Green of the New York Times probably spoke for most people when he dismissed the effort to turn Princess Diana's troubled life into entertainment as tawdry and exploitative, adding that "if you care about Diana as a human being, or dignity as a concept, you will find this treatment of her life both aesthetically and morally mortifying."

But at least it didn't end with a car crash.

The movie version made for Netflix was not one of the Broadway performances from this past fall but was in fact filmed in the summer of 2020 under COVID restrictions without an audience.  Bad move.  If a filmed version had not been made, the musical would have been forgotten once it closed, and none of the actors involved would have been documented on screen for all eternity.  You can always get out of a bad play and you can move on from it without regret.  But you can never get out of a bad movie.

I would suspect that stage actress Jeanna de Waal (below), who played the title role, will have this 800-pound gorilla of a production on her back for the rest of her career - which could be a week.

The Golden Raspberry Award Foundation is cruel, but fair. And it's honorable.  As a joke, the GRAF created a special category for this year's Razzie Awards: worst performance by Bruce Willis in a 2021 movie. Willis was nominated no fewer than eight times for the roles he played in 2021 for such movies as American Siege, Apex, Cosmic Sin (the winning performance), Deadlock and Out of Death.  But when it turned out that Willis is suffering from aphasia, a medical condition that makes it impossible to speak or understand speech, and is retiring from acting, Razzie co-founders John Wilson and Mo Murphy took back the award, saying that aphasia likely had an effect on Willis's acting of late and that it was in bad taste to mock someone for having to struggle at one's craft with such a disease to contend with.  

"If someone's medical condition is a factor in their decision making and/or their performance," Wilson and Murphy said, "we acknowledge that it is not appropriate to give them a Razzie."

Wilson and Murphy have class.  Unlike the people who put Diana, The Musical together.

As for Jeanna de Waal . . . honey, you're about to become the answer to a trivia question.

So I heard something happened at the Oscars?

(And tomorrow . . . the Grammys are on!)

Not The Cat's Meow

Normally, once the Oscars are done (and they were early this year),  I review the "winners" of the awards from the Golden Raspberry Award Foundation, that is, the Razzies.  The Razzies are usually awarded the day before the Oscars, but this time only the nominations were announced before the Oscars.  But there's already a clear front runner for the most "wins," unlike with the Democratic presidential nomination campaign.  Leading the pack with nine nominations is Cats - the movie! :-D

Note the slogan at the top of the movie poster.  So much for truth in advertising.

I don't need to tell you again that I had the misfortune of taking in performance of the original Broadway production, with its original Broadway cast, and I was repelled by the grotesque costuming, the grotesque scenery, the grotesque choreography, and the songs, which were beyond grotesque.  After numerous stage productions and a TV version shown on public television, there was no reason to make a theatrically released movie out of this Andrew Lloyd Webber perversion of T.S. Eliot's writing, but someone went ahead and made one anyway.

The Razzie nominations Cats received are as follows:

• Worst Picture
• Worst Actress (Francesca Hayward)
• Worst Supporting Actress (Judi Dench)
• Worst Supporting Actress (yes, another - for Rebel Wilson)
• Worst Supporting Actor (James Corden)
• Worst Screen Combo (Any Two Half-Feline/Half-Human Hairballs)
• Worst Screen Combo (another two-fer! Jason Derulo & His CGI-Neutered "Bulge")
• Worst Director (Tom Hooper - who?) 
• Worst Screenplay (Lee Hall and Tom Hooper)

I'm betting that it wins at least eight of these awards. At least.

Anyway, Cats was one of the most high-profile bombs of the 2019 holiday season.  There have been bad movie musicals before, but this one will likely go down as the worst of all time by a wide margin - now and forever.  It should at least be memorialized (no pun intended) as the worst movie musical since 1978's Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.  But while Cats may have had an accomplished dancer in the form of Francesca Hayward . . .

. . . at least the Sgt. Pepper movie had sexy ballerina mimes! 

Not to mention one of the most memorable bad screen combos ever - Alice Cooper and his cream pie! :-D

I like repeating myself, yes . . . 

I'll be back in a flash - or whenever the Razzies are awarded for 2020 - with more trash. :-p

Razz Like the Wind

A significant wind storm (you never want to hear that adjective in any weather forecast) is predicted for my area tomorrow, and so the forty-ninth power outage (no, blackout) in a decade that I've been dreading all month long due to the dicey weather this February might actually happen this time.  Outage or no outage, though, I have a full week ahead of me, including a dental appointment, and so I might have to wait until next weekend to offer my takes of all of the big news expected from Washington and Hanoi this coming week.  For now, though, I'd like to take a brief look at the one thing that's more painful than a dental appointment - the subject of bad movies.  Specifically, the 2019 Golden Raspberry Award Foundation, or "Razzie," Awards.  

A leading contender for the top 2019 Razzie prizes was Gotti, starring John Travolta as the famous mobster.  A movie that looked good on paper, it flopped with both the critics and with audiences.  I suppose I should have have included Travolta on my "losers of the year" list this past December, given Gotti's bad press and bad box office, but I'm glad I didn't, for two reasons.  One, Travolta is a nice guy.  Second, Gotti didn't win a single Razzie, despite having gotten nominations in most of the available categories; many of the awards went to another film that was so bad, moviegoers didn't even know of - or maybe heard of and then forgot that it existed.

I'm talking about Holmes & Watson, an unnecessary comedy version of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories starring Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly in the respective title roles.  It won for worst picture, worst supporting actor (Reilly), worst director (Etan Cohen), and worst remake, ripoff or sequel.  Ferrell got beaten out for worst actor, though, by Donald J. Trump for his "performances" in the anti-Trump left-wing Michael Moore documentary Fahrenheit 11/9 and the pro-Trump right-wing documentary Death of a Nation. (Both movies earned Trump and his pettiness the Worst Screen Combo award as well.) Melissa McCarthy won worst actress for two forgotten movies, The Happytime Murders and Life of the Party, but she still won a Razzie Redeemer Award - given to Razzie winners who follow up horrible performances with good ones - for her portrayal of a forger in Can You Ever Forgive Me?  The irredeemable Kellyanne Conway, Trump's White House Counsel, won for Worst Supporting Actress for her appearance in Fahrenheit 11/9.   

But you don't care about all that, because you're more interested in the Oscars tonight, or at least you're interested in the red-carpet show beforehand, where you can see Roshumba Williams turn on the sex appeal in one of those hot dresses of hers.  Well, that's certainly more enjoyable than watching Will Ferrell play Sherlock Holmes.  (No kidding, Kojak!)   

Anyway, for those who do care about the Razzies, the full list of nominees and winners is here.  I hope to be back in a few days, if not sooner.  Wish me luck with the wind. :-O 

Razz It Up

Forget the Oscars - the Razzies are the only movie awards that mean anything anymore, because it celebrates American cinema (foreign nominees? highly implausible) at its worst at a time when everything else about America - including our government - has reached the mother of all nadirs.

The 2018 Razzies were awarded by the Golden Raspberry Award Foundation this past Saturday, and the big "winner" was, with four awards for Worst Movie, Worst Screenplay, Worst Director, and, for "any two obnoxious emojis," Worst Screen Combo, The Emoji Movie, an animated flick about all of the emojis we use on Facebook and their typical, complicated lives.  The plot revolves around one emoji that can't make the facial expression it's supposed to and gets in trouble for it.

I really wanted to see someone base a cartoon movie on emoticon symbols.  Said no one ever.

I'm still waiting to find out why Patrick Stewart agreed to voice the turd emoji character.  By the way, when I first saw a turd emoji, I thought it was supposed to be frozen chocolate custard.  As Jimmy Fallon might say, thank you, turd emoji, for ruining frozen chocolate custard for me.  Next time I'll order vanilla.

Turd emjois are crude.  But not as crude as Fifty Shades Darker, which won Worst Remake, Rip-off, or Sequel must be, and Kim Basinger - remember her? - picked up a Worst Supporting Actress Razzie for her performance in that movie on top of that. Scariest of all, apparently, is Tyler Perry "winning" Worst Actress (HA HA) for Boo! 2: A Madea Halloween (come on, Tyler, even Robin Williams knew that drag is only funny once unless you're a Monty Python alumnus) or Tom Cruise "winning" Worst Actor for The Mummy.   To those who are shocked that an A-list actor would get a Razzie, be warned: "A-list" doesn't mean you're talented, it means you're bankable for the studio.  Ironically, The Mummy was a flop, as I noted in my 2017 list of winners and losers.  Tom Cruise has never been a great actor or even a good one; as much as I love Rain Man, I'd have to concede that Cruise's performance in that 1988 classic was forced when compared to Dustin Hoffman's effortlessness at playing an autistic character, even if Cruise had the best line - "K Mart sucks!"  Unfortunately, so does his acting.  (Then again, as a spoiled-brat gray-market new-car salesman, Cruise didn't have to stretch very far in Rain Man, so that's why he was still able to pull it off.)

I'd like to believe that the failure of movies such as The Emoji Movie and The Mummy will finally wean Hollywood off making dumb cartoon features and overdone blockbusters.  I'd also like to believe in the Tooth Fairy.  But I can dream, can I?  And not about the Tooth Fairy.  

Jack, Jill and Razzie

When a bowling ball does what Adam Sandler did at the Razzie Awards Sunday night - hitting all ten available prizes - it's called a "strike." But when you make a movie and it breaks a precedent by winning a total of ten awards from the Golden Raspberry Award Foundation - with two Razzies given to you and the director for both the movie in question and another movie as well! - it's called a strike-out. It means your movie - in this case Jack and Jill, in which Sandler played both title roles, fraternal twins - sucks big time. It means it sucks so badly that the second worst movie of 2011 - which apparently was Just Go With It, which, like Jack and Jill, starred Sandler and was directed by Dennis Dugan - can't even come close to meeting its awfulness. It means that Sandler - a fixture on television and in the movies since beginning a four-year stint in the repertory company of "Saturday Night Live" in 1991 - has no right to complain when people start calling his career into question. And it means that Mencken wannabes like myself - who enjoy interrupting themselves in print with clauses bookended by hyphens - will quickly want to take advantage of tearing down Sandler further.

But I think I've already done all the damage to Sandler that I possibly can on my own. So I'll let the record do the rest of the damage. Here, in its entirety, is the full list of the ten awards Sandler won at the Razzies ceremony on April 1:

Worst Picture (Jack and Jill)

Worst Actor (for Sandler’s work in Jack and Jill and Just Go With It)

Worst Actress (as Jill in Jack and Jill)

Worst Supporting Actor (for Al Pacino’s cameo as himself in Jack and Jill)

Worst Supporting Actress (for David Spade as Monica in Jack and Jill)

Worst Screen Ensemble (for the entire cast of Jack and Jill)

Worst Director (Dennis Dugan for Jack and Jill and Just Go With It)

Worst Remake, Rip-off or Sequel (Jack and Jill for ripping off Ed Wood's camp classic Glen or Glenda)

Worst Screen Couple (for three -count'em, three couples in Jack and Jill - Sandler and Katie Holmes, Sandler and Al Pacino or Sandler with himself)

Worst Screenplay (Jack and Jill)

I can't understand why Al Pacino had anything to do with this  Did he need the money for doing a self-portraying cameo in this picture that badly?

The fact that this movie even made it to the theaters speaks volumes about Hollywood. It means that Hollywood cannot and will not stop making movies that appeal to young dumb males, i.e., every American male under 35. It means that the movie studios would rather bankroll a grade-zero piece of cinematic vulgarity than make a greater number of serious dramas about blacks or Hispanics, offering prima facie evidence that racism in Hollywood is alive and well. It also means that Hollywood is putting out "comedies" that increasingly fail to merit the term.

And that's not the worst of it. Despite Jack and Jill, or more likely because of it - to date, it's grossed $142 million worldwide against its $79 million budget, $73 million of that gross coming from the U.S. and Canada alone - Sandler can count on continuing to get work. He's already slated to appear in two more movies, including a sequel to the ironically titled Grown Ups. That says more about the movie-going public than I care to mention.

Adam Sandler has made a lot of terrible movies, but, as Roger Ebert might say, the celluloid that goes into producing them obviously supplies plenty of raw material for the ukulele pick industry.

I Razz The Razzies

I want to express my displeasure with the Golden Raspberry Award Foundation.

Am I angry that they've nominated the legendary Sarah Jessica Parker for worst actress in two separate performances in two separate movies? No, since she has shown obvious poor judgment of late in the roles she plays.

Am I upset that Adam Sandler got a whopping eleven nominations, including worst actor and worst actress, for his non-comedy Jack and Jill, in which he plays both title roles? No, because I consider Sandler to be one of those typical dumb American males who go from adolescence to senility while bypassing adulthood, and so I do not take him seriously . . . at all.

Am I stunned that Madonna didn't get nominated as worst director for her ego voyage W./E.? No, because I don't think that movie was eligible for consideration anyway. Wait until 2013.

No, I'm peeved because the Golden Raspberry Award Foundation chose this year not to announce its nominations the day before the Oscar nominations or give out its awards the day before the Oscar ceremony. Instead, GRAF founder John Wilson and the voting members of his group chose to announce the nominations now and have their "award" ceremony on April 1 this time, because April Fool's Day was deemed a perfect date for it.

"I have always wondered if we stepped slightly away from lockstep with the Oscars, what would happen," Wilson explained. "We just kept hoping the Oscars would do their ceremony on April 2, but they just never did."

Right. As we all know, the Oscars were once held in late March, but the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences moved the ceremony up to February to take advantage of TV ratings sweeps. As for holding the Razzies five weeks later, it defeats the purpose of getting Hollywood's worst out of our system before we celebrate Hollywood's finest.

No matter, I eagerly look forward to seeing the purveyors of everything wrong with American cinema get their just deserts as soon as March has gone out like a lamb. And Wilson and the GRAF will come roaring in like lions . . . to which Adam Sandler will likely be thrown.

Do The Razz

The 2010 Golden Raspberry Award Foundation for the worst movies and movie performances of all time have been announced, and surprisingly, Nia Vardalos, the Peter Frampton of comedy, is not among them - despite putting out two movies last year.

Even more surprising is that Sandra Bullock is a nominee, despite getting a best actress Oscar nomination (more about the Oscars later) for her role in The Blind Side, about a white Southern woman who takes in a black teenager and helps him turn his life around and sees him go on to the NFL. Her worst actress Razzie nomination is for All About Steve, a movie in which Bullock plays a lovesick crossword puzzle editor who obsesses over a news cameraman and follows him everywhere. Never heard of it? A lot of people didn't, until the Razzie nominations were announced.

All About Steve got a worst picture nomination, as did Land of the Lost (based on the seventies Saturday morning TV show of the same name, which truly sucked), Old Dogs (starring Robin Williams and John Travolta, both of whom jumped the shark some time in the late nineties), and two action movies made for twelve-year-old men of all ages, G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra and Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen.

Steve Martin got a worst actor nomination for his role as Inspector Clouseau in Pink Panther 2, a sequel to his original remake, which flopped. So many people must have felt taken in by the first Martin Pink Panther movie that they weren't about to fall for the same scam again. Will Ferrell got one for Land of the Lost. But get this - the Jonas Brothers were nominated for a concert movie. I've always said they'd be the Bee Gees of the twenty-first century; this must be their equivalent to the Sgt. Pepper movie (which also starred Peter Frampton). Alas, that deathless classic was released in 1978, two years before the Golden Raspberry Award Foundation was even founded, so it never won a Razzie.

For worst actress, Sarah Jessica Parker joined Sandra Bullock for Did You Hear About The Morgans?, a movie no one heard about. Miley Cyrus got nominated as well for playing the title role in Hannah Montana movie, even as her father Billy Ray got nominated for worst supporting actor in the same film. Keep it the family. Beyoncé Knowles was nominated for Obsessed, but she isn't likely to win, if only because her husband is Jay-Z, and the artist legally known as Shawn Carter isn't someone the Golden Raspberry Award Foundation would want to mess with. (He is one big nasty dude!) I would have to root for someone other than Sandra Bullock to get the worst actress movie, if only because she's finally being taken seriously as an actress by the Motion Picture Academy, and a dubious award like this one is the last thing she needs.

Wait! Why am I wasting my time reciting all of these nominees? You can check them out here. They have all sorts of categories - worst acting, worst screenplay, worst direction (All About Steve seems to have cleaned up) but no categories for worst song or worst score. This means that Peter Frampton could write film music and never have to worry about being nominated - though Miley Cyrus will remain a Razzie favorite, it appears, if she keeps up with her acting, which is, I'm led to understand, no better than her singing. So enjoy perusing the latest Razzie nominations and remember - you might be miffed that true talents like Steve Martin and Sandra Bullock are among them, but even esteemed actors are human and make mistakes. And no matter how bad the Jonas Brothers's concert movie turned out, I expect them to have a long and prosperous musical career.

Unlike Peter Frampton.