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!)

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.  

Come On, Get Razzie!

The Golden Raspberry Award Foundation blew its annual ironic kiss to Hollywood's worst this past Saturday, and the one of the biggest "winners" was Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice.  Neither superhero, obviously, won the battle, as the movie received four booby prizes.

Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice caused some controversy when it was announced that Ben Affleck would play Batman, with many Batman fans opposed to the casting.  This made "normal" people (i.e., people who don't care about comic-book movies) wonder why anyone would care about such a trivial issue.  Affleck was up for a Worst Actor award Saturday night; there's your answer.

Affleck didn't get the golden raspberry for Worst Actor, but he and Henry Cavill, who played Superman, did win for Worst Screen Combo.  Co-star Jesse Eisenberg got the Worst Supporting Actor award, while the movie itself got awards for Worst Prequel, Remake, Rip-Off, or Sequel and Worst Screenplay.

The bigger "winner," however, was conservative activist Dinesh D'Souza, whose-anti-Hillary Clinton documentary, Hillary's America: The Secret History of the Democratic Party, got Worst Picture, Worst Actor (for D'Souza's own narration), Worst Director for D'Souza himself and co-director Bruce Schooley, and Worst Actress for the actress who played Hillary in the movie.  The film was an attempt to de-legitimize Hillary and destroy the Democrats going into the 2016 election, but the Democrats obviously didn't need anyone to do that for them.  Be that as it may, the movie makes some fallacious arguments about how the New Deal was used to manipulate and suppress blacks and argues how the Republicans were the true champions of civil rights legislation (Hubert Humphrey?  Lyndon Johnson?  Robert Kennedy? Never heard of them, eh, Dinesh?).

D'Souza dismissed the award "wins" as "petty revenge" against Donald Trump's election to the Presidency.  Paradoxically, Mel Gibson, no liberal, won the Razzie Redeemer award, an award given to a past Razzie winner for making a good movie . . . as a director - the war film Hacksaw Ridge, which got six Oscar nominations for 2017, including Gibson for Best Director.  (It won two Oscars, for best film editing and best sound mixing.)  As for Becky Turner, the actress who played Hillary, well, maybe one day she'll win an Oscar for a lead role in a movie about an historical event that hasn't happened yet, look back at this documentary and just have a chuckle over it, saying it was just another job.   

Oh yeah, one other thing: Hillary's America: The Secret History of the Democratic Party was the highest-grossing documentary movie of 2016, making it more successful than Michael Moore's Where To Invade Next.

Maybe there should be a Razzie category for Worst Mass Audience. 

You can find the full list of Razzie winners and nominees for 2017 here.

Let's Razz Again

If you can remember when director M. Night Shyamalan was one of the most respected filmmakers in Hollywood, you're showing your age. Peter Bogdanovich, Francis Ford Coppola, and William Friedkin all had their falls from grace, but I don't think any of them have stumbled as quickly and as decisively as Shyamalan, whose action flick The Last Airbender cleaned up at the Razzies last night, "winning" for worst director, worst screenplay, and worst movie. This is a stumble of Cimino-like proportions.

The other big "winner" at the Golden Raspberry Award Foundation's 31st annual awards ceremony was Sex and the City 2, which found Carrie Bradshaw and her friends vamping it up in Arabia and still living life to the fullest. The original "Sex and the City" television series and the first Sex and the City movie had instilled some sense of urban envy in their viewers, entertaining women from suburban areas or from decidedly non-glamorous cities like Indianapolis and Omaha with depictions of the good life in New York, all full of clothes, sex, excitement and shoes. But the latest (last?) Sex and the City movie took that opulence to an unpalatable and offensive extreme. I'll let GRAF founder John Wilson explain:

"It was released in the middle of a period of American history when everyone's scrounging not to lose their homes, and these women are riding around in Rolls-Royces, buying expensive shoes and just throwing money around like they're drunk," Wilson declared. He added that the movie, set in Abu Dhabi, was disrespectful to Arab culture, not the best position to be in at a time when so many Islamic extremists hate the West's guts.

The four stars of this film - Sarah Jessica Parker, Kim Cattrall, Kristin Davis and Cynthia Nixon - felt the hatred of the GRAF, as they shared its worst actress award. They also earned the worst screen couple or ensemble Razzie, while Sex and the City 2 itself "won" for worst prequel, remake, ripoff or sequel.

Shyamalan, for his part, can take solace in the fact that the The Last Airbender, a live-action movie about people who can command fire, air, water and earth that was adapted from the animated TV series "Avatar: The Last Airbender," did moderately well at the box office both here and abroad. But despite its 3-D special effects, Wilson insists that many people felt cheated by the lack of a coherent story and the fact that Shyamalan shot the movie in two-dimensional form and converted it to 3-D. This latter case sounds comparable to digitally remastering an analog sound recording but, judging from Wilson's comments, it's apparently more like colorizing a black-and-white film you meant to feature in color anyway, with bad aesthetics as a result. (It was bad enough to win a custom award: worst eye-gouging misuse of 3-D.)

I wouldn't know, of course. I didn't see it. I'll take Wilson's word that it's bad, though.

It's probably a strong commentary on how Hollywood produces stars more than actors that the other worst acting awards were awarded to actors for multiple roles: Ashton Kutcher for worst actor in Killers and Valentine's Day, Jackson Rathbone for worst supporting actor in The Last Airbender and The Twilight Saga: Eclipse and Jessica Alba for worst supporting actress in The Killer Inside Me, Little Fockers, Machete and Valentine's Day. The Iowa-born Kutcher had never considered acting before he was discovered by a talent scout; he got into movies more for his looks than his talent, exuding a detached Middle American suaveness associated with the young Ronald Reagan. (It seems appropriate to me that Kutcher married the greatest non-actress of my generation, Demi Moore.) And Jessica Alba, whose star burned so brightly as the lead actress in the TV series "Dark Angel," can look forward to a black future if she doesn't realize quickly that movie acting - even in a big-screen farcical romp like Little Fockers - generally requires a greater deal of complexity than a TV series aimed at teenagers.

I have a feeling that the Golden Raspberry Award Foundation will be around for a long time, if only because Hollywood is devoted to that uniquely and insufferably American maxim - if you can't have quality, get quantity - and is thus intent on flooding movie screens with more films than we can possibly stand. And it's easy for movie studios to get enough people to see a piece of crap with the right publicity, especially if there are big enough names in the cast. Of course, some movies don't do so well, going quickly - and in many cases directly - to home video. So what? If they don't make any money, they can always be written off for taxes.

Americans, while foolish in their entertainment preferences, are not completely stupid. When Little Fockers became the top box office draw this past Christmas weekend on the strength of the two previous Focker movies (never mind that the first one was only okay and the second one sucked), it was advertised as America's number one comedy movie. But Americans learn fast. Leaving an office the weekend after that movie's premiere, I overheard someone talk about how horrible it was.

I only hope this isn't the last we'll see of Teri Polo. :-(

Please note that no black actors were dishonored with Razzie awards this year.

Oscars and Razzies

The Oscars were last night, and Slumdog Millionaire won all but two of the awards it was up for including Best Picture. Now that it's won so many awards, the Academy members - to cop a phrase from Albert Brooks - are going to have to see it. :-D

Two very exotic European actresses won the best lead and supporting actress awards - Britain's Kate Winslet for The Reader, which I haven't seen, and Spain's Penelope Cruz for Vicki Cristina Barcelona, which I have. I think Cruz deserved her Oscar. :-)

I looked at the Razzies ,and I was disappointed. Sure, Mike Myers probably deserved to be dishonored for The Love Guru, and Paris Hilton was undoubtedly a shoo-in, but these were false, easy targets; no one expects much from Mike Myers when he's not playing Wayne Campbell or Austin Powers, and Paris Hilton isn't a real actress like Razzie laureate Halle Berry. Much more interesting was M. Night Shyamalan's "win" for his horror movie The Happening, because he's a hotshot hot-ticket director who's taken seriously.

They named Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull as worst sequel. Hey, I liked that movie! :-O

Oscars 2009

Tomorrow is the ceremony for the Academy Awards, where Hollywood's greatest cimema, directing, acting, and writing are solemnly celebrated.

Yeah, who cares? Who won the Razzies already? :-D