MY NAME IS SCOTT FOY and I PAID TO SEE STRIPTEASE

STRIPTEASE.  I still debate whether this was Demi Moore's low point or Burt Reynolds' finest hour.  Sure Reynolds would make something of a comeback with BOOGIE NIGHTS, but if you've ever seen STRIPTEASE, then the image of a half naked Burt covered head to toe in Vasoline is something you will never truly be able to repress from your memory no matter how hard you try.  Then again, few people even remember this cinematic fiasco because of its infinitely worse bastard first-cousin, SHOWGIRLS.  Trying to figure out which of those two is the worse movie is sort of like trying to decide whether you'd rather be shot or stabbed.  Either way, its gonna hurt like Hell!

ENDING THE YEAR ON A HIGH NOTE

2001 will go down in the annals of movie history as being one of the worst years ever.  Virtually every mainstream Hollywood production that opened up on several thousand screens was a festering pile of dog droppings.  Yeah, there were a few bright spots along the way, but those were very few and very far between.  Most of the quality films got such limited releases that unless you lived in one of the major markets around the country, you never even had the option of going to see them.  Oscar season is now upon us and the Academy is going to have to scrounge to find enough quality films to nominate, whereas the Golden Razzies will have an embarrassment of riches from which to select their worst of the year.  It's also around this time that people come out with their 10 Best/Worst lists.  I thought I would do something a little different and, Lord knows, I had a lot to choose from in making this Top 10.  With that said, I present to you:

THE TOP 10 MOVIES I DIDN'T SEE IN 2001
AND, DAMMIT, I PLAN TO KEEP IT THAT WAY!!!

   10  ............................................. SEE SPOT RUN
     9  ............................................. SUMMER CATCH
     8  ............................................. ON THE LINE
     7  ............................................. DOUBLE TAKE
     6  ............................................. FREDDIE GOT FINGERED
     5  ............................................. CAPTAIN CORELLI'S MANDOLIN
     4  ............................................. GLITTER
     3  ............................................. BLACK KNIGHT
     2  ............................................. CORKY ROMANO
     1  ............................................. HOW HIGH

Yes, HOW HIGH wins the award for the movie whose trailer alone was all it took to make want to gouge my own eyes out just to make the horror I was seeing vanish.  To get that sort of reaction from me after seeing footage from CORKY ROMANO speaks volumes as to how repulsive I found the HOW HIGH preview to be.  Is it right to judge a movie without seeing it just on the basis of its trailer?  I say, HELL YEAH!  Not only does it look painfully unfunny and sub-moronic, but I must say I actually have a moral objection to this one.  At least with the Cheech & Chong pot comedies of the 70s and 80s you were supposed to laugh at how stupid these idiots were and how much stupider their pot smoking made them.  From what I've seen and read about HOW HIGH, it seems the story here is that the duo are idiots made smarter by their magical weed and helps them gain love and success.  Sure it's supposed to be a comedy, but give me a break!  I find it funny, or would that be sad, that a realistic, unflinching to the point of being hard to watch, anti-drug movie like REQUIEM FOR A DREAM got saddled with an NC-17 rating, while a "drugs are cool" movie like HOW HIGH only gets an R rating.  I know I'm starting to sound like Bill O'Reilly, but come on!  It only succeeds in proving that the MPAA will punish a film for dealing with certain subject matters, particularly sex and drugs, but has no moral objection to movies that deal with the same subject with the mentality of a high school locker room or of a lobotomy patient.

Don't get me wrong, if you wanna go out and get high, then that's your business, but it really boggles the mind how the media goes out of its way to villify tobacco corporations and beat the audience over the head with messages about how smoking will kill you while at the same time portraying the use of an illegal drug as hip and trendy.  I guess I'm one of the few people of my generation who doesn't smoke weed or ever take recreational drugs.  I guess railing against bad movies is my anti-drug.  Of course, that means when I watch all these bad movies, I do it completely sober.  Oh, the pain, the pain!  The other irony, is that I've heard that even a lot of people who went to see HOW HIGH totally baked hated the movie.  When a comedy fails to make even a theater full of stoners laugh, then you know this movie must truly blow.  Of course, even completely sober, I could tell that just by watching the trailer.  The next time someone asks you your name, just start barking at them like the guy in the movie and see if that elicits laughs or looks of "is this guy mentally retarded" from people.  Amazingly, HOW HIGH  was produced by Danny Devito, who also produced the fabulous, Oscar-nominated L.A. CONFIENTIAL.  I can hear Danny singing right now,"I was gonna produce a really good movie, but then I got high…."


Speaking of lobotomies, I dared to go see NOT ANOTHER TEEN MOVIE which is yet another bad movie!  Granted, the only reason I went to see it was because I was hoping to use it as the subject of one of my columns.  Alas, it wasn't even that bad.  It was just lame, unfunny bad.  Let's run down the totals: I laughed out loud 1 time, chuckled 3 times, and sat in stone-faced silence for 83 minutes.  On top of that, I had to endure the HOW HIGH trailer yet again.  The only positive thing to say about TEEN MOVIE is that it wasn't nearly as painful to sit through as SCARY MOVIE 2.  Yes, 2001 was truly the year of the bad comedy.  2002 may not be much better because now comes word that SCARY MOVIE 3 is on the horizon.  - sigh -  NOT ANOTHER TEEN MOVIE was also the movie that convinced me that I have finally truly matured into adulthood.  When the naked chick first popped up onscreen, instead of drooling like most of the male moviegoers suffering from arrested development, all I could think was how rock hard and potentially uncomfortable her breast implants appeared.

On the topic of of juvenile mentalities, "IRON EAGLE 5" opened up this past November, but apparently the producers finally realized that there wasn't any money to be made anymore in the IRON EAGLE franchise so they changed the film's title to BEHIND ENEMY LINES.  I am utterly convinced that BEHIND ENEMY LINES is nothing more than a Golan-Globus movie with a Jerry Bruckheimer budget.  As a matter of fact, had this moronic, jingoistic, war movie been made in the 80s, it would have been produced by Cannon Films and starred Michael Dudikoff in the Owen Wilson role and either Charles Bronson or Chuck Norris in the Gene Hackman role.  Plus, the bad guys would either have been Russians or of some fictionalized Middle Eastern nationality.  The arrogant French general who wanted to hog the glory of rescuing our hero would still have been French though.  It would seem that the producers of BEHIND ENEMY LINES started out wanting to make a movie about that American pilot who got shot down in Bosnia and managed to survive and evade the enemy for several days before being rescued, but decided that the story just wasn't flashy enough for the big screen so they decided to jazz it up and dumb it down and, rest assured, they dumbed it down with a vengeance!  INVASION U.S.A. is more plausible than this movie!  No, wait, nothing is more implausible than INVASION U.S.A.!  Okay, RAMBO III is more plausible than BEHIND ENEMY LINES.  There, that's better.

Which brings us to something I rarely discuss in this column - a really good movie!  You may have heard of this one.  It's called THE LORD OF THE RINGS: THE FELLOWSHIP OF THE RING.  It's a magnificent movie, even if it does fall short of being the masterpiece some have declared it to be.  Much like HARRY POTTER, it didn't need to be so damn long.  Plus, I thought there were way too many long, overhead, sweeping shots.  By the time it got to the scenes of them rowing down the river, I thought I was starting to get a wee bit of motion sickness.  I didn't care for the ending.  It didn't finish with any sense of accomplishment or with a suspenseful cliffhanger.  A low-key cliffhanger is a hard sell in my book.  And, would have killed them to at least put a title card promoting the next movie in the series rather than just fading to black so the people in the audience who aren't aware that the other films are already in the can don't start screaming how "that sucks."  Still, it was an awesome epic
that is head and shoulders about the majority of what preceded it this year.

Now having never read the book, I've come to some personal conclusions about Middle Earth that you may or may not agree with.  Middle Earth is clearly just Ireland.  Hobbits are basically pot-smoking leprechauns with really disgusting feet.  The wizards are clearly British, whereas the Elves are obviously Scottish.  Hearing how everybody talks about the humans and their quests for power, they must be Americans or, perhaps, Red China.  Judging by their poor hygiene and terrible demeanor, Orks are clearly French!  The way Gollum covertly spies on the fellowship and you aren't completely sure what side he's ultimately going to end up on would have me believe that he is Russian.  I'm not 100% positive, but I suspect the Balrog was Canadian.  Actually, Balrog sounds like the name of some sort of gay sex toy, but I'd rather not delve into that any deeper.

Nonetheless, after a year of crappy movies, seeing LOTR was a fine way to end 2001.  As one of Hollywood's worst, yet still most profitable, year ever draws to a close, I think back on the high points.  HARRY POTTER and LOTR were worthy adaptations of modern classics..  JEEPERS CREEPERS was a fun little monster movie.  How much I enjoyed CATS AND DOGS remains my biggest surprise of the year.  MEMENTO was just damn good.  SHAOLIN SOCCER, LEGEND OF ZU, LEGEND OF THE SACRED STONE, and VERSUS, four Asian movies I picked up bootleg versions of, were probably my favorite movies of the year even though they may never get released in U.S. and, if they do, they'll probably get butchered by the distributors.  Then again, IRON MONKEY got the respect it deserved, so there's still hope.

Of course, this was also the year that Hollywood tormented me with TOMB RAIDER, SCARY MOVIE 2, and SWORDFISH amongst many, many others that I either didn't see or just don't care to discuss ever again.  And finally, I can't finish off the year without mentioning MEGIDDO: OMEGA CODE 2, the first true camp classic of the 21st century!  It hits home video in February so plan to get together with some friends and enjoy it in all its campy glory.

This concludes the year 2001.  Hopefully 2002 will be better movie year.  Something tells me I'll still have plenty to write about.  When does THE SCORPION KING open again?

Special Note - In the time since I wrote this much delayed column and the time it took to be posted on the website, I went to see the movie IMPOSTOR.  A special note appears on-screen at the beginning informing the audience that it is based on a story by science fiction visionary, Philip K. Dick.  I don't know about the "Philip K." part, but the move IMPOSTOR is pure "dick" alright!  2002 is off to a very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, BAD start!

MY NAME IS SCOTT FOY and I PAID TO SEE COOL WORLD