"2001: A Waste Odyssey"
by Scott Mantz

"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times..."

Those were the immortal words that started off the Charles Dickens classic "A Tale of Two Cities," but they could easily have applied to the events that took place during the past year (and let's face it, for many people, "the worst of times" outweighed "the best of times" by a margin of 1,000-to-1.)

The fact is, Americans never witnessed anything quite like September 11, so it was completely understandable that the players in Tinseltown were shell-shocked as to how they should carry on with their now relatively unimportant jobs. But carry on they did, and from David Letterman's impassioned speech his first night back on the air to the moving, tastefully done celebrity telethon, Hollywood certainly had a lot to be proud of.

As for the junk they piled into movie theaters...well, that's another story. Sooner or later (probably sooner), film historians are going to look back on 2001 and ask themselves "just what the heck were they thinking?" Weekend after weekend--especially during the summer--it was the same old story: a big-budget Hollywood extravaganza turned out to be a huge disappointment.

It actually got to a point late in the summer where I had to stop writing reviews for a while. After all, there are only so many ways you can say "this movie sucked" before you start repeating yourself. By the time November rolled around, I got my movie mojo back, but there was still no doubt that my year-end "worst of" list was gonna be a doozie. Speaking of which, here it is...

1) "Freddy Got Fingered" - Depending on how you look at it, Tom Green is either the worst filmmaker of all time, or he's a cinematic genius. How else do you explain his success at convincing the mucky-mucks at 20th Century Fox to let him spend $15 million on something like this? Maybe on paper, some of the events depicted in the movie--like masturbating a horse or swinging a newborn baby around by its umbilical chord--had some artistic merit, but on the big screen, all it did was make me run screaming from the theater (before it was even over).

2) "Tomcats" - Joe Roth is one of the most respected, trusted, and well-liked studio heads in the business, so when he bolted from Disney to form Revolution Studios, A-list celebrities like Julia Roberts and Bruce Willis were pounding on his door ready to make multi-picture deals with him. That's why it was such a shock when his first movie turned out to be such a juvenile, embarrassing, and painfully unfunny teen comedy starring none other than "American Pie" beauty Shannon Elizabeth. Even die-hard fans of the gross-out genre knew enough to focus their short attention spans elsewhere, but hey, if watching an extreme close-up of a doctor biting down on a raw testicle is your idea of fun, then this one's for you.

3) "Saving Silverman" - Speaking of "American Pie," Jason Biggs--the kid who screwed the pie--got himself screwed the moment he signed on the dotted line for this waste of celluloid. Biggs plays the P-whipped boyfriend of an abusive superbabe (played by Amanda Peet), and it's up to his fellow Neil Diamond tribute band members (played by Steve Zahn and "High Fidelity's" Jack Black) to snap him out of it. This ludicrous mess proved that Silverman wasn't worth saving after all, and for Diamond, who made a cameo appearance during the ridiculous groaner of a finale, this was one "song sung blue" (ouch!).

4) "Glitter" - It's safe to say that 2001 was a horrible year for pop diva Mariah Carey, who not only suffered a nervous breakdown (actually, a few of them), but her first major motion picture was routinely trashed by critics, and the accompanying soundtrack album collected dust on music store shelves. Actually, the timing for "Glitter" couldn't have been any worse. Delayed from late August so Carey could recover in time to do some publicity, the movie was finally released within days of the terrorist attacks. Moviegoers looking for a diversion from the onslaught of around-the-clock media coverage definitely didn't find it here, and Carey's semi-autobiographical, unintentionally funny campfest proved that she shouldn't quit her day job anytime soon.

5) "Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within" - I can't remember the last time a movie went so far south for me so fast. Despite incredible special effects and some of the most realistic computer animation ever seen, "Final Fantasy" (which was based on an enormously popular video game) was undone by its own ambitions. Boasting a budget of close to $140 million, someone obviously forgot to put some of that money into the development of a coherent script. When the film barely reached $32 million in the US, all that talk about computer-generated characters replacing the real thing went out the window faster than you could say "game over."

Although many critics hailed "Moulin Rouge" as a groundbreaking cinematic achievement, I actually came close to including it on my "worst of" list. Ok, so maybe it wasn't that bad, but despite incredible performances from Nicole Kidman and Ewan McGregor, director Baz Luhrmann's reinvention of the movie musical was a hyper-kinetic mess that couldn't be saved by the lavish production values. Time Magazine may have praised the film by saying "...you've never see anything like it," but to that I say "...and I hope I never do again."

Given how promising 2001 looked last year at this time, it's safe to say that 2002 will have its fair share of disappointments. It's inevitable, but one thing's for sure. Here's hoping that next year, there won't be so many contenders to qualify for "worst movie of the year."

But I'm sure I'll come up with something.

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