DVD Release Update, 25 February

Included in this DVD update are Catherine Breillat's Bluebeard from Strand, a bunch of Robin Hood films from Sony, Tony Manero from Kino Lorber, Alain Cavalier's Le combat dans l'île from Zeitgeist and Jean Becker's One Deadly Summer [L'été meurtrier] with Isabelle Adjani from a studio I've never heard of called Bayview Films.

- Legend of Witches, 1969, d. Malcolm Leigh, VCI, 27 April
- Malice in Wonderland, 2009, d. Simon Fellows, Magnolia, 27 April, w. Maggie Grace, Danny Dyer, Nathaniel Parker
- 9 to 5: Days in Porn, 2008, d. Jens Hoffman, Strand Releasing, 4 May, w. Sasha Grey
- The Bandit of Sherwood Forest, 1946, d. Henry Levin, George Sherman, Sony, 11 May
- Legend of the Tsunami Warrior [aka Queens of Langkasuka], 2008, d. Nonzee Nimibutr, Magnet/Magnolia, also on Blu-ray, 11 May
- One Deadly Summer [L'été meurtrier], 1983, d. Jean Becker, Bayview Films, 11 May
- The Prince of Thieves, 1948, d. Howard Bretherton, Sony, 11 May
- Rogues of Sherwood Forest, 1950, d. Gordon Douglas, Sony, 11 May
- Sword of Sherwood Forest, 1960, d. Terence Fisher, Sony, 11 May
- Tidal Wave, 2009, d. Yun Je-gyun, Magnet/Magnolia, also on Blu-ray, 11 May
- Iscariot, 2008, d. Miko Lazic, Brink DVD, 18 May, w. Gustaf Skarsgård, Michael Nyqvist
- North Face [Nordwand], 2008, d. Philipp Stölzl, Music Box Films, 18 May, w. Benno Fürmann
- Southern Gothic, 2007, d. Mark Young, IFC Films, 18 May
- Tony Manero, 2008, d. Pablo Larraín, Kino Lorber, 18 May
- Toe to Toe, 2009, d. Emily Abt, Strand Releasing, 8 June
- Antarctica, 2008, d. Yair Hochner, Here! Films, 15 June
- Aqua Teen Hunger Force: Volume 7, 2009, d. Matt Maiellaro, Dave Willis, Warner, 15 June
- Sex Positive, 2008, d. Daryl Wein, Here! Films, 15 June
- Bluebeard [Barbe bleue], 2009, d. Catherine Breillat, Strand Releasing, 22 June
- Le combat dans l'île, 1962, d. Alain Cavalier, Zeitgeist, 22 June, w. Romy Schneider, Jean-Louis Trintignant
- Raging Sun, Raging Sky [Rabioso sol, rabioso cielo], 2009, d. Julián Hernández, TLA Releasing, 22 June
- Say Hello to Yesterday, 1971, d. Alvin Rakoff, Scorpion Releasing, 28 June, w. Jean Simmons, Leonard Whiting

Also on the Blu-ray front are individual releases of some of the Mel Brooks titles included in the box set released last year: High Anxiety, History of the World: Part 1 and Robin Hood: Men in Tights on 11 May. Individual releases of Batman Returns, Batman Forever and (cough) Batman & Robin will also be available from Warner on 4 May.

- Apollo 13, 1995, d. Ron Howard, Universal, 13 April
- Elizabeth, 1998, d. Shekhar Kapur, Universal, 27 April
- Elizabeth: The Golden Age, 2007, d. Shekhar Kapur, Universal, 27 April
- Flashbacks of a Fool, 2008, d. Baillie Walsh, Anchor Bay, 25 May
- Spartacus, 1960, d. Stanley Kubrick, Universal, 25 May

The Decade List: (Some of) The Worst Films (2006)

I've been using the IMDb as a reference for film years when compiling films for the Decade List, and while I realize the site isn't always correct, it's a lot easier than looking elsewhere to find the first official screening of Phat Girlz. However, I've run into my first altercation when using the IMDb for 2006. By their records, 300, easily one of the worst films I've ever seen, is a 2006 movie because it played at something called the Austin Butt-Numb-a-Thon in December of that year. I don't know anything about this "fest," but I'm going to go ahead and disqualify that as a legitimate "film premiere." Black Snake Moan falls under the same category.

Anyway, I have little to say about the films below, but I've included links to shit I've written on them in the past. I've placed an asterisk next to the films that have a special sort of "awful" appeal, failures of a certain charm. I haven't given all of those titles a second look to gauge their level of camp appeal, but I can assure you both Snow Cake and Notes on a Scandal rise to the occasion. Cate Blanchett asking Judi Dench, "You wanna fuck me, Barbara?" and Sigourney Weaver's hilarious performance as a woman with autism in Snow Cake (not to mention how many bad-ass points Alan Rickman lost with his schoolgirl fussiness after confronting the man who killed Sigourney's daughter) are absolutely worth wasting your time over.

- Alpha Dog - d. Nick Cassavetes - USA
- Another Gay Movie - d. Todd Phillips - USA
- Art School Confidential - d. Terry Zwigoff - USA [also here]
- Basic Instinct 2 - d. Michael Caton-Jones - USA/Germany/UK/Spain [also here]
- The Black Dahlia - d. Brian De Palma - USA/Germany [also an appendix; and here]
- Boy Culture - d. Q. Allan Brocka - USA
- Broken Sky [El cielo dividido] - d. Julián Hernández - Mexico
- The Bubble - d. Eytan Fox - Israel [Winner of the "Best Way to Revive Your Otherwise Awful Film" Award at my first, and only, Fin de cinéma awards]
- Cars - d. John Lasseter, Joe Ranft - USA
- Confetti - d. Debbie Isitt - UK
- Cowboy Junction - d. Gregory Christian - USA
- Dans Paris - d. Christophe Honoré - France/Portugal
- Dirty Sanchez: The Movie - d. Jim Hickey - UK
- Eating Out 2: Sloppy Seconds - d. Phillip J. Bartell - USA
- Eternal Summer - d. Leste Chen - Taiwan
- Factory Girl - d. George Hickenlooper - USA
- For Your Consideration - d. Christopher Guest - USA [also here]
- The Fountain - d. Darren Aronofsky - USA*
- Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus - d. Steven Shainberg - USA
- Grimm Love [Rohtenburg] - d. Martin Weisz - Germany
- The Hills Have Eyes - d. Alexandre Aja - USA
- Idlewild - d. Bryan Barber - USA
- Marie Antoinette - d. Sofia Coppola - USA/France/Japan
- Murderous Intent [Like Minds] - d. Gregory J. Read - Australia/UK
- The Namesake - d. Mira Nair - India/USA
- Notes on a Scandal - d. Richard Eyre - UK*
- O Jerusalem - d. Elie Chouraqui - France/UK/Italy/Greece/Israel/USA [also here]
- Off the Black - d. James Ponsoldt - USA
- The OH in Ohio - d. Billy Kent - USA [also here]
- On ne devrait pas exister [We Should Not Exist] - d. Hervé P. Gustave - France
- One Third - d. Kim Yong-man - USA
- The Page Turner [La tourneuse de pages] - d. Denis Dercourt - France
- Phat Girlz - d. Nnegest Likké - USA
- Psychopathia Sexualis - d. Bret Wood - USA
- The Pursuit of Happyness - d. Gabriele Muccino - USA
- Snow Cake - d. Marc Evans - Canada/UK* [more on Sigourney]
- Southland Tales - d. Richard Kelly - USA/Germany/France*
- Tan Lines - d. Ed Aldridge - Australia
- Things to Do - d. Ted Bezaire - Canada
- The Tripper - d. David Arquette - USA
- The Unknown Woman [La sconosciuta] - d. Giuseppe Tornatore - Italy/France*
- Vacationland - d. Todd Verow - USA
- The West Wittering Affair - d. David Scheinmann - UK
- The Wicker Man - d. Neil LaBute - USA/Germany/Canada*
- The Wild - d. Steve 'Spaz' Williams - USA
- The Young, the Gay and the Restless - d. Joe Castro - USA
- Yours Emotionally! - d. Sridhar Rangayan - India/UK

The Decade List: (Some of) The Worst Films (2003)

I figure that the further along I go on the Decade List, the more populated the Worst Films list will be. Some annotations to the list: I didn't place Gigli on the list out of some obligation; I think it's really tedious, though not the complete Thanksgiving dinner everyone else did, most of which I think came from wanting the film to fail because of the media's tiresome coverage of Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez (or Bennifer, as they were once called). But I'd probably watch that junk again over the three turds respected filmmakers Alain Resnais, Jim Jarmusch and André Téchiné threw out that year (I refuse to include Tim Burton and his strangely admired, schmaltz fest Big Fish on the 'respected' list).

In terms of the international films on the list, most fell into three deplorable categories. The first rocked the Paul Haggis structure before he even got a chance to (Liberated Zone, Free Radicals and, to a lesser extent, Slim Sussie). The second includes start-to-finish embarassments from people who should have never been handed a camera in the first place (Insatiability, Testosterone). And the third, which may be the most criminal, concerned showboat directors and their artistic garbage, which fully earns the dismissive label "pretentious," though I typically try avoiding that word (Reconstruction, A Thousand Clouds of Peace).

Teensploitation was also a recurring trend, from 15: The Movie, Thirteen, The Real Cancun, Party Monster and Young Gods dishing out as much young flesh and salaciousness it could handle (and, for four of them, while pretending to disapprove of it and, for the other, disguising itself as something else). A special mention should be given to Tommy Wiseau's The Room, which made it's Los Angeles premiere in 2003, which is so terrible I couldn't leave it off the list, but unlike all the other films below, transforms its awfulness into something of beauty.

I've included links to what I wrote about Coffee and Cigarettes and Love Actually below. As I neglected to mention it when writing about Love Actually, I think the entire film can be summed up in the opening scene, when the aging rock star, played by Bill Nighy, who is "selling out" to record a Christmas rendition of one of his old songs, says to his producer, "This is shit, isn't it?" The producer responds, just as I imagine the producers of the film did, "Yep, solid gold shit."

- 15: The Movie - d. Royston Tan - Singapore
- 200 American - d. Richard LeMay - USA
- Adored: Diary of a Porn Star [Poco più di un anno fa] - d. Marco Filiberti - Italy
- Alex and Emma - d. Rob Reiner - USA
- Big Fish - d. Tim Burton - USA
- Bon voyage - d. Jean-Paul Rappeneau - France
- Bringing Down the House - d. Adam Shankman - USA
- The Cat in the Hat - d. Bo Welch - USA
- Coffee and Cigarettes - d. Jim Jarmusch - USA/Japan/Italy
- Daredevil - d. Mark Steven Johnson - USA
- Die, Mommie, Die! - d. Mark Rucker - USA
- Le divorce - d. James Ivory - France/USA
- The Event - d. Thom Fitzgerald - Canada/USA
- Free Radicals [Böse Zellen] - d. Barbara Albert - Austria/Germany/Switzerland
- Gigli - d. Martin Brest - USA
- The Human Stain - d. Robert Benton - USA/Germany/France
- Insatiability [Nienasycenie] - d. Wiktor Grodecki - Poland/Lithuania
- The Last Samurai - d. Edward Zwick - USA
- Latter Days - d. C. Jay Cox - USA
- Legally Blonde 2: Red, White & Blonde - d. Charles Herman-Wurmfeld - USA
- Liberated Zone [Befreite Zone] - d. Norbert Baumgarten - Germany
- Love Actually - d. Richard Curtis - UK/USA
- Nathalie... - d. Anne Fontaine - France/Spain
- Not on the Lips [Pas sur la bouche] - d. Alain Resnais - France/Switzerland
- The Pact of Silence [Le pacte du silence] - d. Graham Guit - France
- Party Monster - d. Fenton Bailey, Randy Barbato - USA/Netherlands
- The Praying Mantis [Le festin de la mante] - d. Marc Levie - Belgium
- Prey for Rock & Roll - d. Alex Steyermark - USA
- The Real Cancun - d. Rick de Oliveira - USA
- Reconstruction - d. Christoffer Boe - Denmark
- The Room - d. Tommy Wiseau - USA*
- Shattered Glass - d. Billy Ray - USA/Canada
- Slim Susie [Smala Sussie] - d. Ulf Malmros - Sweden
- Strayed [Les égarés] - d. André Techiné - France/UK
- Testosterone - d. David Moreton - Argentina/USA
- Thirteen - d. Catherine Hardwicke - USA
- A Thousand Clouds of Peace [Mil nubes de paz cercan el cielo, amor, jamás acabarás de ser amor] - d. Julián Hernández - Mexico
- The Trouble with Men and Women - d. Tony Fisher - UK
- Wrong Turn - d. Rob Schmidt - USA/Canada/Germany
- Young Gods [Hymypoika] - d. Jukka-Pekka Siili - Finland
- Zatôichi - d. Takeshi Kitano - Japan

Berlinale Final

I suppose that every film playing at the Berlinale has been announced now, thanks to David Hudson. Still no Claire Denis, but here's the full list of additions, which includes the new film Raging Sun, Raging Sky from Julián Hernández, who previously gave us the glaringly awful, humorless Broken Sky and A Thousand Clouds of Peace Fench the Sky, Love; Your Being Love Will Never End (yes, that's the full title). Enough with titles that reference the sky. Groan.