Bad Movie Prize

I like Sakiko’s idea of a special annual bad movie prize. It’s really a reverse prize—the “winner” has to pay. The money could go either to help develop a new, better generation of directors and writers; or, it could simply be given back to the unfortunate slobs who wasted their money going to see the movie. We really want to punish the people who made the big stupid movies that made a lot of money, so the amount of money they’d have to give back would be proportional to the film’s box office take—maybe 20%. That should get their attention.

Especially for bombs like “Matrix—Reloaded”. Its box so far is three hundred million or so so 20% would be like sixty million. Here’s a movie without a plot, without a script, without characters, without anyone who can act, and barely anyone who can put together an action sequence. For that, I can go see Hong Kong kung fu flicks anyway. The only possible reason in life for this film, as far as I can see, is to set the groundwork for the third movie later this year, sure to be equally inane.

Fortunately, the American movie-going public is not really as stupid as the producers of this travesty appear to think. Box-office receipts fell off much faster than is normal for a movie like this after word got out about what a dog it was.

Another good candidate for the 2003 prize would be Legally Blonde 2. I can only imagine the discussions that went on in producers’ offices leading up to the creation of this bomb, as they snickered over how much moolah they could extract from clueless moviegoers for any old movie with the Legally Blonde name and Reese Witherspoon in it—who, by the way, is getting much less perky and cute as time goes on. Beyond her, again, there’s no story (OK, there is one, it’s just very stupid) and no acting. Of course, with box office receipts at only $80 million, at 20% the fine would be a mere 16 million dollars.

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