In the Dark: The Worst Movies of 2000
Eric D. Snider
Man, 2000 was a crappy year for movies.
Remember 1999? Remember how many fine films there were? "The Sixth Sense," "The Phantom Menace," "Blair Witch Project," "Toy Story 2," "Fight Club," "The Matrix" — the list goes on. Ten years from now, what will we remember about 2000? That every single damned movie Hollywood produced that year was a piece of crap.
OK, maybe not every single movie. But certainly — you know what? Yes, EVERY SINGLE MOVIE! Not one good movie was made in 2000! You show me one you think was good, and I'll chase you off my porch with a BB gun.
Here's my top-five list for the Worst Movies of 2000.
1. "Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2." It was a tight race, but this ill-conceived sequel to the 1999 curiosity emerges victorious in the Worst Movie of the Year category. Aside from being an obvious attempt to milk a few more dollars out of the Blair Witch craze without putting any effort into the script-writing or directing, "Book of Shadows" also commits the cardinal sin of filmmaking: It's deathly boring. The plot involves some stupid young people going into the woods where the "Blair Witch Project" supposedly took place and then finding out it wasn't fictional after all when the witch herself comes home with them and makes them all become terrible actors. The low point of this movie was forty-five minutes into it, when the critic sitting across the aisle from me took his own life.
2. "Pokemon: The Movie 2000." "Hey, you know how 'Pokemon' was popular a year or so ago? Well, let's make another movie and squeeze whatever we still can out of the phenomenon! We don't have to make it interesting or entertaining or put any effort into it. We can just throw some Pokemon up on the screen for a couple million dollars and turn a $60 million profit! Parents will take their kids because parents are stupid and will do anything their kids say! They'll ignore all the bad reviews, dismissing them with a casual, 'Oh, those critics don't like anything.' Sure, they'll rue the day they disregarded the critics once they actually suffer through the crap we're going to force down their throats. But we'll already have their money by then! Let us now thank our merciful god, Lucifer himself, for the bounty we are about to receive."
3. "Battlefield Earth." Why isn't John Travolta's absurd vanity project at the top of the list? Because it was actually so bad it was entertaining. I laughed all the way through it. The idea that anyone ever thought we'd take it seriously is what killed it; this, like most bad movies, suffers from extreme hubris (plus a bad script and bad acting and John Travolta looking like a Klingon had a child with Della Reese).
4. "The Next Best Thing." Madonna and Rupert Everett star in a preachy, heavy-handed movie about a gay man who accidentally gets his best (girl)friend pregnant and they decide to raise the kid together, with little regard for whether the kid will turn out to be a freak, being raised jointly by a gay man and Madonna. It was targeted directly at gay audiences, who found it dour and unfunny and not at all like an episode of "Will & Grace." Everett came off as more British than gay (there's a fine line), thus achieving what was previously thought impossible: a gay man failing to accurately portray a gay man.
5. "Who Gets the House?" A Feature Films for Families production about a group of kids who, upon hearing of their parents' impending divorce, convince a judge to let them keep the house and force the parents to take turns living in it with them. Never mind the stupid premise: This is a stupid movie, appealing to people who decide a movie is "good" based on its absence of profanity and sex. A pile of vomit doesn't have any profanity or sex either, but that doesn't make a pile of vomit worth spending money on, unless the person who produced the vomit had eaten a lot of diamonds beforehand. It is possible to make a movie that's both clean and of high quality — Disney does it every few years — but Feature Films for Families apparently would rather go on making crappy movies and collecting a lot of money from naive Utahns who wouldn't know quality entertainment if it bit them in their large, Jell-O-padded behinds.