The Gospel of the Living Dead

I just read a book called Gospel of the Living Dead, in which theologian Kim Paffenroth analyzes five great zombie movies (Night of the Living Dead, Dawn of the Dead 1978, Day of the Dead, Dawn of the Dead 2004, and Land of the Dead) from a Christian perspective. Though he stops short of making this explicit, Paffenroth traces a through-narrative of the four Romero films that pretty clearly mirrors the trajectory of Jesus' death and resurrection.

A crucial theme of Romero's first four Dead films, and something very few of his disciples have ever picked up on, is the development of the zombies. Night of the Living Dead presents the ghouls as nothing more than the mindless flesh-eaters we all know and fantasize about shooting; Dawn begins to hint that there is something more to them than just the cannibalistic instinct; Day portrays a zombie beginning to develop rudimentary skills and basic emotional ties; and by Land of the Dead the zombies have their own more or less functional city alongside the humans. Paffenroth reads the movies as increasingly optimistic, traveling from the utter bleakness of Night's wonderfully nihilistic ending to a degree of hopefulness for human/zombie coexistence by the end of Land.

This also is pretty much how I read the crucifixion and resurrection.

Consider: the death and descent of the zombie uprising, with all the hellishness that entails, is the very thing that undoes materialistic, capitalistic, kyriarchal society – Romero is famous for his fierce social critique, and Paffenroth does a fine job of unpacking the films' criticisms of racism, sexism, class inequality, rampant consumerism, and so on – and ultimately allows for the rebuilding of a better world. Now this could be read in the traditionally eschatological way (there's a reason we call it zombie apocalypse), but I prefer a non-eschatological theology that sees this death-and-resurrection narrative as the narrative of the daily taking up of the cross.

Redemption only comes through the utmost suffering. The zombies, like all of society, must lose their souls in order to regain them. They die to self in order to be reborn as a new community. Only by losing our lives can we gain life; only by dying could Jesus defeat death.

Compare Mark C. Taylor's Erring, a “postmodern a/theology” which declares the post-Hegel world to be a world without God, self, history, or book. These four concepts are dead, and something new must be built in their place – something radically new: an erring, mazing, de/constructive, relational freeplay that does not resort to oversimplifications or hierarchized oppositions. Something, in fact, rather like human/zombie coexistence.

I've never understood why Nietzsche's “God is dead” pronouncement shocked anyone. I mean, what do Christians believe happened on the cross? Isn't the crucifixion really the moment that kills God, self, history, and book; that kills the transcendental signified, the ultimate referent, the Logos? And isn't it only by this death that it can rise again, new and different and wonderfully strange?

Disneyfail: Pocahontas vs The Princess and the Frog

When I look at Pixar movies, I envy today's kids. Imagine growing up with your earliest cinematic memories being of Wall-E and Up and Toy Story 3.

But then, I myself grew up in a pretty sweet age of children's cinema. I'm a child of the Disney Renaissance: I grew up with The Little Mermaid and Aladdin and Beauty and the Beast and The Lion King, which are hardly to be sniffed at. Of course, if we're talking feminism, they leave something to be desired, but Pixar has its own problems in that regard.

People who are new to feminist, womanist, or otherwise SJ-oriented pop-culture criticism sometimes miss a crucial point: just 'cause I love something doesn't mean I give it a free pass on its isms. Conversely, of course, I can slate something for its genderfail, racefail, etc. and still love it. As Sparky puts it, “My most favourite of favourite things I love are sadly rife with stereotypes, erasure, damaging tropes and out right prejudiced portrayals.” To my thinking, being a responsible pop-culture consumer requires applying critical thinking even to your most beloved properties, and it doesn't necessarily mean you love them any less.

That said, some beloved childhood properties are just too toxic to be looked on with any degree of fondness once you're old enough to think about them critically.

Take Pocahontas. I was six years old when Pocahontas came out, and, with the undiscriminating consumption of young children, my brothers and I watched and rewatched the video. We played at being the characters (primarily the animal sidekicks, so much more interesting than the tedious leads), and we often listened to a cassette of the soundtrack on car journeys. As I grew older, I maintained that the film wasn't very good but the music was.

This assertion was based on fickle memory rather than recent experience, because it's been well over a decade since I either watched the movie or listened to the soundtrack – until the other day, when combined nostalgia and morbid curiosity led me to give the songs a spin.

Wow.

Wow.

I realize this movie came out in 1995, when commercialized internet was a brand-new thing, and that it would be a good fifteen years before fuck yeah cultural appropriation came along to succinctly and brilliantly call out this kind of crap, but Orientalism was published in 1978. Are you telling me no one working at Disney in the early nineties had even a passing familiarity with the general concept? Because ICK. I know I'm saying nothing new in pointing out how gross Disney's Pocahontas is, but what shocked me was how much my skin crawled at just the songs, not even the movie itself.

Every damn song is like “woo, the brown people are ~spiritual~ and ~in touch with the land~! The brown people ~understand nature~ and can magically learn foreign tongues by ~listening with their hearts~ and ~communing with the trees~! Fertile valleys, dewy grass, wind, and clear water...” UM WHAT. And in the song “Savages” there's a painful attempt to draw an equivalence between the invading British forces and the defending American Indians.

Leader of invading British colonialists: “They're different from us, which means they must be evil!”

Leader of American Indians: “They're different from us, which means they can't be trusted.”

Even as a small child, I recognized the pungent stench of BS in that false equivalence, though I couldn't have articulated why it bothered me so much. Well, now I can: the invading British forces actually can't be trusted. The tribal chief is RIGHT. The invaders want to kill him and his people and steal all their things! Don't give me this “there was wrong and misunderstanding on both sides” revisionist horsepuckey. I'm supposed to condemn the indigenous peoples for not just cheerfully handing over their land, resources, vaginas, etc. to the invading colonial forces? Fuck right off.

Up until Mulan (WHO WINS ALL THE THINGS, NATCH), the only Disney heroine I identified with at all was Belle, obviously. She liked reading a lot, she wanted much more than this provincial life, and everyone thought she was a bit weird: she's just like me! – provided we ignore the entire second half of the movie where she up and Stockholm-syndromes her way to a “happy ending”, as this fabulously ranty piece points out.

That same piece does an able job of describing everything that's wrong with The Princess and the Frog. I don't disagree with any of Ashley's points, but heck if I didn't enjoy the mucus out of that movie. I think it's because I saw the Tiana/Naveen/frog business as a humdrum, easily-ignored subplot. The movie isn't really about princesses, frogs, or any iteration thereof. The movie is about celebrating New Orleans culture: the food, the music, the accents, the color of the city. If you conceive New Orleans as the protagonist, and the actual storyline as stuff that's just happening in the background so we get to enjoy the milieu, it's a less frustrating film.

Tiana's character arc is certainly profoundly disappointing. [SPOILERS, but it's a Disney movie so you knew what was coming:] Apparently we've progressed to the point where a woman can have ambitions of her own, but mayn't realize them unless she has an all-important Man first because what really matters is MARRIAGE!

...Um, Disney? Can I ask you a question? Why do all your movies have romance in them anyway?

I mean, I get that some kids must like love stories. They must do, because it takes all sorts and whatnot. But... in my house, at least, romance plots were something to be suffered through so you could have the awesome songs, wacky sidekicks, magical enchantments, and goofy jokes. My brothers and I were not fans of “mushy stuff”, and surely millions of kids feel the same way. Why have romance in your kids' movies at all? Kids are kids! They're not interested in ~love~ and ~romance~ and ~special feelings~. Kids want stories of adventure and magic and fun and friendship, the things they seek out in their everyday lives. At one stage during The Princess and the Frog, I briefly entertained the notion that Tiana and Naveen might just realize they liked and valued each other as friends, and that would've been awesome. If I were writing a kids' film, the interpersonal relationships would all be friendships, because I think kids deserve to know that friends are more important than romantic partners. (YMMV, of course, but surely we can all agree that's true for six-year-olds!)

But, for all its faults, The Princess and the Frog does take unmitigated delight in Louisiana Creole culture, in a way that seems genuine and reasonably non-gross. I'll take that over Pocahontas any day.

The Pursuit of Bootstrappyness

So I watched this movie, The Pursuit of Happyness, and it was pretty gross. I don't mean Trainspotting gross, or Saw LXIV gross. In fact it's directed strictly at middlebrow sensibilities, competently directed and well-acted, hitting all the predictable beats of your standard Oscar-nomination-getting story.

And it's precisely because a story like this is seen as so innocuous, such gloopy inoffensive awards-bait, that we need to talk about why it's so gross.

Will Smith plays a father and salesman who is struggling to make ends meet. He takes on a highly competitive unpaid internship at a stockbroker's, but when his baby mama walks out on him and their five-year-old son he's left destitute. His only hope is to be the bestest intern the stockbrokers have ever seen, so that they will choose him over the other 19 interns to get the paid position at the end of the six-month internship. Calamity piles on calamity, and before long Will Smith and his son are homeless and sleeping in public restrooms and homeless shelters – well, the son is sleeping; Will Smith studies by night, and, because he is a superhuman with no need for such mundanities as sleep, manages to be the bestest ever intern and win the job. Happyness: pursued, caught, skinned, barbecued, and eaten.

How is this narrative gross? Let me count the ways:

1. Harpyness

Thandie Newton plays Will Smith's girlfriend and the mother of their adorable moppet Jaden (well, he's Smith's moppet IRL). Newton gets to do exactly two things in this movie:

1. shriek at Will Smith over his inability to pay the rent; and

2. leave town, never to be heard from again.

Now, Newton's behavior toward Smith is actually pretty understandable. She's been working double shifts at her job, but they still can't make their payments because Smith is unable to sell the transmogrifiers he's invested in. Yelling at him isn't right or helpful, but I sympathize because I imagine she's under huge amounts of stress (especially since, as is implied later, she never particularly wanted to be a parent). However, I sympathize only because I have years of feminist deprogramming making me hypersensitive to any portrayal of a female character; the problem is, we never actually see her work problems or her stress (or her doing anything other than yelling at him, really) – and because the entire film is focalized through Smith's character, we see the ill fortune that dogs his honest attempts to sell his transmogrifiers, we see Newton not giving him a chance to explain before starting to shriek, and so your average filmgoer probably just thinks, “Damn, what a harpy.”

Personally, I'm fascinated by her story. It sounds as though she didn't want to be a mother, and only carried her pregnancy to term because of baby daddy's insistence. The story of a reluctant mother assailed by the mounting pressures of family and financial concerns until one day she can't take it anymore would be an original one for Hollywood, at least if it were told sympathetically; but, no, the concept that a mother might find something in life more important than motherhood is just too radical for our Extreme Leftist Hollywood.

2. Crappyness

These characters are working class. I know you don't use that term in America, but they are. They live from paycheck to paycheck; perhaps at the beginning of the film they are hovering on or just above the poverty line, but as it goes on they slump into undeniable poverty. A combination of accumulated parking tickets, unsympathetic landlords, and the ultimate evil that is TAXES leave our protagonist utterly destitute. He and his boy have to go live in a homeless shelter; with no income at all, Smith has to pretend to all the high-flying stockbrokers that everything is just swell and dandy.

(Now I'm thinking about it, how does he pay his son's daycare fees during their homeless period? Surely the $25 from donating blood would go toward food and bus fares.)

The rich white people treat poor black Will Smith like dirt. They make him fetch their coffees and donuts, they make him park their cars, they generally treat him like their darkie servant. And yet the film feels no need to make any comment on this racism. In fact, once Will Smith accepts an invitation to attend a football game with a very rich stockbroker and his creepily Aryan son, he manages to keep crawling on up until the rich white people accept him as one of them. Congratulations, poor black man! Because you did what the rich white people told you and swallowed their humiliations, you've been permitted to ascend to their level! If you lick their boots some more, maybe they'll let you join the whites-only country club! There's no critique of this system. The rich white people's position is presented as the ideal – as the happiness Will Smith's character is pursuing – and the fact that he's had to crawl on his belly and let them treat him with total indignity is a mere inconvenience. Suck it up, boy.

3. Bootstrappyness

Just as there's no critique of the racist aspects of Smith's ascent, there's no critique of the class system. A story like this is the ideal avenue to explore class inequity in America: rich people swan around to their boxes and golf courses, oblivious of the fact that right in front of their eyes are millions of people who can't afford basic amenities, who can't lend you $5. I'd like to see the story of Smith's character building relationships with the other poverty-stricken people around him, building solidarity with others who have been screwed over by a vastly unequal society. But he never engages with those around him in any way (except to fight another homeless guy for a place at the shelter). He's better than they are. Unlike them, he doesn't deserve to be here. He'll haul himself out of there by his bootstraps. He'll claw his way to the top of the system that screwed him.

The myth of the “American Dream” is that anyone can do anything. Will Smith's character even speechifies at his son to this effect: “Don't ever let somebody tell you you can't do something. Not even me. ...If you want something, go get it. Period.” But the vast, vast majority of people living paycheck-to-paycheck can't do anything they want. There are just too many obstacles, a whole system twisted against them. By only telling rags-to-riches stories – never acknowledging the inescapable poverty that is reality for millions – Hollywood is reinforcing the idea that the underdog can always win, that if you're still poor it's because you didn't try hard enough, you didn't want it hard enough, you didn't have enough grit and daring: that it's your own fault.

At the end of the movie, Will Smith and his son walk down the street in their nice new rich-person neighborhood. The houses are huge, the street is clean, and the shuffling hordes of the homeless, among whom they not so long ago were queuing desperately for a night's shelter, are nowhere to be seen. Out of sight, out of mind. You hauled yourself up by your bootstraps – they can darn well do the same.

7 Reasons Why I Love "The Day The Earth Stood Still"

The Retro-Futurist Production Design

Okay, so it's not Metropolis (I LOVE YOU METROPOLIS MEET ME AT THE ALTAR AS SOON AS THEY LEGALIZE HUMAN/MOVIE MARRIAGE), but it's still got a pretty snazzy aesthetic. The smooth white uniformity of both the spaceship and the robot Gort prefigures Apple products by about 50 years.

The Amazingly Non-Annoying Movie Kid

Everyone hates kids in movies not aimed at kids. We all agree that Terminator 2: Judgment Day was marred only by the obnoxious brat and his even more obnoxious haircut. Movie kids, as a rule, fall into two equally unbearable categories: Whiny Brat and Smug Prodigy. Little Bobby Benson, though, sidesteps this rule. As a good-natured, obliging, happy kid, he's not at all whiny or bratty, and he's curious and inquisitive without being precocious or smug.

The ~Deeply Subtle~ Christian Allegory

Klaatu's first words to humankind are, “We have come to visit you in peace and with goodwill.” He assumes the name Carpenter (OH I SEE WHAT YOU DID THERE), teams up with a Jew, and suffers little children to come to him. He's distrusted, demonized, and eventually assassinated by the authorities. He gets resurrected and delivers a message to all humans that leaves the decision of how we act in our own hands, and then ascends to the heavens. Yes, it has all the subtlety and finesse of a chainsaw, but I saw E.T. a billionty times as a kid – I'm a sucker for a hamfisted Christ allegory.

In Places It's Hilariously Dated

This isn't always to the film's credit: for a movie with such a progressive, let's-all-join-hands-and-sing-kumbaya message, it's remarkably light on people who aren't rich white American men (my favorite class of people in movies!). And how creepy is the scene where Klaatu gets into the elevator with Helen, knowing full well that the power's about to go out and she'll be trapped in the elevator with a man she doesn't trust? THE STUFF OF NIGHTMARES. Funnier are the more naïve signs of its times: the fact that Helen willingly leaves her son in the care of a strange man (after asking her boyfriend, “Do you think it's all right?”, to which my brain cannot possibly avoid adding “to leave the boy with Uncle Ernie...”); the doctors who complain that Klaatu's advanced medicine makes them feel like “third-rate witch doctors” and then light up cancer sticks inside the freaking hospital.

Claude Rains Almost Played Klaatu

As good as Michael Rennie is, I have a bit of a thing for Claude Rains, so I would have loved to see this happen. On the downside, it would have totally screwed up the first verse of “Science Fiction Double Feature”, which is the best song in Rocky Horror and if you disagree you are the Mayor of Wrongsville, the President of the Society for the Promotion of Wrongness, and the Supreme Leader of Wrongistan.

“Klaatu Barada Nikto”

I used to have a hoodie with “Klaatu Barada Nikto” on the back, but then the K fell off, and I was like, “I can't walk around with 'laatu Barada Nikto' on my back, everyone will think I am a DORK” so I peeled off all the other letters and then I found the K and I was like dammit. I guess the moral of the story is, tidy your room, kids.

It's Basically Plan 9 From Outer Space Done Right

Plan 9 From Outer Space is one of my comfort movies, right alongside The Final Sacrifice on MST3K and any of the Disney pics from the early '90s. I love the shit out of that ridiculous frickin' movie and would quite happily watch it every day for the rest of my life. The Day The Earth Stood Still has more or less the same plot as Plan 9 – aliens, concerned that nuclear-age humanity is going to blow them all to kingdom come, descend to Earth in order to stop that from happening – but dispenses with the continuity errors, ill logic, and golden Ed Wood dialog. Which, okay, makes it sound like it's missing all the good stuff, but I promise you, this is a fantastic movie.

(Who is Keanu Reeves what remake I DON'T KNOW WHAT YOU ARE TALKING ABOUT)

I Read Harry Potter

In honor of the release of the final Harry Potter film, here's a piece I wrote in 2009 (pre-blog), when I finally read books six and seven (spoilers ho).

* * *

It is now well over a decade since the day my best friend, breathless with enthusiasm, told me about the brilliant book she’d just read. I listened, enchanted, as she described to me a tale of mystery and excitement, of danger and magic, of friendship and evil; of a boy, a little older than ourselves, who discovers that he is a wizard. She had the sequel with her, and I stayed up far into the night, devouring it feverishly, terrified and thrilled in equal measure. For my tenth birthday not long afterwards, I received my own copies of these first two books. When the third was released later that year, she sent me a copy of that too (in a hardback first edition that I really wish I’d held onto; they’re worth quite a lot these days). And when the fourth book came out, I got that one as well.

And somewhere in that couple of years, Harry Potter went stratospheric.

But as Harry’s star waxed, my interest was on the concomitant wane. It was partly growing up: at twelve, I was beginning to feel a little old for the children’s series I’d enjoyed so much at ten. It was partly the Hipster Code, which insists that something is only good as long as it’s underrated, and the minute it becomes popular it loses all merit. (Twelve years old, a massive prog rock fan, and already the makings of a hipster - my parents must have been so proud.) It was partly some less tangible sense that I was losing my best form of escapism to the intruding rest of the world. It was partly a precocious discernment of decline in quality.

As the world succumbed to Pottermania, I remained resolutely uninterested. I did read the fifth book, found it unimpressive and unmemorable, and never bothered with the last two - until 2009, when, with the horf-inducing hype dormant (if not dead), I felt compelled to read the entire series, if only to have an opinion on it. More than that, though, it was a chance to get closure on the magical, wonderful world that afforded me so much joy at the miserable fucking ages of ten and eleven. Which would prove the more accurate, my initial assessment of awesomesauce, or my later opinion that it was all suckacious?

Prior to the evaluative process, though, I offer you three little pieces of advice. Number one - don’t go the total immersion route; reading all seven books in a single week will screw with your mind worse than a good Confunding spell. Number two - the American editions are wildly inconsistent; in book one we find the jarring happenstance of these quintessentially British characters saying ‘Mom’, but by book seven even ‘trainers’ are being left intact. Number three - those totally essential Ginny/Hermione makeouts? Don’t hold your breath. (That’s what fanfiction.net is for, amirite?)

If the sparklepire woman is the Keyser Söze of criminals against the English language, then J.K. is that dude down the road who never bothers scooping up his dog’s mess from the street. Yeah, it’s unpleasant, and it’s technically an offence, but the style police have extremely bigger pizzas to fry. Rowling’s writing is workmanlike at best, intrusively inept at worst. ‘CAPSLOCK SIGNIFIES MY FURY! FEEL THE UPPERCASE RAGE OF MY TEENAGE ANGST!’ shouted Harry angrily... - annoying tics, but on the whole ignorable (hot tip for writers: if you ever, ever find yourself following a speech signifier with the word ‘sarcastically’, it’s probably time to reconsider your chosen career). The trouble starts when she overreaches, trying to describe deaths, traumas, and complex emotions, which she just isn’t really capable of. Don’t get me wrong - I’m not one to think a book sinks or swims solely on the elegance of its writing style; heck, find me a bigger fan of David Lindsay’s A Voyage to Arcturus and I’ll find you a well-written sentence in that book; but there are certainly times when it matters. One is when both style and content are so clichéd, so jaw-droppingly clumsy, that you cannot conceive of how the book actually got published (hello again, sparklepires!). Another is when the simplicity of the style just can’t bear the weight of the things it has to convey.

And I think that is the basic problem the series encounters as it goes on. The books are at their best when they’re content to be a kind of Roald-Dahl-cum-Enid-Blyton for the PlayStation generation, and, while I understand and sympathize with Rowling’s desire to get darker and deeper as her characters aged, she’s just not a good enough writer to pull it off. To start with, there’s the cartoonish grotesquery of the ‘bad guy’ characters - notice that the Dursleys and most of the Slytherins are fat and ugly - but with characters introduced later in the series the good/evil divide gets more nuanced, and it jars. The attempt to insert ambiguity into Dumbledore’s past, for example, was particularly clumsy, and (I have to say) would have been way more effective if she’d made his feelings for Grindelwald explicit. I mean, how awesome would that have been? Can you imagine the shitstorm if there’d been overt homosexuality in the bestselling children’s book series of all time? At least she had to stones to out him in an interview, even if we all kind of knew already.

Another difficulty is that of the characters’ aging: how do you convey sixteen-year-olds’ thoughts and desires without alienating the eleven-year-olds that love the early books? With a lot of immature bitching about ‘snogging’, apparently. (Really? A bunch of sixteen-year-olds cooped up in a castle that’s full of secret rooms and hidden passageways, and all anyone gets up to is snogging?) The sixth book was by far my least favourite, seeing that NOTHING. FREAKIN’. HAPPENED. for 500 pages. In fact, both of the last two books suffered deeply from the contractual obligation for seven books, s-t-r-e-t-c-h-i-n-g the story out. As a result, the pacing got seriously screwy. (It reminded me strongly of Buffy season seven, which also felt contractually stretched out, and would have been a lot stronger if there’d been less of the bad British accents and Buffy giving pep talks, and way more of the Nathan Fillion.) I would’ve combined them into one book, jettisoning all that tedious who’s-snogging-whom business as well as the whole camping in the woods bit, thus leaving only the awesome parts from both books.

Because that’s the really frustrating thing: J.K. can actually write a damn fine battle scene when she’s not desperately scrabbling for ways to fill out a few months on the Potterverse timeline. Both the dramatic you-all-know-who-dies part at the end of book six and, especially, the climactic battle at Hogwarts in book seven are pretty freaking killer. Of course, then it gets undermined by a tediously talky ultimate smackdown with Voldemort, which follows an awfully predictable death and resurrection sequence. (HARRY : JESUS, GEDDIT??)

My overall feeling is that neither of my previous judgments was quite right. There is awesome in places, and there is suck in other places. I still think the earlier, less ambitious books work better, and I still think the ubiquitous popularity is OTT. I rather wish Rowling had given us a cool female fantasy protagonist (à la Philip Pullman’s Lyra), instead of just another male Mary Sue. Hermione and Ginny both rule, and shouldn’t have been stuck playing second fiddle to boring old Harry*. But I do understand people’s longing for magic to coexist with the mundane, and hell, better the kids read this than Twilight.

*They should’ve banded together to form a sort of detective team, like a magical Veronica Mars. With makeouts.

Public Humiliation Time!: My First Movie Review

This week I've been sorting through all my junk. The plan is to go minimalist: everything unnecessary goes in the trash. I own a lot of unnecessary stuff, so this is proving a mammoth undertaking.

Embarrassingly, I've found a whole pile of inane scribblings – both schoolwork and personal creative writing – from my teenage years. The cheesy Tolkien rip-off that consumed my free time when I was 13... An awful, horrible letter I sent to the Guardian when I was 15... “Lines on the Resignation of David Blunkett (15/12/04)”... As I reread the forgotten writings, I can feel my extremities curling with humiliation like leaves of wilted lettuce.

I know that time travel will not be invented within my lifetime, because if it ever is the first thing I would do is travel back to 2004 and give my younger self a good hard slap to the face; and, sadly for my unbearably pretentious teenage self, this did not happen.

I'm afraid the most hideously embarrassing stuff went straight in the trash; but among the things I saved is the first full-length movie review I ever wrote. This was pre-blog and pre-Facebook, and thank you God I never had a Livejournal or anything like that, so I only have one, handwritten copy, which has never been seen by any eyes but mine. Because I am too lazy busy to create all-new content right now, I thought you might like to see how my writing style has or hasn't changed over the past seven years.

From probably around 2004, this is my review of the 1975 movie Tommy – unedited, unexpurgated, and with minimal editorializing. I hope it amuses you as much as it embarrasses me.

* * *

You've heard the stories... now confront the truth.

Hey, you know how when you hear that something is really, really bad, you find yourself feeling mild curiosity tempered with disbelief – as in, how could something really actually be that terrible, and you just have to check it out? Well, don't bother. Seriously. Tommy is every bit as bad as legend would have it, perhaps even more so. It redefines the term “godawful”. If you look up “egregious” in the OED, this film will be there. Repugnant, hideous, traumatic, belief-defying, gruesome, seizure-inducing are a few of the other adjectives that spring to mind... pass me a thesaurus, somebody... But then of course the film of the rock opera was never going to be quite a pleasurable undertaking.

Okay, so we open with a shot of a guy standing before the setting sun; little war love story, tum-te-tum – nothing too offensive yet: incomprehensible, yes; ghastly, not yet. At least, until the singing starts. Remember the record? And remember how the music was, y'know, not very good, well, quite crap actually, but we suffered its existence because we knew it and were kind of fond of it in the way one grows fond of a genital wart*. Well, imagine that music, melodramatized in the extreme, mutilated to sound kitschy and “musical”, and then murdered by a bunch of severely annoying uber-celebs in dodgy costumes whose “acting” consists of impersonating a constipated beaver. Prety much the same can be said for the, and I use the word with caution, plot, which at best has more holes than a fishing net and at worst is total nonsense. I think – I think – they've tried to improve upon the original concept, by giving it an almost-structure, which goes something like this:

Kiddie Tommy is about five or six when his missing daddy turns up and is murdered by mummy and step-daddy. He witnesses the encounter and (on account of the persuasive powers of the two miscreants) is struck deaf, dumb, and blind. There follows a lot of dumb stuff, supposed I think to be insight into his mind, which would be kind of cool in a dumb sort of way if done with today's SFX, but, since it mainly involves moving bits of cardboard around in front of lightbulbs, just looks crap. Mummy takes him to a freaky healer dude, who fails to wreak miracles; step-daddy takes him to Tina Turner, who prances around like a demented drugged-up banshee (oh wait – she is one**), gives him acid, and sends him on a baaaaaad trip. This was the part at which I first completely lost the will to live, a feeling that was to recur regularly over the remaining 80 minutes (o gods!) – or rather to throb continuously throughout, like pus seeping from a gangrenous wound. Urrrrrrgh.

Neither faith nor drugs having accomplished anything, somebody seems to decide that a sever shock will do Tommy good. When Cousin Kevin pulverizes him, there is relief in the vicarious fulfilment of a fantasy that involves doing much the same to pretty much everyone involved in the making of this excrescence of a film. Parents do not learn from this episode the folly of leaving vulnerable Tommy with dodgy relatives and proceed to give kiddie-fiddler Uncle Ernie the go-ahead to do whatever he wants. Then somehow Tommy gets into a junkyard, only there are two Tommys, and he climbs a bunch of cars, and then one Tommy disappears, and then the cardboard and lightbulb from earlier reappear, and then he's standing on a car playing pinball, and oh don't do this to me my head hurts... And Elton John stumbles out of Santa's Grotto, picking up the old woman's shoes on the way to the film set, where he loses to Tommy at pinball. Someone might have told him he's meant to play pinball, not a piano. And then...

Oh god, I can't go on describing the events in detail, it's making me too bloody depressed. Suffice to say that most of the rest is just as scary, meaningless, and dreadful as what has gone before. This film is a grisly carbuncle, a putrid pustule, a fetid ulcer on the bottom of all mankind's most execrable experiments in cinema. I still can't believe I spent 110 minutes of my short lifespan – better spent watching paint dry – on this excruciating mess.

Or, as I've been trying to say all along: yes, it really is that bad.

*1999 me and 2011 me are united in contempt for 2004 me. Tommy the album is awesome. And, leaving aside the belabored nature of the simile (get used to that), what does me of any age know about genital warts??

**OUCH! What the fuck, 2004 me? What did Tina Turner ever do to you? Apart from be in a movie you hated?

Top Five Films Of 2011 So Far

Allow me to don my Professor Trelawney specs and predict: posterity will judge 2011 to be a profoundly crappy year for movies (Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Parts 2-9 notwithstanding).

Oh, there's a smattering of mildly interesting releases, both Hollywood and (mainly) not, but compared with the abundant high-quality output of the past few years – 2010's Monsters and Inception and Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World and Toy Story 3 and Of Gods and Men; 2009's A Serious Man and Up and District 9 and The Hurt Locker and Moon; 2008's Waltz With Bashir and Synecdoche New York and Wall-E and The Dark Knight and Let the Right One In; 2007's No Country For Old Men and There Will Be Blood and The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford and Persepolis and 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days – compared with all that, 2011 is looking like a banner year for mediocrity.

Nonetheless, we're halfway through the year, and it is only right that I should scrutinize the mediocre-est cinema has to offer and present you with a list of the Top Five Films Of 2011 So Far.

A note on Black Swan: You'll notice I've left Black Swan off this list. That's because I don't know what to do with it. Its US release year was 2010, and by the time I compile my end-of-2011 list I'll be living in the US, so it won't feel right to include it; however, I didn't see it until January, so I don't feel I can legitimately retcon it into my end-of-2010 list. (I probably will, eventually, especially because I was only really happy with 9 of my top 10 of '010.) Of course, I think it's an absolute cracker of a film. Maybe Black Swan and True Grit can have their own little subcategory of my year-end top ten.

A note on the list: It skews obscure and foreign. Sorry and all, but I've not yet seen the big releases I'm hoping to love (Bridesmaids, out of laziness; Super 8, out of the whole not-released-in-the-UK-almost-until-I'm-leaving business).

Top Five Films Of 2011 So Far

5. Source Code [dir. Duncan Jones]

In which Jake Gyllenhaal repeatedly lives out the last eight minutes of a stranger's life in an attempt to prevent a terrorist attack – Precogs On A Train, if you will. The only American film on the list, I know it disappointed a lot of people who were hoping for a second Moon, but I thought it was great. I mean, I love Moon as much as the next Silent Running fan, but it was nice to see Jones tackle something a bit bigger and explodier with the same thoughtfulness (even if the premise doesn't really make sense – just go with it; the ending's great). I officially declare Duncan Jones to be a Very Good Director, and if he delivers a third film on a par with his first two I shall upgrade him to Auteur.

4. The Borrower Arrietty (Kari-gurashi no Arietti) [dir. Hiromasa Yonebayashi]

A new Studio Ghibli film is always something to celebrate, especially one based on a classic novel from my childhood. (Side note: did you know it's pronounced “Jibbly”? I literally just found that out yesterday, after like eight years of calling it “Studio Gibbly”. Live and learn.) This one is charming and delightful as ever, though not quite as good as the lovely Ponyo – largely because of the human boy Sho, who is quite as irritating in this film as he was in the book. I saw the subtitled version, and, though I know it's an anime purist's no-no, I'm very much looking forward to the American dub, 'cause AMY POEHLER. (Side note two: ask me about my post-colonialist interpretation of this movie!)

3. Julia's Eyes (Los ojos de Julia) [dir. Guillem Morales]

This first feature film from director Guillem Morales was advertised on the back of star Belén Rueda's previous film The Orphanage (El orfanato). That movie (produced, like this one, by the wonderful Guillermo del Toro, who LET HIM MAKE AT THE MOUNTAINS OF MADNESS ALREADY, HOLLYWOOD!!) gave me the serious heebie-jeebies, so I anticipated many a sleepless night from this new offering – and I was not disappoint. This story of twin sisters, a degenerative eye condition, and a creepy stalker ramps up the fear factor in a sequence that makes the night-vision-goggles scene from The Silence Of The Lambs look like something out of Ponyo.

2. Tomboy [dir. Céline Sciamma]

I have no reference points for this movie, so perhaps you won't either, but it's a truly charming French film by a writer-director I'm not familiar with. Skinny prepubescent Laure has short hair, a flat chest, and, like, the most soulful face you've ever seen on a kid actor; when her family moves to a new neighborhood, she presents herself as a boy named Mikael, ushering in a glorious summer of fun with her newfound gang of friends, especially BFF (and potential romantic interest) Lisa. It's never clear whether Laure is trans*, genderqueer, or just the most precocious and adorable little babydyke you ever saw, but little Zoé Héran brings real depth and nuance to the role. Even if you're not interested in queer stories (in which case, why are you reading this blog?), you should watch this film to see the most delightful and naturalistic portrayal of childhood on film since the opening scene of Spike Jonze's Where The Wild Things Are.

1. Attack The Block [dir. Joe Cornish]

My favorite film of the year so far, no question at all. This story of urban yoofs fending off an alien invasion from their South London council estate is an absolutely brilliant sci-fi adventure (brimming with easter eggs for the eagle-eyed sci-fi fan: the titular block is called Wyndham Tower, and it's situated on Ballard Lane) with a reasonably subtle side serving of sociopolitical commentary. Pay no attention to Mark Kermode in this instance (you should jolly well listen to me and The Incredible Suit instead): it's plenty funny and plenty scary, and I think it has a real shot at retaining its number one spot in my end-of-year top ten list.

Well, that was fun! Given a list of movies I feel passionate about – a list that includes only one straight white male protagonist, a class of people about whom I never want to see another movie as long as I live – I am starting to feel relatively optimistic about 2011, and we can't have that. To balance out the warm fuzzies, let's throw in a couple of mid-year GCG Pop Culture Awards.

Benjamin Button Award for Most Painfully Boring Movie I Have Ever Seen In My Life

Blue Valentine. Okay, I'm cheating by including it (see note on Black Swan, above), but I feel moved to share with the world just how much I hated this movie. I went in expecting a searingly honest relationship drama; I came out a ghost to the power of three, because it was so excruciatingly dull I died three times over in the course of watching it. Oh God, it was so boring. It was so tedious, it made Benjamin Button look like Die Hard. It was so long, it made Berlin Alexanderplatz seem like Le Voyage dans la lune. It perpetrated such agonizing torture on my soul that I'm afraid I fought back using my only weapon: atrocious cinema etiquette. I texted a friend, I groaned aloud, I got out a book of Sudoku and started solving them by the light of the screen. And I am generally a person with a very high boredom threshold (and impeccable cinema manners), but this... oy.

Sex and the City 2 Award for Most Loathsome Piece Of Garbage In Cinemas 2011

The Hangover Part II. I've only seen about five minutes of this dungheap whilst doing screenchecks at work, but that five minutes served up a demonic smorgasbord of homophobia, transphobia, racism, xenophobia, and good old-fashioned misogyny. I think – I hope – I'm safe in awarding this prize for the year as a whole, because I can't imagine we'll see a more disgusting pile of kyriarchal poop on the big screen in the next six months. (If we do, I'm turning Amish.)

And The Oscar Goes To...

[Also at Newsgrape.]

Golden Globes, Baftas, Grammys – awards season limps onward to its apex (or nadir, depending on your perspective): the Oscars. If you have a film-lover in your life, you will know that we can’t stop talking about the Oscars – or the Academy Awards, as we call them when being pretentious – but we constantly bitch about them. “It’s all politics,” we say. “The Academy only likes ‘worthy’ films. The Academy hates genre pieces, women, and people of color. The Academy gave Best Picture to Shakespeare In Love. It’s all a nonsense.”

These complaints are entirely legitimate, but the Oscars is still the highest-profile award ceremony, and a nomination or win can really boost interest in independent and foreign movies; so, if you’re at all interested in the current shape of the film industry, you have to watch. (Plus – do I even have to say it? – mocking it is such fun.)

Black Swan

My favorite of the Best Picture nominees – I went to see it twice. Half the world loved it while half hated it, which is a clear sign of cinematic greatness (see also: Tarsem’s The Fall).

Three-word summary: ballet, lesbian, psychosis

It will win: Best Actress for Natalie Portman

I would give it: Best Picture, Best Sex Scene, Best Set of Influences (Lynch, Cronenberg, Argento)

Inception

I saw Inception in a little English-language theater in Munich. It was the ‘surprise film’ screening, and my companion was irrationally fearful that the surprise would be Sex & the City 2, even though I kept saying it would be Inception. Being proved right was even better than the movie.

Three-word summary: dreams within dreams

It will win: Best Visual Effects

I would give it: Best Director, Best Score, Best Film by a Former UCLU Film & TV Society Member

Toy Story 3

And I saw Toy Story 3 in Amsterdam, where I was not the only grown-up scrabbling frantically for Kleenex in the final reel.

Three-word summary: Toy Story 3

It will win: Best Animated Feature

I would give it: Most Kleenex Required

True Grit

The Coens’ five best movies are Fargo, Miller’s Crossing, A Serious Man, The Big Lebowski, and No Country For Old Men. True Grit isn’t quite up there, but it is hell of entertaining.

Three-word summary: badass little girl

It will win: Best Supporting Actress for Hailee Steinfeld, Best Cinematography for Roger Deakins

I would give it: Best Female Character, Best Jeff Bridges

The Social Network

Does The Social Network hate women? I would argue no; it just doesn’t care about them enough to give them any portrayal outside the perspective of a character who does hate women. Which, you know, four of the ten Best Picture nominees this year have a female protagonist, so maybe that’s some kind of progress.

Three-word summary: jerk invents Facebook

It will win: Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay

I would give it: Fastest Talking, Most Sympathetic Jerks

The King’s Speech

The King’s Speech was pretty good, for a film about the monarchy, but I stand with this NPR article, which argues that a movie focused on Lionel Logue would be more interesting (and not just because he treated my great-grandfather IRL).

Three-word summary: stuttering monarch speaks

It will win: Best Picture, Best Actor for Colin Firth, Best Original Screenplay

I would give it: Best Casting Of Derek Jacobi, Most Flagrant Oscar-Bait

127 Hours

Surprised me by being very gripping and getting me completely invested in a pretty basic story about a pretty douchey guy. But if my brother thought he was going to die and made a video mentioning me as little as the dude mentions his sister in this film, I would be Deeply Hurt.

Three-word summary: jerk severs arm

It will win: Best Editing

I would give it: Grossest Sound Design, Most James Franco

Winter’s Bone

What a disappointment. I really wanted to like this film, and I still want to champion it because it is the most low-profile of the Best Picture nominees – and because Jennifer Lawrence’s performance is fantastic – but I just found it kind of dull. I feel bad.

Three-word summary: winter, poverty, meth

It will win: probably nothing

I would give it: Dirtiest Sounding Title, Best Performance In A Boring Film

The Kids Are All Right

Again, I went in hoping for the best, but I was mostly bored.

Three-word summary: nothing much happens

It will win: also probably nothing

I would give it: also probably nothing

The Fighter

Snoooooooooze. At least some of the punch noises were funny.

Three-word summary: Rocky or whatever

It will win: Best Supporting Actor for Christian Bale

I would give it: Most Boring Film That Isn’t Blue Valentine, Most Flagrant Bechdel Test Failure, Funniest Foley Artistry

Dancer in the Dark

When that I was and a little tiny girl, some of my favorite books were set in ballet schools. There was the fourteen-book Sadler’s Wells series by Lorna Hill, which tells the story of lovely prima ballerina Veronica Weston and her friends and family, both in Northumberland and in the Wells ballet school. (Incidentally, I still think Veronica and temperamental musician Sebastian are one of the most gorgeous fictional couples of all time. As a child, I was pretty much in love with both of them.) And, of course, there is the mother and father of all ballet school stories, Noel Streatfeild’s Ballet Shoes. If you haven’t read it, I heartily recommend it, even if you’re not a little girl. At the very least, watch the lovely 2007 BBC adaptation (starring the lovely Emma Watson). Admittedly, my favorite thing about that book was not so much the dancing as the character of Petrova, who loathes the performing arts and loves fixing cars (when she’s not learning important life lessons from two unmarried lady doctors… I’m not inventing the subtext, just reporting on it!).

I think part of the allure of ballet schools for me was that I would never, ever be a part of them. Like all six-year-old girls in small-town Alabama, I took ballet lessons briefly, but it soon became abundantly clear that I was far too heavyset, graceless, and clumsy to have any talent in this field. Kids who went to ballet school were like kids who solved mysteries or fought aliens – they were cool because they were doing something that did not exist in real life.

Noticing my enthusiasm for stories about ballet, my parents bought tickets for a Covent Garden production of Swan Lake. We’d been up late the night before – trips to UK back then were always an exhausting merry-go-round of little-seen relatives – and the parents were a bit concerned that my ten-year-old self might find the reality of dance rather more soporific than the books I so loved. They needn’t have worried. I was completely transfixed. The minute we got home, I copied my dad’s Swan Lake LP* onto a cassette* so I could relive the experience constantly (well, on rotation with my three other cassettes, which were The Who’s Tommy, Talking Heads’ Remain In Light, and a kick-ass compilation tape made by my brother).

Which is all to say: stories set in ballet schools are dear to my heart, and Swan Lake is especially dear to my heart, so it was pretty much a given that I was going to enjoy the hell out of Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan.

Black Swan tells the story of a young ballerina’s descent into madness, which is driven by her creepy sex-offender dance instructor, her creepy overbearing mother, the rival onto whom she projects the darker side of her own psyche, and her tireless quest for perfection. It is the story of the artist, of the ruthlessly single-minded pursuit of beauty and the toll this takes on the individual; and it is the story of the Hollywood star, particularly the female Hollywood star. Nina is constantly both infantilized and sexualized by those around her. This is literalized in the scene where she masturbates while surrounded by stuffed animals, but it’s also clear from the way her mother suffocates her like a small child whilst being unsettlingly eager to undress her, and from the way her instructor Thomas treats her. He repeatedly demands that his leading lady embrace her dark side (and by “her dark side” he means “his penis”), but he is drawn to her childlike naivety and even calls her “little princess” – or he calls her that once she has proved herself fit to take the place of the older dancer, who is considered a has-been at 35 (Winona Ryder, in possibly the “ouch”est piece of casting ever). Our society wants women celebrities to be squeaky-clean role models for little girls to look up to, but it also wants them to be sexual objects, and Thomas’s interpretation of Odette-Odile directly mirrors this cultural Madonna-whore complex.

Given the wild, extreme, high-pressure Hollywood milieu it reflects, it’s no surprise that Black Swan is a smorgasbord of bombast, intensity, operatic excess, and headfuckery. Naturally, this brings to mind that other bombastic, intense horror-thriller about an innocent young woman corrupted by the dark side of a ballet school: Suspiria. (Heck, the number of times I’ve almost called Darren Aronofsky Dario Argento is surely evidence of the connection.) I freakin’ love Suspiria. I love all those Italian horror films of the 70s, which the literati call gialli but which I, as a teenager ignorant of film-critic terminology, dubbed ‘spag-horror’: movies made by Lucio Fulci and Mario Bava, with irresistible titles like The Night Evelyn Came Out of the Grave and Twitch of the Death Nerve. These movies, along with the oeuvres of Davids Lynch and Cronenberg, were some of the most influential on my development as a film-lover, and I love that Black Swan is forthright in acknowledging its debt to Argento, Lynch, and Cronenberg.

I also love the lesbian sex scene (and not just because it lends credence to my theory that the career trajectory of Lindsay Lohan was an influence on this film). Between the ballet school setting, the giallo sensibility, and the h4wt girl-on-girl action, it’s as if Black Swan were specifically designed for me and me alone. And, considering the amount I complain that Hollywood doesn’t cater to my particular tastes, I think I should take this moment to say:

Thank you, Darren Aronofsky.

*These are just some of the ways we listened to music before mp3s, children. You can probably see examples of them in your local museum.

The First Annual GCG Pop Culture Awards

In which I make up categories as it suits me and distribute awards entirely at random.

MUSIC AWARDS

“Come on Eileen” Award for Most Inane, Repetitive, Inescapable Song of 2010
I Gotta Feeling by the Black Eyed Peas.

Critical Masturbation Award for Most Boring Record That Critics Inexplicably Loved
Lisbon by the Walkmen.

Most Essential Downtime in a Song
The eight measures in Kanye West’s “Monster” immediately following Nicky Minaj’s verse, allowing you to pick yourself up off the floor from the awesome, awesome, awesomeness.

Best New Genre Award
Prog-rap, the definitive text for which is of course Kanye West’s big, bold, mind-blowing My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. Kanye should collaborate with Rush, because if there’s one thing better than a prog-rock steampunk concept album, it’s a prog-rap steampunk concept album.

FILM AWARDS

Pirates of the Caribbean Award for Terrible Film I’m Nonetheless Glad Exists Because of the Awesome Kermodean Rant It Inspired
Sex and the City 2. Witness the glory.

Crank: High Voltage Award for Most Ridiculously Fun Cinematic Experience
Piranha 3D.

3 Most Rage-Inducing Film Posters of 2010
(3) Gulliver’s Travels; (2) Vampires Suck; (1) that one Katherine Heigl movie with the grown man dressed like a baby.

Fish Tank / An Education Joint Award for Best Unintentional Double Bill
Catfish & The Social Network.

Bad Filmgoer Award for Terrible Alternate Version of Great Film I Kind of Want to See
The great film: Of Gods and Men. The terrible alternate version I kind of want to see: Uwe Boll’s Monks Vs. Terrorists.

Alison Bechdel Award for Most Feminist Film / Cagney & Lacey Award for Most Subtexty Film
Whip It.

Top Ten Films
In the order I saw them, because that’s just how I roll:
Ponyo
Shutter Island
Kick-Ass
Four Lions
Inception
Toy Story 3
Scott Pilgrim
The Social Network
Monsters
Of Gods and Men

BAD FEMINIST AWARDS

Bad Feminist Award for D00dliest Top Ten Film List
Me. Look at that Top Ten. There’s, like, two female characters total in all those films.

Bad Feminist Award for Film I’m Most Ashamed That I Didn’t See
Made in Dagenham. Missing it makes me feel like a bad feminist, a bad filmgoer, and a bad member of the Kermode nation.

Bad Feminist Award for Film I Feel Guilty About Not Really Liking
Winter’s Bone. Directed by a woman, starring a woman, highly acclaimed, hella boring.

Bad Feminist All-Round Award
Sex & the City 2. By all accounts, the movie’s portrayal of women is as problematic as its attitude toward class issues and race issues, but the discourse around it has been hideously misogynistic.

TELEVISION AWARDS

Buffy S8 Award for Series I Should Have Ditched Long Before I Actually Did
The League, which I watched for a season and a half in a vain attempt to discover why my equal-parts-loved-and-hated AV Club thinks it’s so great; I saw only a mean-spirited, misogynistic, unfunny show, like an incompetently executed answer to It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. Even the unearthly attractiveness of Katie Aselton couldn’t keep me at this show.
Honorable Mention: Mike & Molly, which started out surprisingly sweet and charming, but has gotten lazier and more reliant on hoary clichés week by week, to the point that I will definitely not be coming back in January.

Best TV Show of 2010
COMMUNITY, BITCHES

Best Comeback From A Show I Feared Might Be In Irreversible Decline
It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia, which recovered from a patchy fifth season and a lacklustre two-part season opener to deliver a sixth season whose highs stand among the show’s finest moments.

Car Crash Television Award
Running Wilde. Mitchell Hurwitz, Will Arnett, David Cross – with the amount of goodwill guaranteed this show from still-mourning Arrested Development fans, it was going to have to be really terrible in order to squander it. It was.
Honorable Mention: Glee, of course.

Firefly Award for Most Lamented Single-Season Show
Terriers. TV gods, you owe me one. I expect at least a third season of Community for this.

BOOK AWARDS

The Amber Spyglass Award for Most Uncontrollable Weeping Induced by the Final Volume of a YA Trilogy
Since I failed to bottle my tears for an exact comparison, I’m going to have to declare it a tie between Mockingjay, the final volume of Suzanne Collins’ Hunger Games trilogy, and Monsters of Men, which concludes Patrick Ness’ Chaos Walking trilogy. Maybe I will even do a compare-and-contrast of the two series.

SILLY AWARDS

Robert Browning Award for Unintentionally Hilarious Word Usage
The Last Airbender, which was nowhere near as painful as I’d been led to expect, thanks largely to the giggle factor of lines such as “There are some powerful benders in the northern water tribes” (plus the ever-amusing spectacle of Aasif Mandvi making a fool of himself).

Amanda Seyfried Award for Blonde Lady I Find Stunningly Attractive Despite Not On The Whole Preferring Blondes
Whitney Able in Monsters. Like Ms Seyfried, she looks better in motion than in still photographs, because she has a luminous quality that lights up the screen.

Bad American Accent Award (Film Edition)
Aaron Johnson in Kick-Ass. He comes so close to getting it right, until he starts talking about “supaheroes”. Bless.

Bad American Accent Award (TV Edition)
Olivia Williams in that one episode of Terriers. I love you, Ms Williams, but wow can you ever not do an American accent.
Honorable Mention: Gabrielle Anwar on Burn Notice seems to be getting lazier with her fake American accent, but since the character’s supposed to be faking the accent I’ll let it slide. If there’s a similar excuse for Archie Panjabi’s similarly dodgy accent on The Good Wife, we haven’t heard it yet.