The Hottie and the Nottie is NOT the worst movie of all time
I have yet to see the movie so I can’t really make a call on whether it’s the worst movie I’ve seen in my short life!
THE release in the United States of Paris Hilton’s The Hottie And The Nottie has revived the debate over the worst movie ever made. Because the film logged some of the worst receipts in history - $US250 ($273) per screen on opening weekend - there is a temptation to accord it the mythical status of such universally ridiculed films as Attack Of The Killer Tomatoes or Plan 9 From Outer Space, to welcome it into the dark, Bizarro World pantheon inhabited by phantasmagoric disasters such as Showgirls, Ishtar, Heaven’s Gate, Battlefield Earth, The Postman and, most recently, Gigli and Swept Away.
That is not fair. It is not fair to Kevin Costner, it is not fair to Jennifer Lopez, and it is certainly not fair to Madonna. Though it is a natural impulse to believe that the excruciating film one is watching today is on a par with the excruciating films of yesterday, this is a slight to those who have worked long and hard to make movies so moronic that the public will still be talking about them decades later. Anyone can make a bad movie; Kate Hudson and Adam Sandler make them by the fistful. Anyone can make a sickening movie; we are already up to Saw IV. Anyone can make an unwatchable movie; Jack Black and Martin Lawrence do it every week. But to make a movie that destroys a studio, wrecks careers, bankrupts investors, and turns everyone connected with it into a laughing stock requires a level of self-involvement, lack of taste, obliviousness to reality and general contempt for mankind that the average director, producer and movie star can only dream of attaining.
A generically appalling film like The Hottie And The Nottie is a scab that looks revolting while it is freshly coagulated; but once it festers, hardens and falls off the skin, it leaves no scar. By contrast, a bad movie for the ages is the cultural equivalent of leprosy.
The worst film I have seen is a low-budget 1969 production called Futz. It was about a man who fell in love with a pig, and even by the dismal standards of the era, it was dismal. There is also a special place in my heart for La Grande Bouffe, the 1973 film about four men who eat themselves to death, and for Anjelica Huston’s 1969 debut in her father’s A Walk With Love And Death, which also starred Assaf Dayan, the son of the Israeli general with the flashy eyepatch. Pasolini’s 120 Days Of Sodom is as vile as any film I have seen, The Way We Were as treacly and flatulent as any movie I know of, and the lighthearted Holocaust-era comedy Life Is Beautiful as morally repugnant - precisely because of its apparent innocence - as any film I can name. But these are personal tastes; I would never be so bold as to argue that a 39-year-old film about an arrant porcophile is the worst ever made, not only because so few people have seen it but because there may be several others about men who lie down with comely sows that are actually worse than Futz.
Source: Sydney Morning Herald
Related Stories
POSTED IN: About Paris Hilton, The Hottie and the Nottie
0 opinions for The Hottie and the Nottie is NOT the worst movie of all time
No one has left a comment yet. You know what this means, right? You could be first!
Have an opinion? Leave a comment: