Book Review: My Year of Flops

My Year of Flops: The A.V. Club Presents One Man's Journey Deep into the Heart of Cinematic Failure
By Nathan Rabin
Scribner
Publication Date: October 19, 2010
ISBN: 9781439153123

Review by Samir Mathur

For the last few years, Nathan Rabin has been writing his My Year Of Flops column over at The AV Club. As that sentence suggests, it was conceived as a 12-month-long project, but Rabin underestimated its popularity, and it's still going strongly four years later. This book collects some of those columns, adds some new case files, and interviews some of the actors involved with some of these films.

I really enjoy Rabin’s writing on The AV Club. His recaps of The Simpsons and 30 Rock are often just as funny as the episodes themselves, and his latest project, analyzing each of the Now! That’s What I Call Music compilations, is equally detailed and fun. I was only lukewarm on Rabin’s memoirs, The Big Rewind, because they documented his very difficult childhood and upbringing and contained – yuck – actual feelings, emotions and sadness. Even though they were littered with Simpsons quotes and other pop culture trivia that I love, that book just didn’t do much for me.

My Year of Flops – “a floposphere for pop-culture rubberneckers and schadenfreude enthusiasts” - totally did it for me though. It’s important to note that this isn’t just a collection of bad movies. Anybody can make fun of a terrible movie – Videogum.com does it particularly well– but Rabin isn’t concerned with doing that. It’s far more interesting to think about movies, often very obscure, that just don’t work. For whatever reason. Rabin dissects each case file, in meticulous detail, and then decides whether each one is just bad (a ‘Failure’), or spectacularly, what-on-Earth-were-they-thinking bad (the ‘Fiascos’), or sometimes, he’ll find films that are worth a second look, that he considers to be unfairly deemed flops and actually have more to offer. These are the ‘Secret Successes’.

There are plenty of things that can make a movie go south. Among the famous flops that are discussed in book is Gigli, the Affleck/Lopez film that arrived after months of intense media hype, and could never live up to the constant tabloid coverage of "Bennifer". Sure enough, critics pounced on the film’s stodgy, unnatural dialogue and especially the leads’ performances – Affleck is nobody’s idea of a mobster. In one of his many great comparisons, Rabin’s says that Christopher Walken’s appearance in this film is “like Miles Davis popping into a Holiday Inn lounge and jamming with the house band. [Writer/director Martin] Brest has written dialogue so doggedly strange and unnatural that only Walken can hack his way through it without looking like an amateur.” And in case you’re wondering, yes, of course there’s a case file on Battlefield Earth: “John Travolta, an actor who makes so many flops that when other actors fail, they have to pay him royalties.”

Sometimes filmmakers grossly misread their source material – c.f. 1995’s The Scarlett Letter and its happy ending; 1997’s Lolita; and Ang Lee’s Hulk, where the filmmakers “screwed up a perfectly good smash-'em-up comic-book monster movie with their infernal "art" and "ideas".” Sometimes movies become flops based on how expensive they were to make versus how much they were actually reviled when they were released. To this end, Rabin offers a minute-by-minute commentary to the director’s cut of Waterworld (three hours long!) so you don’t have to ever see it. Also, did you know that, to promote Last Action Hero, Columbia Pictures paid half a million dollars to have Arnold Schwarzenegger’s face painted onto the side of a space shuttle? Madness.

Then there are the films that are just doomed from the start because of their head-scratching concepts. Here are a few choice lines from the book that concisely illustrate this point.

“Like The Star Wars Holiday Special, [1978’s] Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band puts a beloved cultural institution in a new context so mind-bogglingly inappropriate that it engenders intense cognitive dissonance.”

“Paint Your Wagon represents an odd marriage of convenience between the manliest cinematic genre (the Western) and the girliest one (the musical).”

“[Gus Van Sant’s Psycho] belongs not in a movie theater or a drive-in but in a conceptual art museum in a wing devoted to pretentious experiments in pointlessness.”

Again, though, Rabin isn’t just here to gleefully make fun of poorly-thought-out pieces. There are those which earn the “Secret Success” tag, such as Michael Cimino’s legendary Heaven’s Gate, a film that sank so hard that the director (who had previously won an Oscar for The Deerhunter) hardly made any movies afterwards. Oh, and the movie studio that funded it, United Artists, collapsed as a result. That’s the nice thing about this book and indeed the whole project: Rabin watches the films and judges them for what they are. Even though he notes all the off-screen turmoil, he can still form an opinion of each film based purely on the film itself. He says of Heaven’s Gate "[i]t's a film of rare beauty and scope, a feast for the eyes and a harrowing, unflinching meditation on the cruelty of capitalism.” While that sounds heavy and boring to me, another reader might be inspired to check out the film.

Always funny, self-deprecating and willing to drop an obscure gem of pop-culture trivia, Rabin’s writing is a delight, and this book is great for people like me who love knowing the full story behind Hollywood disasters. The writing is always accessible and even when providing historical context, it doesn’t get boring, so that’s a plus. Now, I’m off to give Southland Tales a second chance.