All things are relative ... even badness

Best I can discern, cinema badness comes in two flavors: Cabin Boy Bad and Driven Bad. One’s simply bad for you, like a grease-bloated corn dog from the state fair made by a man with no teeth and no describable personality, but oh does that corn dog taste good. That’s Cabin Boy Bad. The other, Driven Bad, is simply bad bad bad, like eating paper clips or stuffing pine cones down your throat. The names come from, of course, two horrible pictures — Cabin Boy, a Chris Elliott nonsensical comedy about a “fancy lad,” and Driven, a Renny Harlin racing picture that makes his other work (Die Hard 2, Cliffhanger, Cutthroat Island) look as brilliant as a joint collaboration between Martin Scorsese and Alfred Hitchcock in Italy during some kind of neorealist phase … and starring Laurence Olivier.

Watching both a day apart I’ve come to realize the difference between totally craptastic cinema and cinema designed to be craptastic for our amusement: one thinks it’s good and the other knows it’s not. I’ll let you decide which is which.

Let’s begin with Cabin Boy. Take whatever you’ve heard about it and reduce its awfulness by half; that’s a better assessment of Adam Resnick’s one-and-only attempt at directing (apparently studio bosses weren’t amused enough to give him a second attempt). How a movie like this was made is mind-boggling, or as Will Farrell will attest, it’s “mind bottling.” Speaking of bottles, those little glass bottles with ships in them … you could fit Cabin Boy’s premise inside one with room to spare for a nice clipper ship. It’s not high art, art or even words that rhyme with art, like “smart” or “fart.” It’s basically a movie in which Chris Elliott sinks his career into the briny deep. His gayish, impish, childish Nathanial Mayweather is a Fancy Lad, which apparently is some kind of title awarded in certain Ivy League colleges. He graduates in no discernable time period — cars and limos exist, but everyone is in 1800s clothes and the men are wearing powdered wigs — and heads off to meet his daddy for a job that requires only foul stubbornness and rude belittling (“I’m sorry, sir, I was just pondering what drifter’s corpse you stole those shoes from”). After a rather bizarre cameo by David Letterman, the film sets upon a series of surreal sea adventures in the spirit of The Odyssey involving a man-shark, abominable snowman, talking cupcake, six-armed sea mistress and her giant husband, who works in sales at the end of the Earth but still has to wear a suit to work.

Keep in mind, this is a bad movie. I will not be making arguments to the contrary. But somehow, despite its badness, Cabin Boy has found a cult following. Suddenly its badness is its key selling point. Thank not Elliott, who prances around in his hosiery and wig looking for handouts on a fishing schooner called the Filthy Whore. Thank the crew of the Filthy Whore and the fun one-liners they’re given in a film that never takes itself very seriously. Regarding how serious it takes itself: its fancy-pants attention span and its self-hating cheapness were major faults when it was released back in 1994, but now they are badges of honor. Back to the crew, each member is represented by a character trait: Big Teddy, a wall of a man (Brion James, Leon from Blade Runner), relies on sarcasm, in fact I’m sure it’s what pumps through his ripply veins; Skunk (Brian Doyle-Murphy) is allowed to plead guilty to irony and over-explanation as the film’s one source of real information; Paps (James Gammon) is a salty goon with a deviant mouth who can rhyme in sea shanties (don’t ask what “puhlinka pachinka pastinka” means); Captain Greybar is a big softy who spends less time barking orders than he spends giggling like a school boy from the mizzenmast; and then there’s Kenny (Andy Richter) who is so deficient in the IQ department that his brainwaves are weaker than a ladle full of fish chum. These characters mingle in what can only be described as madness, but somehow they’re funny. Not legitimately funny. Rather just funny because the material is so bizarre, the acting so bad, the point so diluted that you can surrender yourself to its silly sensibilities.

This isn’t the first or last movie to be this bad. Beyond the Valley of the Dolls could fall in that category. So could the disaster-movie remake, Poseidon, which I loved despite its overt awfulness. Napoleon Dynamite was widely accepted, but it plays off the same principles.

Now consider another kind of bad movie. Consider Driven. The 2001 film was directed by Renny Harlin, a man I frequently name without hesitation as the worst director. Ever. Harlin, an apparent gear head and race car enthusiast, dishes a saga unworthy of daytime television for a sport he supposedly loves dearly. Driven is filled with race clichés so obvious and obtuse that kids with learner’s permits could see them coming from three time zones. I’m sure race cars can do some of the things in Driven, but exaggeration sets upon these cars with such force that they no longer even resemble race cars. They’re like race jets, streamlined little crop dusters with sonic engines that whine and wheeze depending on the altitude and plot. They may be fast and dangerous, but any yokel with some rudimentary skill on a John Deere could jump in one and take off to, say, the streets of Chicago and under parked semi trailers. And notice how, when the cars roar through city streets, manhole covers upturn and roll down the street as if an asteroid just passed. Also, newsstands and womens' skirt aren’t safe either. One question: if a car could pry a manhole cover off the street (and those suckers are stuck in there pretty good) then why wouldn’t it shred the street as well, which is attached just as firm? Why stop there: Why don't the buildings lining the street come crashing down from the massive force of those race cars, vehicles that would make a VW Bug look like a touring bus.

It’s funny how in races, when two cars are running full-on, pedal to the floor, and right next to each other, that one car shifts into a mystery gear that the other car apparently doesn’t have. This magical gear somehow propels the car forward to win the race. Don’t forget to notice the give in the steering wheel; you’d think the drivers were controlling a school bus with a sloppy suspension by hand motions used to turn from 12 o’clock to quarter past one. I'm no expert, but when you crank the steering wheel at 200+ mph you're day is not going to end well. By far, the worst elements of the movie — besides the acting, the directing, the computer effects, the crash sequences, the love interest, Sylvester Stallone’s granite-like oration — are the race announcers who act as the voice of God to every single image on the screen. Announcer: “Rain is threatening the drivers today in Germany at the second to last race of the season …” Camera: Cut to storm clouds brewing on German horizon. Announcer: “Jimmy Bly is just not on his A-game today.” Camera: Cut to Jimmy Bly punching his helmet in frustration, his A-game clearly escaping from behind the visor. The announcers even explain things as they’re happening, as if we’re all too inept to figure out that the action our little eyes are witnessing is actually part of the story and not some random image that just so happened to float into the theater, reel itself into the movie and project itself on the screen. Image: Jimmy Bly struggling to save a friend by lifting a race car out of a small pond where it crashed. Announcer: “There’s Jimmy Bly valiantly lifting the car trying to save his injured and imperiled teammate from a cold fate in that shallow pool of rainwater. This is just incredible footage.” I kept waiting for them to say, “This life-or-death moment is brought to you by our crash sponsor Coca-Cola. Thirsty? Reach for a Coke.” I’m so tired commentators in sports movies. There are better ways to move the action along than to rely on some omniscient announcer who acts as narrator but never supplies the narrative with any substance. A good filmmaker (not Renny Harlin) wouldn’t have the announcer tell us every friggin’ thing.

Besides all this, Driven is filled with lots of MTV-type moments showing race tracks, fans, crew guys randomly fixing thing, vendors, local babes dressed in regional-specific skimpy clothing. Oh, and there’s lots of ooh-aah shots of race cars zooming around corners, pitting and getting their wheels removed. Then there are these spinning, retracting, panning, tracking shots of race cars, as if the camera itself were glorifying the idea of race, or maybe exploiting it for cheap thrills. It’s like race car porn. Notice, though, how when they crash it looks like vinyl siding from Sears splits off from the car in massive chunks. Oh and there’s more. Check out the random stuff, like a girl eating a Mexican churro, Gina Gershon applying mascara, a pool game gone terribly wrong and Burt Reynolds in a wheelchair. I’ve thought this out, and the only reason to have Burton Leon Reynolds in a wheelchair is because it’s twisted irony that a race car manager can’t actually walk. A design that’s even more twisted: Mr. Reynolds spends the entire movie stuck in a chair that doesn’t move because of a … wait for it … a flat tire. Booyah!

He’s not the only one that has it rough, though. Check out Kip Pardue, who acts as if his performance in this movie determines the fate of a litter of puppies. And apparently Kip Pardue really hates puppies. His poor brother in the movie, Henry or Tom or something, gets to be the bad agent who dispenses advice that is usually reserved for bad agents. We know he’s bad because he wears more black than Johnny Cash at a gothic funeral. And poor Sly, he just drowns in this tremendously stupid picture. At one point, to prove his authenticity, Sly's character flicks quarters on the track and then drives, drifts and power slides over them at 185 mph. The sequence is so ridiculous it shall forever be known as the Quarter Incident. Another scenes gets close to topping it, but comes up short. The scene: a car has turned over in a puddle and the driver is going to drown unless he gets help. Does the safety crew save the day? Nope. Two drivers turn around on the track, race through oncoming traffic and stop near the puddle so they can hop out of their cars to save the day before a gas leak and a burning bush end the sequence with a roasty-toasty driver barbecued inside his own car. If race-track safety crews have a union they should protest this movie immediately; it makes them look like fools.

I thoroughly hated this movie. Is it obvious? I’m a moderate Formula 1 fan, so I hated it for a variety of reasons beyond just its overall composition and quality. But ignoring its bogus interpretation of racing, Driven has no redeeming value to society. It’s an abomination to film, to acting, to automobiles. And the six years between now and its release haven’t helped it improve its reputation — even today it sucks. You want to know a more interesting movie? What about a documentary on how Renny Harlin has been allowed to actually get behind any camera, be it a windy-box disposable camera or an IMAX 70mm. I want to see that film. Twice. And own the DVD, as long as Renny doesn’t get residuals.

So, there you have it, Driven Bad and Cabin Boy Bad. Liking bad moves is OK by me. As long as they admit they're bad and face the music, or the firing squad. Whichever comes first.

Writers note: Several thoughtful readers have pointed out that Formula 1 team owner Frank Williams is in a wheelchair after a car accident in France in 1986. So maybe Burt Reynolds' placement in Driven is not so far-fetched.