Aaron's List of Ten Most Insulting Movies

Do movies ever rub you the wrong way not necessarily by being bad but by going against some established principal or philosophy? Or by crossing that generally accepted line of good taste? Here are ten movies that insulted me, even if I ended up liking some of them.

10. Vanilla Sky. Because Cameron Crowe and Tom Cruise had no vision for what they wanted to do with their remake of Abre Los Ojos, so they just had everyone talk and talk, and they cleared Times Square and had Steven Spielberg show up. All that power and money, and what do you get? Emptiness.

9. Meet Joe Black. The original 1934 version isn't even an hour and a half long, and Martin Brest's bloated remake tops out at almost three hours, and adds nothing significant to the plot. Why do directors feel they need to add material to a remake? Steven Soderbergh's remake of Solaris is an hour shorter, and just as effective as the original.

8. Ocean's Twelve. Because the sad screenwriters wrote themselves into a corner, and had to break the reality barrier by having Julia Robert's character, Tess, pretend to be the real Julia Roberts in order to pull off the crime. Who does Steven Soderbergh think he is, Luis Bunuel? Surrealism like this is uncalled for in a disposable Hollywood sequel. And it's not clever, either. I would have called for a rewrite. He obviously didn't give a shit.

7. Lady in the Water. Director/writer/producers like M. Night Shyamalan need to learn how to say no to themselves. After The Village was universally derided as a misconceived flop, Shyamalan should have been extra careful in his selection of his next project. Instead, he chose Lady in the Water, a desperate attempt at fashioning a fairy tale from nothing that turned Shyamalan into a laughing stock and cashed in any chips he had left from his Oscar-nominated wunderkind days. It's tough to say no to yourself when you have the keys to the city. Perhaps Shyamalan can be a lesson to others.

6. Because I Said So. Diane Keaton just pisses me off by immersing herself in crap like this and crap like Mad Money and crap like The Family Stone, and by running the same schtick she's been doing since Annie Hall. You know from Interiors and Reds that she's a good actress, and she, if anyone, could prove there are rolls out there for older women, so let's get the ball rolling, and enough of this la de da crap.

5. Scary Movie. Not because it wasn't funny, but because it used entire swaths of the Scream script verbatim as if the Wayans didn't even want to attempt to come up with anything original. This isn't lampooning, it's plagiarizing.

4. Freddy Got Fingered. Because the producers didn't say no to a movie that includes horse masturbation, deer evisceration, and elephant ejaculation. Not to mention a dead baby swung by its umbilical cord until it comes back to life. Who would think this is funny? Producers need to say no to crap even if its creator is on a hot streak.

3. Hostel Part 2. Eli Roth fucked up his rather scary premise in the first film, and I thought maybe he'd get it right this time. Instead, he goes for the cheap gross out and cuts off penises and feeds them to dogs, and crosses the line of good taste by stringing a nude, screaming, terrified woman upside down and having another nude woman slice her to bits and bathe in her blood. That's not scary, that's not horrifying, that's just disgusting.

2. The Return of the Jedi Special Edition Version. Lucas's obsession with revamping his old enterprises over and over again is a testament to leaving well enough alone, especially in the case of these embarrassing alterations. Fake-looking digital creatures getting down on the dance floor, and Hayden Christensen appearing as a ghost at the end when, for the past twenty-some years, Sebastian Shaw had ably filled that spot. Lucas also fucked up the original Star Wars with that embarrassing Jabba the Hutt addition, and he fucked up THX-1138 with the addition of mutant midgets during the chase sequence at the end. And Spielberg is in the same boat with his goofy alterations to E.T., who looks far more believable (and emotional) as a puppet than a digital thing.

1. Gus van Sant's Psycho Remake. Fuck Universal Pictures for allowing this to happen. When a film is universally regarded as a masterpiece, there should be laws against remaking it. The sick thing is, I know every studio has a list of films they want to remake, and I know other masterpieces are on there.

(Sorry for going on a rant, but I feel it is warranted in this case.)

MORE LISTS:
Nilay: 10 Reasons to Feel Dirty and Angry After Leaving the Theater
John: John Walks Out of the Theater with a Frown
Bree: In Poor Taste: Ten Flicks that Got My Goat