Shewara And I Decide The Worst Movie Of All Time

Shewara and I each had our pick for the absolute worst movies we had ever seen. And we consider ourselves, especially her, to be rather well-informed critics of contemporary cinema, so when we say a film we each refer to as "one of the worst movies we ever saw" we think such a movie would be similarly lambasted by critics. And after years of investigation, it came to pass that each film we decided was the worst ever were both critically-acclaimed masterpieces. A good portion of the reason we both hated these two films were that they seemed to be so universally-beloved, and that we could not figure out why anyone enjoyed them.

And so last Saturday we decided to take three hours of our respective lifespans and watch, back-to-back, each of our picks for worst movie ever. Mine was a major motion picture by a noteworthy American director, hers was the highest-grossing documentary in the history of France. And for the first time in five hundred years, the French have won a war.

. . . .

Until I went to see A History of Violence in the theater, I had never seen anyone walk out on a movie. But halfway through the film when Maria Bello and Viggo Mortensen have rough, rug-burning sex on the steps in their house, a saw a family of four leave the theater. It wasn't the sex that was bothersome - it was the context. Mortensen plays Tom Stall, an unsuspecting Indiana restaurant owner whose secret history of violent organized crime in Philadelphia comes back to haunt him. Old friends return to kill him, but Mortensen does the opposite, alerting his family to his former life. His wife, furious at the lies upon which their family is based, gets into a fight with Mortensen, who then chooses to calm her by having sex with her. Of course she obliges, as all good women being raped should, and afterward she gets up and slaps him.

A History professes to make a point where there is none to be mad. I get it: violence can be a problem. Secrets can be a problem. I could have figured this out without the over-acting, utterly disjointed narrative scheme, endless succession of film and literary cliches, and typically unnecessary sex and violence. Everything about this movie forced me to mold my face into a disgusted, quizzical look which thereafter became anger when everyone began to praise this film for making the world's most obvious point by simply crossing the line of good (many critics here used the word "acceptable" or "typical" in a praiseworthy way) film-making. Too much sex, too much violence, too much acting, and too much ... I want my money back.

. . . .

Generally, documentaries are supposed to "document." Events, people, places, ideas, whatever. To Be And To Have did just this, to the extreme. The film opens with a view of a farmer harvesting some grain. We don't know where, or when, or why, but he continues to harvest that grain for about the next six minutes. Then suddenly - we're in a classroom! Watching cute little turtles walk across the floor around the empty desks. For a few minutes. Turtles. Walk. Desks. By the time we here people talking, they are small children sitting in the back seat of a van, being driven to...we don't know. Nobody tells us. But they're speaking French. Perhaps Quebec? Ooh, maybe it's France. Ah yes France. Oh, and now they're arriving at school! The one with the turtles. And by this time you realize that the turtles are a metaphor for the film: they don't talk, generally are rather uninformative, and move ridiculously slow.

There are certain expectations in modern cinema about how long a single shot should last. If you have a camera planted on a tripod, filming a cow walk across a field during the sunrise in a movie about school, you're probably letting us know that it's morning. Five seconds will do. Sunrise = morning, got it. But damn if that cow doesn't walk the entire way across the screen, taking his good old time while you are forced to watch. You are then subjected to watching five year olds make drawings of bears and whatnot, for about twenty minutes or so, all the while having intellectually fascinating conversations:

I love to paint.

I painted a bear.

How amazing! I've never seen this! And now I get to watch this and similarly analogous activities for the next 104 minutes of my life. I found out later that according to the filmmakers and many critics, the children's problems with painting and math are supposed to be laugh-out-loud funny. Perhaps they would have been if this film had some sort of emotion to it, but sadly it tended to mimic the infectiously stagnant personality of the schoolmaster. What's best is that the movie's cover screams that it is "One of the most emotionally gratifying films about teaching ever made!!!" I find this hilarious since at the end of the film we discover that the vast majority of the students have failed out of their secondary school, most likely as a result of the education they received at their one-room rural French schoolhouse.

Just like the kids in the film, boy was I happy to get out of that place. A History was bad, but this was far far worse.

To Be And To Have, a film which received a 96% rating on RottenTomatoes and is to this day the highest grossing documentary in French history, we officially declare to be the worst movie of all time.