The Last Book I Read

There have been a bunch of books over the years devoted to bad movies. I remember, for one example, reading The Golden Turkey Awards way back before author Michael Medved became the pop culture maven of right-wing radio. That book, like many of the genre, was all about scoring cheap-shots on its targets without offering anything resembling critical analysis (now that I think of it, a perfect calling card for someone who would eventually get into the right-wing radio biz). Such books were often funny, but ultimately forgettable since they weren't really intended as anything more than an exercise in snarkiness. Nathan Rabin's My Year of Flops is a different kind of project altogether. Collecting columns written for the Onion A.V. Club, it truly is a work of criticism in the noblest sense of that term. Rabin is much more interested in examining how and why the selected films fell short of expectations (both commercial and artistic) and, though he offers his fair share of funny asides where appropriate, he's really more interested in making sense of the eventual disconnect between filmmaker and audience that defines each failure. Actually, even that oversimplifies the breadth of the book, since in any given instance there could be multiple points of such disconnect, any one of which might derail a particular project. Beyond the filmmaker/audience dichotomy, there also lurk such players as the studios, the critics, and broader social forces that all contribute to the context for disappointment (or for that matter, with different films, success). Recognizing how these factors combine (in various ratios) to effect the prospects of any individual project, and then applying his own critical perspective, Rabin offers a concluding summary for each film covered, labeling it a failure, a fiasco, or a secret success. If you've followed movies over the past half-century, you'll be familiar with virtually all of his subjects-- Cleopatra, Heaven's Gate, Ishtar, and most of the other predictable candidates for inclusion. But there are some more esoteric choices as well-- e.g. The End of Violence, Pennies From Heaven, Tough Guys Don't Dance-- which, while eminently qualified as flops on one scale or another, were hardly the pop culture landmarks of their more notorious brethren. In all cases, I found Rabin's analysis thoughtful and useful, insofar as it made me think (or rethink) through some of my reactions to these or even other films. It also made me want to go back and look at some of these so-called flops (Heaven's Gate, for one) with, as much as is possible, fresh eyes untainted by the expectation I'll be witnessing a train wreck.