'08 on Film? Please Pass The Duds

Well, somebody, somewhere kind of, sort of, halfway liked Boll's movie. "I wouldn't change a thing," raved the Combustible Celluloid Web site. "It's been a while since I've seen Hollywood filmmaking this unsafe and unhinged." (For the record, Boll almost achieved the distinction of having two titles on the list in one year. But we had to cross off his political satire "Postal" because it never opened here.)

Everyone, it seems, has an opinion. And these days, it's all too easy to share it, especially if you've got access to a computer and a lot of free time.

Which is why it's all the more important to pause at this time of year, a time when the elite movie world seems to fall into lockstep, with best-of lists featuring such names as "Frost/Nixon," "Wendy and Lucy" and a handful of others.

Let us consider, then, "The Hottie & the Nottie."

There's a lesson to be learned from that misogynistic Paris Hilton vehicle (No. 7 on our stinker hit parade, with a score of 5), which Richard Roeper, in a fit of adverbial excess, called "excruciatingly, painfully, horribly, terribly awful" and the Chicago Tribune "a pea-brained vanity production." (I'm not sure if that last line refers to the movie or its star. Perhaps both.)

That lesson is: Making fun of bad movies is easy. Making good ones is hard.

Nobody sets out to make a lousy movie. Among the more high-profile titles on a list that includes such flashes in the pan as "Prom Night" and "Shutter" (a horror twofer tied for No. 8) is "The Love Guru."

The stakes could not have been higher for that summer comedy, produced and co-written by its star, Mike Myers, about a long-haired prophet of self-help named Pitka. To restore his street cred, onetime comic genius Myers, who hadn't appeared in a live-action film since 2003's disastrous "The Cat in the Hat," needed to make us laugh again, and badly.

Unfortunately, that seems to be exactly what he did.

"If you're in the mood for a delightful tweak of today's self-actualizing New Age gurus," wrote Entertainment Weekly, of what Rotten Tomatoes calls the 19th-worst film of the year, "look elsewhere. If, on the other hand, you want to see gags about boogers, elephant poop, and mano-a-mano duels with mops drenched in urine, then this is for you."

Ouch.

It certainly isn't the only example of how the mighty have fallen.