The Razzies are awful. Just completely, uniformly awful, almost always in a way that is worse than the movies they pick to denigrate. It’s just a generally mean-spirited idea antithetical to cinephilia to dedicate a whole awards show to mocking movies considered by a completely illegitimate body to be bad. But trolls and bad faith actors and just the general toxicity of a more and more online movie culture have kept them alive. That and the occasional attention-seeking of a controversial pick. However, many of their selections have been shoddy. There was the time they singled out Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt as Worst On-Screen Couple for Interview With a Vampire out of simple homophobia. Or when they declared Showgirls, a beloved camp classic, the Worst Movie of the 90s. This month the Criterion Channel cleverly decided to subvert the Razzies by showcasing a collection of famous winners, positing that there may be some good to be found in such much maligned films.
And one that I’ve been curious about for a while is Ishtar, the infamous 1987 mega-bomb that sadly killed the directing career of trailblazer Elaine May. It was an adventure-comedy homage to the classic Road To… series of Bing Crosby and Bob Hope that went notoriously over-budget and was beset by complications arising from the harsh desert production and difficult relationship between May and lead actor and producer Warren Beatty. It hobbled into theatres, was eviscerated by critics, and became synonymous for a time with the idea of bad movies. Criterion finally gave me the chance to watch it, and I gotta say it is unsurprisingly not that bad …even quite good in places.
I’m not going to defend it as great -this may be the only movie I’ve recommended here that I think is not of particularly high quality, but it does have real merits -starting with the premise and inspiration that I think is rather fun. Like many a Road To… movie it depicts a pair of unsuccessful songwriters -though unlike Crosby and Hope, Beatty and Dustin Hoffman are not at all good- whose last ditch effort to make it involves going to Morocco where they get caught up in the turbulent political situation of the neighbouring fictional country of Ishtar. Isabelle Adjani is the Dorothy Lamour analogue -the local woman who both men fall for and who manipulates Beatty’s Lyle into helping her left-wing guerilla group, while Hoffman’s Chuck is recruited as a mole for an exasperated CIA agent played by Charles Grodin.
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Hoffman and Beatty have good chemistry and it’s particularly refreshing to see Beatty play the innocent doofus of the pair, when he is so often cast as the charming ladies man. And Beatty is pretty good at it too. Their songs, written by Paul Williams, are amusingly awful -even worse when sung by these talentless goofs, and there are plenty of jokes in the movie that are clever and creative -it is still an Elaine May script after all! Maybe the funniest performance, though it is quite low-key, is from Grodin, who infuses his every interaction with an almost Albert Brooks-like attitude of irony -especially in scenes between him and the Emir, played by Aharon Ipalé, that poke fun at American interference in the Middle-East. On the subject of American imperialism in foreign affairs, Ishtar actually seems like it was ahead of the curve.
I happen to be a fan of the Road To… movies as well, so the little homages sprinkled throughout and images like the two white guys dressed in desert clothes riding a camel had some charm to me. So did the sometimes farcical nature of the plot and the pair’s divergent threads of being used. Oftentimes the movie is meant to have the silliness of a cartoon, like when Lyle orders a blind camel by accident due to giving a special code-phrase to the wrong salesman.
Then again that silliness isn't always reflected in the film's tone, and I think it is only fair I address those aspects of the movie that did justifiably meet with criticism. As much as Ishtar wants to be a goofy, old-fashioned farce, there are scenes and compositions that suggest a serious atmosphere -likely coming from Beatty and cinematographer Vittorio Storaro. Not to mention a depth of realism those old comedies didn't have that makes moments like Chuck attempting suicide or the pair being fired at in the desert less palatable as comedy. The narrative isn't particularly well-constructed, especially the motivations of Adjani's guerillas, which are entirely unspecific other than that they are generic revolutionary leftists trying to overthrow an apparently corrupt regime. And then there's just the weird sexism (Adjani is disguised as a boy throughout and twice simply flashes a boob to reveal her gender) and the less weird though tiring racism -sprinkled all over the movie but most emphatic in a bit where Chuck talks in vaguely Arabic-sounding gibberish to pass off as an ally to a gun cartel. It's not only offensive and lazy but a complete non sequitur of a plot point.
Ishtar is a movie that seems very slight given all the excess of ambition that went into the making of it. And it wouldn't be the last time Beatty in particular would be involved in such a ridiculously overblown project (Town and Country is much much worse). But the result is ultimately an okay movie that is in some places very enjoyable. It’s pretty clear in retrospect that its status as one of the worst movies ever made is mostly due to the reputation of its extremely troubled and over-budget production and its abysmal failure at the box office. But these things don't always correlate to a movie's quality. It's important to remember that.
Criterion Recommendation: The Dark Crystal (1982)
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Talking of movies that were major failures at the box office. It was Patrick Willems' recent video essay on Muppet Cinema that brought Jim Henson's ambitious passion project The Dark Crystal to mind (as well as lingering love for its incredible prequel series on Netflix). Here is another movie that isn't especially great as a story but is so technically audacious it deserves wider recognition. A bit of a generic fantasy premise, it is the story of the world of Thra, in the grip of powerful bird-like creatures called the Skeksis, while two underdog humanoid Gelfling embark on a quest to defeat them and save their world by uniting the shards of a great Crystal -and all of it is rendered entirely through puppets. The feats of elaborate puppetry achieved in this movie are really something to behold, bested only by those of the series. Henson and co-director Frank Oz push the bounds of their artistry and filmmaking capabilities to some truly fascinating results, even if some of the experiments (notably around the Gelfling) are imperfect. Still it is the kind of artistic achievement that deserves to be celebrated by the Criterion Collection. And given the depth of Brian Froud's designs, just think of the cover artwork!
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