In honor of the news that schlockmeister Roger Corman will be the subject of a new documentary feature, take a look at the above fan-made mashup of the 5 Worst Lines in Corman’s The Last Woman on Earth. For all of the cinematic garbage he unleashed on the world, Corman gave a huge number of future stars and eventually important filmmakers their first big breaks, including Dennis Hopper, Jack Nicholson and Martin Scorsese. Last Woman’s highly mockable was actually scripted by Robert Towne, who went on to write Chinatown, The Parallax View, Shampoo … and also Days of Thunder, Orca and Tequila Sunrise. Those salesladies at Saks will do it to you every time!

Today is Dustin Hoffman’s 70th birthday, and as David Hudson notes, the English-language media doesn’t seem to care (today’s #1 Entertainment story, according to Google News? Drunken British celebutards fight for MTV Award.) But because the internet moves in mysterious ways, while looking for Hoffmanania this morning I discovered a documentary-in-progress called Waiting For Ishtar.

The project apparently began when Canadian writer/comedian John Mitchell (who is co-directing the film with Jonathan Crombie), attempted to borrow a copy of the much-maligned 1987 Dustin Hoffman/Warren Beatty flop from his local public library, only to learn that he was #34 on a list of library members waiting to check out the branch’s sole copy of the movie. Mitchell then decided to make a documentary, in which he’d “find and interview the 46 other Toronto Public Library members ‘Waiting For Ishtar’.” The project has since expanded to include interviews with Ishtar director Elaine May and co-stars Charles Grodin and Carol Kane, as well as “film critics, songwriters, Ishtar fans, writers and directors, including well-known Canadian filmmaker, Don McKellar.”

Mitchell maintains a spottily-updated blog in connection with Waiting for Ishtar, subtitled “A love letter to the most misunderstood movie of all time.” The comments section on the blog is really amazing. The most recent post was apparently published in February of this year, but it’s still attracting comments from Ishtar lovers who seem overjoyed to learn they’re not alone. In one comment, dated June 28, Dave Elvin describes screening the first 20 minutes of the film at a party; as a result, a few of his friends “don’t speak to me anymore.” Discovering the documentary, Elvin says, “feels like going home.”

If you’re currently on the Toronto Public Library’s waiting list for Ishtar (or have been in the past two years), Mitchell wants to speak with you. You can contact him through the Waiting For Ishtar website. And if you need an Ishtar refresher course, check out the ten-minute YouTube clip above.

On last week’s edition of FilmCouch, I revealed one of my dirtiest secrets: on some level, I’m more interested in bad movies than good ones. You’ll have to listen to the podcast to hear my explanation, but coincidentally, I’ve come across a number of stories over the past few days that revolve around quantifying and qualifying movie badness.

Going into the weekend, FILMMAKER’s Scott Macaulay noticed that the apparently unwatchable (and unscreened for critics) Lindsay Lohan vehicle I Know Who Killed Me was rocking a rating of 0% fresh on Rotten Tomatoes. “In our long-tailed world of a million and one tastes, it would seem impossible to make a film that simply nobody likes,” Macaulay wrote. “If you believe the tomato squad, however, it’s been done.” A commenter on that post noted that once a few more reviews started to roll in, its score skyrocketed to 8%; five days later, it has actually dropped to 7%.

Only two of the reviews listed at Rotten Tomatoes are positive enough to earn a juicy red tomato; one of them, by the McVoice syndicate’s Jim Ridley, has essentially convinced me that I Know Who Killed Me is a must see. “Watch the mallrats’ jaws drop as they pay to see the same old teen slicer-dicer, only to get this wacko hodgepodge of the Brian De Palma horror filmography and—I swear to God—Kieslowski’s The Double Life of Veronique,” Ridley begins. The critic only has about 200 words to work with, but he manages to call it a “a surreal, disjointed mood piece about teen alienation,” AND commend Lohan for playing “her good-girl/bad-girl role with wit and an air of sly calculation,” AND toss off a reference to Kafka just before the clock runs out. Well played, indeed.

…Read more

In late 2005, Jon Avnet (who, it should be noted, is a very successful producer who hasn’t directed a film you might have seen since Fried Green Tomatoes) directed Al Pacino in a “real-time thriller” called 88 Minutes. A trailer for that film seems to have shown up on the web around this time last summer. According to IMDb, 88 Minutes was released on DVD in Brazil this past February and in a handful of other countries theatrically over the course of the spring; the pic’s US release date has been bumped several times, and is now listed as sometime in 2008.

Perhaps now we know why. In an interview with Pitchfork, indie rock guitar virtuoso Marnie Stern admitted to having recently downloaded “40 or 50 movies” while touring with Hella drummer Zach Hill. “But,” she says, “Every movie is a pile of garbage!” Stern elaborates on one recent download:

Another movie I saw last night was Al Pacino in 88 Minutes, I don’t even know if it went to the goddamn theatres. He looks unbelievably terrible. Like, in the Rolling Stones category. Dyed hair, he’s over-tanned, he’s really is not looking good at all. And in the movie he’s having sex with 25 year-olds.

So what do we learn from this little anecdote, beyond the fact that Al Pacino is no longer a credible love match for Alicia Witt or Leelee Sobieski? That studios might as well release dust-collecting duds, because the piracy chain is now so massive that an up-and-coming American rock star is easily able to illegally gain access to a film before any American film critic, and then ultimately tell the Wall Street Journal of hipster websites all about how ridiculous it is? Yeah, I guess that’s all kind of a big deal, but mostly, I’m just really hoping Marnie Stern starts a film blog. In the meantime, you can watch the video for her song “Every Single Line Means Something” above.

Since SXSW 2005 I’ve been hearing about the Duplass brothers and this film I’ve got to see, The Puffy Chair. What I hadn’t heard until recently was the story of the Duplass brothers and their near abandonment of filmmaking.

In an interview with Erik Davis at Cinematical, Jay Duplass, director of The Puffy Chair, tells the story of the night he and his brother made a short film that became the darling of the Sundance Film Festival.

“Well, we had been making really bad movies all through our 20s and we were just depressed, sitting in our apartment, thinking we’re gonna have to quit because it was draining money and, well, we felt it just wasn’t going to happen. We’re obviously not cut out to make movies. And Mark, who is sort of like the bully and pusher in our relationship, gets up and is like, “Screw it, we’re making a movie today. We’re not leaving this apartment until we make a movie.” All we had was our parents home video camera and, uh, I came up with this idea of a guy who tries to put back the personal greeting on his answering machine. So Mark said, “That’s it!” He walked out the door–we didn’t write a script, we didn’t do anything–he came back in and tried to perform this scene. He ended up crying and falling to the ground–it was all out of our own fears of desperation and being failures–and it all happened in one take. It was the first time I was on set and felt I was capturing something unique and beautiful.”

I imagine these “bad movies” the Duplasses were making. They can be found everywhere (I’ve got a few of my own attempts sitting in a box somewhere) and the scenario around making them reminds me of the making of a high school play. The theater teacher decides to do To Kill a Mockingbird because the kids will be able to picture themselves acting out great performances like Gregory Peck and Robert Duvall. Over the months, they rehearse, bond, get artsy and have a great time. Then opening night comes and all the parents proudly watch their kids’ work. But the parents have seen Gregory Peck and Robert Duvall in the film version and the high school performance is a mimicry of a classic. The parents, luckily, are mostly entertained anyway because these are their kids and the kids are learning.

The Duplasses (along with the rest of us) are learning. We’ve all made films with wedged-in dialogue explaining unnecessary plot points, and actors trying to muster up interest in what they’re saying, offering long, contemplative looks to convey depth. They were just little films that seemed so glorious until the outside world watched them. What I love about the Duplass brothers is that, in a moment of desperation, they stopped mimicking their favorite films and found the film about themselves–the film only they could make. Maybe I’ll get there myself someday.