Gore Verbinski's life has been leading up to Rango

 Gore Verbinski has had kind of a weird career.

best worst movies about terrible families

9

Thirst

Chan-Wook Park's vampire movie is based on a novel by Emile Zola. It's streaming on Netflix, so you can go watch it right now. There are a lot of movies about the plight of vampires, and this is one of my favorites. It's at the bottom of this list because it's only partially about a bad family--it's mostly about a sort of love triangle, but the mother-in-law character really makes the movie.
In good news, speaking of Chan-Wook Park, that old rumor about a Smith/Spielberg version of the Old Boy story? That's not happening.
Note: Old Boy is also only partially about a bad family.

8

Dogtooth

Why haven't you watched Dogtooth yet?
Lanthimos's next movie, by the way, is supposed to be darker and funnier than Dogtooth. Which is good, because Dogtooth really needed to be a little more extreme.

7

Box

I thought about putting Audition on this list, because really that movie is all about a dad trying to find a mom for his children, and what could be sweeter? It's like The Brady Bunch, heartwarming. Box, Miike's contribution to the Three...Extremes trilogy is more in line with the theme of weird families. It's about sisters. And it's weird and cool and pretty. Actually, now that I'm thinking about it, all three of the movies in that collection should be on the Bad Families list, each in its own way.

6

Arsenic and Old Lace

Do the Brewster sisters really qualify as a bad family? I mean, they are good as a family. But they are also serial killers, so let's count them as bad.

5

Animal Kingdom

Animal Kingdom is not a terribly original story, and I suspect I would not have liked it--or actually, I would have liked it fine, and forgotten it immediately--if it weren't for Jacki Weaver and James Frecheville. She's terrifying and convincing and intense: half Tony Soprano and half Baby Jane. His performance is so quiet and bleak and passive in contrast, that when he does take action, it's surprising...and surprisingly satisfying. At the end of the movie I felt relieved more than anything.

4

Bunny Lake Is Missin

I saw this movie when I was very young, late at night on TV, and I remembered bits of it--a creepy doll, a man smoking a cigarette in a bathtub. For years, I could not figure out what movie it was. Then I rented Bunny Lake Is Missing, because it was directed by Otto Preminger and it has Lawrence Olivier and Noel Coward in it. It sounded interesting, like "If you liked Laura, you'll like Bunny Lake Is Missing." I was about thirty minutes into the DVD before I started to suspect it was that movie. It's a little less haunting and maybe even a little corny on rewatching, but it's still scary.

3

Speaking of Baby Jane: Whatever Happened to Baby Jane

2

Grey Gardens

Two roads diverged in yellow wood.
And pondering one, I took the other.


And of course, the very best worst movie about a really unpleasant family:

1

Chinatown

Lionel Shriver on pregnancy in the movies

"Ever notice how many films portray pregnancy as infestation, as colonization by stealth? Rosemary's Baby was just the beginning. In Alien, a foul extraterrestrial claws its way out of John Hurt's belly. In Mimic, a woman gives birth to a two-foot maggot. Later, the X-files turned bug-eyed aliens bursting gorily from human mid-sections into a running theme. In horror and sci-fi, the host is consumed or rent, reduced to husk or residue so that some nightmare creature may survive its shell."

from We Have to Talk About Kevin

Dogtooth

It seems like people are talking a lot about Dogtooth, and the talk is largely along the lines of, "I'm not saying you should see it, and I definitely never need to see it again, but it's a good movie." It's one of these movies that I liked,but I have not been recommending it because I don't really want people to watch it thinking, "So this is the sort of thing Lydia is into." It's kind of like when I found out a colleague had never seen Blue Velvet, and I told him to go watch it immediately, then followed up with a thousand caveats: it's weird, it's upsetting, etc. So when I say that Dogtooth is a good movie, what I mean is that it is a COMPLETELY ACCURATE PORTRAYAL OF WHAT HOMESCHOOLING IS LIKE. It could be a documentary of my childhood: incest, felicide (felinocide? catricide?), misleading vocabulary lessons. All true.

I can't help thinking about similarities between Dogtooth and my favorite new movie I saw this year: Never Let Me Go. Both are about children who are not really children, who are fenced in and deliberately misinformed about themselves and the world outside the fences. They are young people constructing their own reality, out of false and partial information. They are terrified of the outside world, and they are obsessed by ordinary shabby objects and bits of popular culture they don't really understand. Both movies use very unusual circumstances to talk about things that are more or less universal to human experience: power, trust, autonomy, mortality, family.

Of course, there are differences. Never Let Me Go made me feel like a human life is very short, unfairly short. It made me think it's very lucky to be allowed to spend any time at all in this maddening, beautiful, incomplete, imperfect world. Dogtooth made me wish I still believed in a cruel and arbitrary God, so I could stop now. That might be comforting.

The thing I liked and hated about Dogtooth, what made it hard to watch, was not really the way the children were mistreated, or the frank depiction of various unromantic (maybe that's an understatement) sexual encounters, or the moments of sudden violence. The thing that made it hard to watch was the way I as a viewer was deliberately underinformed, like the children. In one scene I found particularly troubling, the father and mother discuss a problem late at night, and the father silently and dramatically mouths his words, while we watch over the mother's shoulder. Throughout the movie, people have conversations while we are looking at odd fragments of their bodies. Watching, I felt claustrophobic and bewildered. I guess that makes it a good movie, because I'm pretty sure that's what it was trying to do. But I'm not saying you should go watch it or anything.

Alien Cubed

In light of our recent fascination with genre, I’m going to do my best to avoid all reference to genre in this post. I was unfortunately born far too late to enter into the Alien franchise at a respectable point. Alien (1979) and Aliens (1986) had been on laserdisc for years by the time I was allowed to watch them, but Alien³ (1992) was in theaters at a time when I could spend my allowance and drag my dad to the theater for my occasional terrible choice in movies (this list includes The Faculty and From Dusk ‘til Dawn).

This period also marks the time when I would spend my allowance on various sets of cards purchased at the Trader’s World flea market. Because I identified this as an “adult” film, and part of my entrance into adulthood, I bought the entire set of Alien³ movie cards to only ensure that everyone would be aware of my maturation.

For a long period of time the third film in the franchise occupied the much-coveted third spot in the hier

archy of alien films. I don’t think many would argue that the Ridley Scot

t Alien isn’t the best film in the franchise, with Cameron’s taking second place. It seems the central argument to the Alien movies is where do three and four end up after one and two. After years of carrying this film close to my heart, it’s time to let the chest-burster go and move this film down a peg.

Part of this film suffers from wanting to be a Terry Gilliam movie, but a weirdly sentimental and serious Terry Gilliam movie. Most of the characters are British, and the set design is less futuristic and more industrial in a Brazil sort of way. Just look at Jonathan Pryce on the set of Alie...I mean Brazil.

The film also failed to develop any really sense of character, or at least if it did I failed to realize which relatively unknown, bald, British actor was which relatively underdeveloped psychopath. Poor Pete Postlethwaite. At one point I was certain they had just killed the same guy 17 times. And I only recently found out that William Gibson was the original choice for screenplay writer. I’ll allow him to add his two cents: “It became the first of some thirty drafts, by a great many screenwriters, and none of mine was used (except for the idea, perhaps, of a bar-code tattoo).”

Ultimately, what this film did not do that makes Alien great and Aliens meh is point out that it’s the metaphor that’s scary. We should be afraid of a world where people are treated as itemized inventory, and we should be afraid of the dark. In Alien³ it seems we should be afraid of the alien itself, but in its new dog form.

By the way, I think you could identify which films are the best according to taglines.

Alien: Resurrection: It's been more than 200 years ... The beginning has just started.

Alien: In space no one can hear you scream

Alien³: In 1979, we discovered in space no one can hear you scream. In 1992, we will discover, on Earth, EVERYONE can hear you scream. (The film did not take place on Earth, in case you were wondering)

Aliens: This time there's more

Young Lincoln

Party Down: Young Lincoln
Uploaded by kdlmd243. - See more comedy videos.

1. It is impossible to satirize the crap hollywood produces, because no matter how terrible and ridiculous your idea is, someone will make that movie, or has made that movie, or is making that movie:

http://www.imdb.com/news/ni7354948/

2. Who wants to see Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter on opening night with me!? Yes!

my ignorance of certain genres is a real problem

My recent suggestion that you all start a regular screening of westerns for my education was not met with the unmixed enthusiasm I anticipated. But I'm trying again. People, I need to see westerns. I cannot understand other movies. Once when I was very young I saw Bronco Billy on TV when my mom thought I was asleep. I saw Drums Along the Mohawk in a course on Images of American Indians in Film. And while I would still argue that The Big Lebowski is a western, I don't think it really counts as, you know, canon. I'm pretty sure I've never seen a John Wayne movie all the way through. I mean, except this one.

I saw The American last weekend, and I think it was a Western, but I can't be sure. George Clooney is a crafty gun maker--a definite contender for the handmade Oscars this year, if anyone is keeping track--and maybe he's also an assassin, and he's hiding out in a tiny town in Italy. He is in a restaurant and a movie is on the TV, and someone explains (to us? to Clooney?) that Sergio Leone was Italian. Who knew!?


People love this movie, and I understand why; it's very beautiful to look at, whether you prefer looking at crooked Italian cities or implausibly beautiful Italian prostitutes or George Clooney's lean torso. I loved how silent it was (or...I would have loved it, had I not been trying to eat some nachos in a very crowded theater, but I can hardly blame Anton Corbijn's for the fact that the Bow Tie ran out of soft pretzels).George Clooney does this grave, understated, crafty thing, and he does it very well. There is a lot to like in the construction and the performances.

But it is also kind of a movie about cartoon butterflies. It is about redemption, and I'm not very interested in the character's redemption. There is a love story, but I don't understand why anyone loves anyone in this movie. There is a priest who has lots of aphorisms ("You cannot deny the existence of hell. You live in it.") and shadowy moral failings (I know, shocking). And, seriously, there are a lot of cartoon butterflies.