
Barks With Bite Blog - Awards Watch Blog
We're not exactly what you'd call "design-obsessed" here at MovieRetriever.com. We don't believe in feng shui, we don't follow fashion, and, even if you put a gun to our heads, we'd be hard pressed to distinguish a Frank Lloyd Wright house from a Roscoe's House of Chicken and Waffles. (Roscoe's is the one where the plumbing actually works, right?) But, even though we generally don't have a very discriminating palette, we are very, very sensitive when it comes to bad design choices in movies. Honestly, all it takes is a few lousy costumes or a ridiculous haircut or two to irreparably wound our delicate sense of movie aesthetics. (We're still barely recovered from League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.)
All in all, we're total design snobs when it comes to film, and perhaps that's why we reacted so strongly to the general aesthetic heinousness of last week's Star Wars: The Clone Wars. Say what you will about the redeeming qualities of Jedi mullets and Naboo spacecraft, but how can anyone defend something as conceptually repugnant as Ziro the Hutt, a modern "interpretation" of our old friend Jabba, only this time reimagined as a cracked-out, tattooed, English-speaking, hate-crime-level effeminate-caricatured, hot tranny mess? However, the whole Ziro debacle did get us thinking about some of our least favorite Hollywood design moments of the past decade - those landmark lows in movie costumes, production design, and special FX that still make us shudder every time we think of them. So, kicking off what we're sure will be a regular feature here at MovieRetriever.com, here are ten of our picks for some of the biggest movie design blunders of the past ten years. (And since we're totally burned out on Clone Wars hate, this will be a Star Wars-free list... this time.)
10. Willem Defoe's Green Goblin outfit in Spider-Man (2002)
Go, go, Goblin-rangers! This terrible moment in costume design is particularly galling since the rest of Sam Raimi's inaugural Spidey flick was generally so well conceived. It's like the designers spent all of their energy on bringing Spider-Man's iconic super-suit to life, doing an excellent job in the process, and then turned to the Green Goblin and said, "Hey, do we have any crap from a live-action Japanese anime-knock-off toy commercial that we can paint green and call it a day?" And don't start on Norman Osborn's obsession with masks or his background in military tech - the suit looks both ridiculous and cheap, and it completely undercuts the Goblin's menace by making him look like a total tool. (If you want to see how to make a bad guy look both effortlessly cool and scary-as-hell, check out Heath Ledger's Joker.)
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9. The big bad ghost of Hugh Crane in The Haunting (1999)
Some would argue that the true crime of The Haunting was wasting such good actors (Liam Neeson, Lily Taylor, Catherine Zeta Jones, Owen Wilson) on such an ill-conceived mess of a "horror" film directed by Jan de Bont, the director of Speed 2: Cruise Control. But the real crime of The Haunting is that the film shows absolutely no understanding of what "horror" actually looks like from a design perspective. Scary is a door creaking slowly open at the end of a long corridor; scary is a clown-face jumping at you from out of nowhere behind a darkened window; scary is dark and oppressive and claustrophobic. Scary is NOT a Godzilla-sized black cloud of CGI smoke - flapping, farting, and screaming at you as loud as it can - while you run through a gimmicky house right out of Disney's Haunted Mansion ride. That's not scary, it's silly.
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8. Benicio Del Toro's prosthetic nose in Sin City (2005)
Lots of fanboys adored Robert Rodriguez and Frank Miller's uber-faithful adaptation of Miller's neo-noir comic book, Sin City, and, we'll admit, it's definitely a visually ambitious film. However, that's no excuse for sending an actor of Benicio Del Toro's caliber on-screen with six pounds of silly putty on his nose. Honest to god, why did Nicole Kidman get so much flack for her fake nose in The Hours and yet no one seems bothered by Jackie Boy's equally-inflated (and just as stupid-looking) snozz in Sin City? OK, Mickey Rourke's Marv needed a certain amount of prosthetics to make him match his character's iconic profile, but Jackie Boy doesn't have a similarly trademarked silhouette, and Del Toro resembled Jackie Boy enough that he didn't need a needless nasal enhancement to help sell his performance. Clive Owen and Jessica Alba didn't match every line of their comic doppelgangers EXACTLY, so why didn't they have to wear any prosthetics? There's being faithful and then there's being stupidly faithful. Guess which side Jackie Boy's puffy protuberance ends up on?
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7. The CGI monkeys in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008)
The worst part about this one is that Spielberg set himself up for this kind of criticism. All throughout the production of Crystal Skull, Spielberg and his production team went out of their way to assure fans that they'd be relying heavily on practical effects, rather than CGI, to make sure that Indy 4 would fit in visually with the previous Indiana Jones films, and then, suddenly, there's this ridiculous, overly-computer-generated jungle romp right out of Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow. We won't begrudge Indy a little CGI here and there, but the second that Shia started swinging through the trees with his Scooby Doo-esque monkey companions... you could hear the groans all the way to the Temple of Doom. We kept waiting for the little evil Nazi monkey from Raiders to show up and strangle the cartoon monkeys to death, but alas, apparently, Santa hasn't got our letter yet.
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6. Halle Berry's shredded cat-suit in Catwoman (2004)
It takes a special kind of costume designer to make Halle Berry NOT look sexy, and perhaps that's the most noteworthy accomplishment of Pitof's Catwoman, one of the worst-conceived comic book movies ever filmed. (Sorry that this list has been comic-book heavy, but superhero movies are everywhere nowadays and they tend to bring out the worst in designers.) Apparently, Pitof thought that having Catwoman appear in a "catsuit" was too obvious, so instead he wrapped Halle in a shredded leather nightmare that looked like the bastard child of a Damn Yankees back-up dancer and a pretentious '90s fashionista runway show. (We kept waiting for Halle to turn to the camera and scream, "Egoiste!") We feel bad for Halle, but it just goes to prove that, from the clothes down to the performance, Michelle Pfeiffer did it first and did it better.
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5. Christian Slater's oddly-revealing tank-top in Alone in the Dark (2005)
Chances are, most of you haven't seen or heard of Alone in the Dark and with good reason. For those of you who have heard of it, you know it as just another terrible Uwe Boll video game movie, however, this time, hilariously casting Tara Reid as a glasses-wearing scientist. (Because the glasses make her smarter. That's just science.) What you may not know, even if you've heard of Alone in the Dark, is that the movie features one of the funniest bad costume choices in recent memory. The movie opens with Christian Slater as Edward Carnby, a butt-kicking paranormal investigator, but, for some reason, they dress him in a trenchcoat and this bizarre tank-top that's so low-cut it would make Dolly Parton blush. Seriously, the parabola of Slater's wife-beater stretches so uncomfortably low that it must come from a special line of tank-tops made especially for 'roided-out transsexual body-builders. We can almost forgive Slater for agreeing to star in a Uwe Boll film, but there's no excuse for allowing yourself to be filmed wearing a shirt like that.
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4. The mess of metal that is Megatron in Transformers (2007)
Alas, poor Megatron, we knew you well. Now we're not card-carrying Transformers purists or anything - we completely acknowledge that it would've been ridiculous to have the 20-foot-tall Megatron transform into a handgun like he did on the '80s cartoon series - but THAT was the best Michael Bay could do? Really? One of the coolest aspects of the Transformers was that they had such clean recognizable profiles in their robot forms. You could easily tell Bumblebee from Ratchet and so on. But Bay's Transformers look almost indistinguishable from each other in their rock-em-sock-em modes, losing any traces of personality along the way. But Megatron is definitely the worst of the bunch. He doesn't even look like a functioning robot. He looks like a reject from Futurama's Robot Hell, a demon cast in iron by a metal-worker with way too many goth tendencies. He looks less like a mecha and more like something that should be hanging off a chain worn by a cashier at Hot Topic.
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3. Josh Lucas' comic book panel end in Hulk (2003)
There are a lot of aspects of Ang Lee's much-maligned Hulk that could've made this list - the Hulk poodle; Nick Nolte's haircut; the incomprehensible final confrontation between the Hulk and the Absorbing Dad - but none were quite as embarrassing as Josh Lucas' freeze-framed final scene. Throughout the movie, Lee framed shots like they were comic book panels, letting the panels overlap from transition to transition. It's a nice idea - seemingly very loyal to the Hulk's roots - but, in its execution, it was about as subtle as a jackhammer and gave the film a strange cartoony vibe, which didn't mesh well with Lee's angst-ridden, child-abused superhero. But the absolute worst moment came when Bruce Banner's evil rival Talbot (Josh Lucas) is about to get blown-up for his villainy, and Lee freeze-frames the panicking Talbot mid-jump, surrounds his body with an outline, and spins the camera. Conceptually, we'll guess that this was supposed to resemble a comic book panel, but, in reality, it's just stupid as hell and looks like Austin Powers jumping through the Time Tunnel in The Spy Who Shagged Me. Why didn't Lee just take it further and insert a POW! or BIFF! every time the Hulk hit something? Terrible, terrible idea.
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2. Godzilla In Name Only in Roland Emmerich's Godzilla (1998)
This one still baffles us. Since 1954, moviegoers around the world have flocked to Godzilla films. Yes, it's obviously a man in a suit, but there's something about the creature that film fans adore. They love the look of Godzilla, the destruction, the cheesiness, the pseudo-environmental messages, the over-the-top bad guys - don't look for logic, but Godzilla, as a design concept, works. Godzilla is a modern icon of pop culture, whether you're down with Monster Island or not. So why on Earth, if you were making a big-budget Hollywood version of Godzilla, would you toss out everything about the character that people have loved for 34 years, ignore everything visually that has turned the character into one of the most recognizable movie monsters in film history, and instead just make a big, dumb action movie with a giant, poorly-rendered iguana standing in for Godzilla? Maybe Disney should make a Mickey Mouse movie where they throw out Walt's original design and just film a sewer rat driving a steamboat! Why not? In the crazy world of Roland Emmerich, that's probably a great idea, but, in the real world, where the rest of us live, everything about 1998's Godzilla was doomed from the very beginning.
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1. The lame CGI zombies in I Am Legend (2007)
Wow. Talk about one bad design choice almost sinking an entire movie. We know that CGI is all the rage these days, but there is literally no rational reason why director Francis Lawrence chose to make all of the bloodthirsty zombies in I Am Legend completely computer-generated. Maybe we'd feel differently if he'd pulled it off, delivered a CGI spectacle the likes of which we'd never seen... but he didn't. Instead, he took the great Will Smith (who gives a really nuanced, strong lead performance) and surrounds him by cartoons - cartoons that never once look like they're occupying the same physical space as Smith. During the climax, we wanted Will to put down the machine gun and go grab a vat of Judge Doom's "Dip" because, hell, as we all know, that's the only way you can kill a 'toon. But the sad thing is - it's not just that the CGI was poorly executed (and it was), it was completely unnecessary. It's not like the zombies had tentacles or changed shape or lived underwater. They were just pasty albinos with fangs. Hire some Cirque du Soleil guys, put them in make-up, and that's probably 9000% cheaper and more believable than making every zombie fully CGI. The zombies in I Am Legend needed to have some depth and gravity, particularly in the movie's closing scenes, but instead Lawrence chose to make them as ephemeral as air - a terrible, terrible design choice that almost entirely robbed the movie of any sense of menace, tension, or competent filmmaking.
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Those are some of our least favorite moments in movie design from the past ten years. What do you think? Did we miss some obvious choices? Can't believe we didn't mention Carrie's wedding dress from the Sex in the City movie? Should we do an all-Star Wars edition? Or should we go back further and include Sean Connery's big red diaper in Zardoz?
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