Storytelling
Storytelling is probably not really the worst movie of the year. It can't hold its own among the canon of the truly awful; it would crumble and fall in the company of Gummo, or The Majestic. It's not offensively bad; you won't walk away from Storytelling angry. Todd Solondz has a sharp, relentless sense of the absurdity of mundane things, which, though it was certainly stronger in his last film "Happiness," is evident and occasionally effective in Storytelling. It deserves to be called the worst film of the year for a couple of reasons: for revealing Solondz as the one-note director we all suspected he might be, and for presenting the audience with an unbalanced, obviously unfinished film.

It's not a crime to focus art on one topic, to return to one theme again and again. Chuck Close, Whit Stillman, Guided by Voices: their artistic, cinematic, and musical work rarely strays from the guidelines they've imposed on themselves, but all continue to present viable artistic statements, minorly fluctuating in style rather than attempting to tackle vast new ground. The fine line between success with a limited palette and thematic stagnancy is one that Solondz tread carefully from Welcome to the Dollhouse to Happiness, and one that he clearly crosses from Happiness to Storytelling. To uncover the inner rot and lingering effects of the suburban experience is the director's mission, but how many apathetic, misguided, silver-spooned, winkingly ironic characters need inhabit his films for the point to come across? His attempts to elicit sympathetic responses for awful people was a point in itself in Happiness, and it worked because the characters truly were awful people, and also entirely sympathetic (despite illicit sexual predilections or black, empty hearts).

Storytelling is populated with almost-bad people doing sort-of-bad things to one another. Selma Blair is Vi, a college student whose sexual deviancies involve sleeping with a palsied kid and getting willingly fucked by her immense African-American English professor, an extracurricular activity she prepares for by repeating "Don't be racist" to herself. And yet she's not drugging and raping a 10 year-old boy, so we can't reach that simultaneous revulsion - connection we do with Dylan Baker's character in Happiness. Paul Giamatti plays an exploitative documentary filmmaker, but he's not sticking postcards to his wall with his own semen. Solondz dug a hole for himself with his previous films, because he successfully achieved his mission of exposing suburban decay. If he's already shown us evil, he can't show us piddling crap and expect shock. Storytelling retreads dead issues; Solondz is wasting his time (and ours) by obsessively focusing on an hypothesis he proved four years ago.

Thematic issues aside, Storytelling is a stylistic disaster, piecing together two disparate stories into an uneven, confusing whole. "Fiction," the Selma Blair segment, is a brief 20-minute short that feels tacked on. It's as if the A-picture, "Nonfiction", was deemed too short, and the studio made Solondz shoot a real quick two-reeler so they could release the film theatrically. A third segment, starring James Van Der Beek, was shot and discarded. Perhaps that was the missing key that would have made everything cohesive. Doubtful. Or maybe it was the half-hour of music composed by Belle & Sebastian that Solondz left out of the final cut. Maybe one day we'll get a full director's cut and we'll see Storytelling as the masterpiece it was in Solondz's head. Until then, it would behoove him to find another subject to obsess over, and not to make us sit through the same movie a fourth time. -- NB

Tadpole
In the same year that Lily Chou-Chou, The Fast Runner, and Russian Ark brilliantly realized the expressive potential of digital video, the medium got trounced again with Gary Winnick's disgusting little Sundance fave. For anyone who was bamboozled into paying ten hard-earned dollars to sit through this muddy,78-minute pixel-fest, the sensation was dismaying: is this really where movies are headed? Aside from technical ineptitude, Tadpole represents the worst of all film types: slovenly imitation, unmitigated class envy, and conflicted aesthetic and narrative choice. Winnick creates a smug, Voltaire-spouting prep-school smartass so overtly obnoxious that he has to dare us to hate him, a character predicated upon the supposition that gullible arthouse audiences would find any precocious, post-Jason Schwartzman twerp charming. At least in Rushmore, Max Fisher's preposterous quirks fell under Wes Anderson's candy-colored stylization; here, Aaron Stanford's white wise-guy routine can barely connect with the viewer from under its caked layers of digital muck. We don't yearn for him to bed down any one of the cadre of predatory older women, especially not his stepmother, played by a bored Sigourney Weaver, delivering all her lines in a staccato monotone. Just another in this year's parade of films by directors who haven't yet outgrown their little-boy fantasies (Igby Goes Down, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind), Tadpole only seems comparatively harmless by not relying on murder and mayhem to bestow meaning and import on its stunted-growth protagonists. But Winnick puts no perspective or insight into his pseudo-Neil Simon Upper West Side escapades, his privileged characters hermetically contained within their airless libraries, as if he watched Woody Allen's class dissections and thought they were earnest tributes (come to think of it, a lot of people make that mistake). So thuddingly obvious as to play Bowie's "Changes" over the closing credits as the little shit supposedly emerges into adulthood, Winnick uses the latest technology to regress into a state of remorseless infantilism. -- MK

8 Women
In a year of duds dropped by high-profile directors (Ararat, Frida, Invincible), there were more potential contenders for this spot than I can remember in years past. There will always be heaps of terrible sequels, misguided blockbusters, and lame teen comedies, but why pick on them? They may stink, but they don't dress themselves up in pretty clothes to hide their inadequacies. For me, the race for this spot came down to The Hours and 8 Women, but once you factor in raised expectations dashed furiously to the rocks, 8 Women draws ahead. All Stephen Daldry had behind him was the mildly pleasant Billy Elliot, and a brief perusal of The Hours' cast and synopsis coupled with its time of release (Hello Oscar®!) provided a near perfect picture of the pseudo-intellectual, borderline offensive treacle a viewing ended up providing, so I couldn't say it came about of the blue. To its credit, The Hours actually turned out to be much more humorous than I'd expected, but not in ways Daldry and his leading ladies ever intended.

François Ozon, however, seemed to be on a roll. Sure, the giant rat of Sitcom was a really terrible idea that he may never completely live down, but Water Drops on Burning Rocks was a quantum leap towards fusing his camp sensibility to some semblance of restraint. His fourth feature, Under the Sand eclipsed everything that had come before. For the first time, Ozon had delivered a truly mature and skillfully made work from the first frame to the last - one that paid homage to the classics of European art cinema, while forging a terrific voice distinctly its own. One wonders then, how exactly 8 Women came about. In it, he takes eight of France's leading actresses, turns them all into giant rats that sing and dance, and sets them loose in garishly decorated set to act out material that would have been better suited to 1930s radio. It shoots for the comedic moon in at every turn, but I laughed far more in The Hours. And though it seems like its making may have been an enjoyable romp, sitting through it felt twice its hundred minutes, and then some. If Ozon had decided to drop this same film, ready-made for observation like a urinal on a museum pedestal, he might have been on to something (or at least allowed himself an easy-out), but the arch-quotient is fast-food supersized which means that everyone went into this with eyes wide open, and still thought it was a good idea. Ozon's uneven career trajectory thus far leaves room for hope, but it's going to take an Under the Sand and then some to erase the stink of this one. -- JR

Bowling For Columbine
Honestly, I can think of half a dozen films that were "worse" than this, but no film of 2002 pissed me off more than Michael Moore's latest self-aggrandizing opus. (Recently being named "The Greatest Documentary of All Time" by the IDFA, an act of idiocy and short-sightedness worthy of Moore himself, isn't softening my attitude either.) Despite inaugurating all of the flaws that have come to define his work on film and TV-anti-intellectualism, phony populism, and genuine condescension, celebrations of stupidity, sledgehammer irony-seen in the context of this mess his 1987 debut Roger & Me looks like an masterpiece by default. Roger & Me was a film made by a man who, fleeing his burning house in the middle of the night, instinctively grabs his camcorder from the hall closet and films the disaster from the sidewalk, in his pajamas. Even with all its notorious elisions and manipulations, it was an organic and unself-conscious response to a local crisis, but only a fool would believe it accredited Moore as a filmmaker, much less a firefighter, which is what he seems to think he is now. As social complaint, Bowling is passable; but as political critique-even of a target as seemingly unmissable as the gun lobby-it's nonexistent. My inbox is full of forwarded emails written by Moore urging our President to "let the inspectors do their job." I wish Moore would indulge in the same practice with the unfortunate secretaries and street cops he spends his time harassing and go after someone worth humiliating, but he won't because deep down he knows that any non-Alzheimer's patient in a position of power would make him the fool. -ES