Movies

One Man’s Treasure …

156 Comments

This will not look good on a resumeOver at The Onion AV Club, Nathan Rabin is putting himself through sheer holy hell on a weekly basis, watching unloved and unworthy movies for our entertainment and edification.

At least, that’s how he’s framing it. The series is called “My Year of Flops“, and it’s now in its 14th instalment, a meditation on William Friedkin’s “Deal of the Century”.

Previous titles have included Barry Levinson’s “Man of the Year“, Tom Laughlin’s “Billy Jack Goes to Washington” … and just in case you thought the focus was exclusively political, he’s also done Adam Bernstein’s “It’s Pat: The Movie“, so there.

Every one of them is a fascinating read, both for Rabin’s insightful commentary — he reads “Deal of the Century” as a perfect storm of career mediocrity for Friedkin and star Chevy Chase, for example — and for the alternately informed and insane comments that invariably follow afterward.

The “It’s Pat” page quickly develops from a discussion of other crappy “Saturday Night Live” spinoffs into a conversation about cult comedies that actually had merit, like “Stuart Saves His Family” and “Kids in the Hall: Brain Candy”, and then somehow turns into an argument over whether Norm Macdonald is a genius or a fool. (I vote “genius”, even if he did somehow get sucked into voicing a talking beaver for my corporate masters.)

The Friedkin career forensics on the “Deal of the Century” page are also worth a look.

Not that I’m suggesting any of these films bear a revisit, though. Especially not “Man of the Year“. Sweet merciful Christ, that was awful.

156 thoughts on “One Man’s Treasure …”

  1. Just for a fleeting second, I thought that you had lumped “Brain Candy” in the same boat as “It’s Pat”. After I regained consciousness, I re-read what you wrote and everything was okay again.

    Oh, and you’ve been tagged. But I have no idea how to put a direct link in the comments section. So you’d have to go through the website in my profile.

Comments are closed.