Five In Focus

Richard T. Kelly

Richard T. Kelly is an English novelist, broadcaster, and author of several biographical studies of filmmakers, including the authorised Sean Penn: His Life and Times. He has recently edited Ten Bad Dates With De Niro: A Book of Alternative Movie Lists, in which writers and filmmakers (including the Coen brothers, Steven Soderbergh, Mike Figgis and Kevin Macdonald) present offbeat 'top tens' that celebrate their abiding movie-going passions.

Here, in a post-Thanksgiving — and pre-Christmas — mood, we offer Kelly's 'top five' of so-called 'Turkeys' that, in his eyes, have been most unjustly maligned.

1. |

Waterworld

Movie fans must have started to begrudge Kevin Costner his hot streak of mainstream hits, such was their apparent delight in all the horror stories that emanated from Waterworld's beleaguered shoot in Hawaii. Okay, it's Mad Max At Sea. But who has a problem with that? Any sane lover of action-adventure ought at least to enjoy the rip-roaring "Battle of the Atoll'" sequence, and Costner's athletic performance of stunts that, in the age of CGI, look better with each passing year.

2. |

Hudson Hawk

Even those who loved Bruce Willis' smirk inMoonlighting or Die Hard seemed to want to see it wiped off his face by the failure of this 'vanity project' where he plays a cat-burglar blackmailed into stealing Da Vinci artworks. But Willis was only trying his hand at a genre later reworked more profitably by Austin Powers and the Ocean's Eleven remakes. Some of it falls flat but at its best Hudson Hawk is just as weird and witty as director Lehmann's earlier and hugely praised Heathers.

3. |

Heaven's Gate

In his famously savage New York Times review Vincent Canby at least credited Heaven's Gate as "probably the first Western to celebrate the role played by central and eastern Europeans in the settlement of the American West." Doesn't that sound interesting, though? The picture's slow rehabilitation began in France, where Cimino now resides, and where cinephiles were more open to its harsh portrait of East Coast cattle barons engaging "regulators" to gun down immigrant farmers.

4. |

Mary Reilly

Vertigo is now widely rated as Hitchcock's masterpiece, a psychological study of what men see in women, whereas Hitch himself simply dismissed it as a thriller that failed to thrill. Mary Reilly is an analogous case. As a Jekyll & Hyde horror movie it doesn't quite function, despite the gore that was added after poor test screenings. But as a study of a woman disturbed by what she is sexually drawn to in a man, Frears' movie is dark, elegant, compelling, and blessed with Julia Roberts' bravest performance. Sadly, a lot of people found it easier to bitch about her Irish accent.

5. |

Ishtar

Comedy has got to be the toughest genre in which to defend a movie's reputation once it's been written off as garbage. ("No, but, see, you just didn't appreciate the joke, it's actually funny, really.") The comedy of two inept New York singer-songwriters caught between the CIA and leftist guerrillas in a fictional Arab state may well be an acquired taste. All I can say is that I thinkIshtar is probably the funniest movie I've ever seen, and that it's not merely a crying shame but a national scandal that Elaine May has not directed a film since.