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With the big InRo Decade In Review just days away, allow me to proudly present an extra special supplementary piece, a guest essay by fellow film buff Ezekiel Ornelas. In a ten-year span that saw studios taking less risks, investing more money in sure thing franchises and remakes and sequels, the following ten movies (uber-flops, all of them) represented a kind of glorious anamoly. These were the Beautiful Disasters of the Aughts, and this is their affectionate reappraisal.

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In an age when the filmmaking industry, especially Hollywood, is dominated by figures like Ryan Kavanaugh and other fiscally conservative moguls solely motivated by an ambition to produce the next Avatar, it has become increasingly difficult for filmmakers to secure the capital to finance more interesting projects. Beautiful Disasters is a list of ten films from the past decade that were fueled by a sort of reckless ambition, often detrimental to both critical and commercial success. This is a list celebrating those individuals that didn’t believe in the myth of Icarus, those that aimed high and missed, fell hard (or maybe didn’t). Many of these films are flawed, without a doubt, but none of them are deserving of the overwhelming, universal disdain they initially garnered. They were called too weird, too long, unfocused and uncomfortable. But there’s something supremely admirable, beautiful even about such resolute filmmakers and their uncompromising visions.

This is a process of re-examination, rotating the prism in which a film is viewed in order to see if there’s something we missed on the other side. A handful of these pictures are undeniable messes (Southland Tales, My Blueberry Nights, Freddy Got Fingered). Others are partially redeemed by moments of formal mastery or innovation (Lady in the Water, Speed Racer). A few of them fully succeed, without qualifiers, at that which they have attempted to do (It’s All About Love, Bamboozled, The Fountain). Each of them was a commercial or critical failure, and many of them were both. What is on display in these films is unwavering fearlessness—a desire by the artist to challenge himself and maybe film language itself, to explore new boundaries of the human experience or just tinker with the tools of narrative. None of the films on this list cost less than $10 million dollars, which makes one wonder how they ever got made, how they accomplished what they did within the studio system, where profit motive is the guiding principle. All ten of these movies are examples of what happens when nobody is willing to or capable of saying “No, you can’t do that.” If only filmmakers were told “no” less often.

Bamboozled [Spike Lee, 2000]

What an interesting little monster Spike Lee’s Bamboozled is, especially in the same decade in which Paul Haggis’s Crash took home an Oscar for Best Picture. Haggis’s portrait of American racism is simplistic and casually reductive. If that’s what it takes to make audiences and critics heap praise upon a piece of work, it’s certainly no surprise that nobody felt like acknowledging Bamboozled’s damning interests. The film is definitely abrasive and uncomfortable. Whereas Crash’s showcase of race relations is easy and digestible (“Everyone’s racist.” The End.), Lee’s film openly embraces and explores virtually every imaginable facet, argument or question about race in America today. Sparing no feelings and taking no prisoners, Lee points his finger at everyone: the whites who think that “nigga” is their word to use too, the “socially-conscious” hip-hop community that still falls prey to capitalist propaganda, the well-educated, upper-class blacks that seem to have virtually no understanding of the black community at large, and the so-called “satirists” that traffic in harmful, racist caricature. The film is remarkably unparalleled in its ambition and scope. Is the rebirth of the minstrel show okay simply because a black man decided to bring it back? In an epilogue that Von Trier seemed to have noticed, Lee provides a wordless argument maintaining the necessity of understanding the cultural scars left behind after centuries of oppression and dehumanization.

Freddy Got Fingered [Tom Green, 2001]

Anchorman set the stage for a monumental shift in American comedy. The characteristics: non sequiturs, narrative divergences, threadbare or virtually nonexistent plots, and a full-on embrace of the bizarre and the absurd. Though generally unfunny, Freddy Got Fingered seems to have laid the groundwork for Anchorman and its ilk. The film works best when it simply revels in Tom Green’s weirdness: skinning a dead deer on the side of the road and wandering around wearing its flesh; tying sausages to strings wound through a pulley-system in his living room; or grabbing a small flower-pot in between his teeth, flapping his arms around and making bird noises. Kudos to Green for having the balls to allow plot to come to a screeching halt (literally, in one scene) any time he feels the urge to do something bizarre. The inspired insanity also veers into some metaphysical acknowledgement of the film’s financing. Green seems slyly aware that he’s burning money onscreen, and every grotesque or inane “comedy routine” he performs—playing with an erect horse-penis or wearing a suit backwards on his body—registers as a kind of Fuck You to everyone who funded the film. Too bad Green only half commits to his transgressive aims—Freddy Got Fingered is frequently boring and, when concerned with exposition, incredibly unfunny. C’est dommage.

HULK [Ang Lee, 2003]

This is not a good movie, by any stretch of the imagination. Its too boring, too poorly acted and, at a whopping 138 minutes, much, much too long. This is Ang Lee’s Daddy Issues - The Movie, complete with a misguided attempt to visually implement comic book panels into the language of film. It’s an inspired idea that quickly becomes tiresome in practice. There’s a fascinating disconnect between Lee’s clashing sensibilities. On one hand, the color palette and comic book dissolve trickery suggest an adherence to a graphic-novel-coming-to-life aesthetic. Problem is, Lee also insists on grounding the film in some semblance of reality, exploring the challenges many adults face when trying to reconcile who they are with who their parents were. In the film’s oddball climax, Nolte’s David Banner absorbs his son’s rage and suffering—the source of the Hulk’s power—and finds the pain too much to bear. An interesting idea, that a desire to distance ourselves from our parents can become a motivating life energy. But the movie never fully commits to it. Stuff does occasionally blow up though.

It’s All About Love [Thomas Vinterberg, 2003]

In the not-so-distant future, the world has become an unusual place—a place where people drop dead out of nowhere (“It’s the heart,” one man explains), certain individuals in Uganda miraculously float away into the atmosphere, and figure-skaters are worldwide rock-stars. Vinterberg’s film is one that wears its heart on its sleeve, without reservation or hesitation. Joaquin Phoenix plays a Polish man, just dropping by New York City to sign divorce papers with his figure-skating, world-superstar wife, played by Claire Danes. With the gradual end of the world as the film’s backdrop, highlighted by the onset of an ice-age, Phoenix’s character is pulled into an elaborate plot to dispose of his spouse. Her managing staff has cloned her three times and intends to use these doppelgangers as replacement stars. The film’s climax reaches a sort of fever pitch when Phoenix has to watch his wife murdered four times in quick succession—the three clones skate with her on the ice, and he can’t tell them apart, even when the killing starts. It’s All About Love utilizes its futuristic setting as a means of expressing heightened, exaggerated emotion. Lushly photographed, powerfully heartfelt, and featuring three American actors who slip in and out of bad Polish accents, the film was simply too emotionally transparent for critics and audiences to appreciate.

The Fountain [Darren Aronofsky, 2006]

Like It’s All About Love, Aronofsky’s The Fountain seems to have been rejected because of its emotional sincerity, its exploration of hopes and fears regarding love. Our protagonist, played by Hugh Jackman, is an experimental research doctor desperately struggling to find a cure for an unnamed illness that his wife, played by Rachel Weisz, is quickly succumbing to. Aronofsky’s formal mastery is deftly on display here—every image seems to revolve around the central conceit. Thematically, the film is about grappling with the realization that everything will eventually die, including those you’ve chosen to spend your life with. A simple thing to make a movie about, but The Fountain’s immaculate construction, its honesty and sincerity, help it transcend this seemingly banal premise, reaching something greater. Virtually every shot in the film is a symmetrical image, subservient to the idea that life is a cycle: birth-death-rebirth, extolling the virtues and beauty of the notion that someday everyone will return to that from which they came. Metaphysically ironic, one might suggest, that the film’s conception of the cosmos is realized via microscopic images of cellular reactions. Perhaps Aronofsky is on to something here: does the universe exist in all of us?

Lady In the Water [M. Night Shyamalan, 2006]

Only a douchebag would cast himself as the savior of mankind in his own film. The Village, Lady in the Water, and The Happening, that trifecta of lousiness, whisper the awful truth about M. Night Shyamalan: he shouldn’t write his own screenplays anymore. Lady in the Water’s got a superb performance by Paul Giamatti as an apartment complex’s super. It also features consistently gorgeous photography (excluding shots of those hideous CGI-creatures) by my favorite drunken Aussie Christopher Doyle. The film scarcely earns or deserves these merits, which lend it more legitimacy than necessary or appropriate. What Shyamalan does have going for him is a terribly terrific grasp of filmic language, the ability to compose striking images and then pair them together in interesting ways. Just as in The Happening, the filmmaker’s voice is clear and present in every single frame of the film. Doyle’s status as a photographic auteur is on full display here, as he documents the interaction between nature and this monstrosity of apartments. If only the movie had anything else going for it.

Tideland [Terry Gilliam, 2006]

One thing’s for sure: Tideland is easily a more coherent and interesting fable than the highly-overrated Pan’s Labyrinth. With that out of the way, the experience of watching the damn thing is honestly an overwhelmingly unpleasant one, a real ordeal punctuated by a few fleeting moments of honest beauty. Gilliam’s sensibilities lend themselves exceptionally well to the insane, dingy lifestyle of Jeliza-Rose and her junky parents. Eventually, the film jumps the rails, and it feels as though Gilliam’s tics and tendencies begin to work against what he’s attempting to convey. The director’s insistence on framing close-ups with a wide-angle lens anytime two characters are on screen is a great example of how he undermines what little beauty he has managed to create in the film. Gilliam’s aesthetic is perpetually grotesque, but credit where credit is due: he creates a genuinely moving portrayal of bourgeoning romance between nine-year old Jeliza-Rose and a mentally-handicapped man-child named Dickens. That alone is worth mentioning and kudos to the filmmaker who can bring to life such an utterly uncompromising vision.

Southland Tales [Richard Kelly, 2007]

Richard Kelly has absolutely no idea what exactly he wants to say, but he sure does have a lot that he’d like to talk about. Southland Tales is a sprawling, ambitious, confused, gigantic mess of a film that Kelly created in the process of trying to say “something.” As a strict narrative, the film fails in many respects. There are too many characters, too much background exposition, too little time, and no notion where it’s all headed. What the film does function as, rather effectively, is a time capsule: these were the fears and concerns of our nation immediately after Bush’s unthinkable re-election happened. (The War on Terror, still raging on in Iraq and Afghanistan, has expanded to Iran, Syria, and North Korea.) The film manages to briefly touch upon just everything Kelly is concerned with in this country: not just war, but also the looming energy crisis, an emerging police state, the inane banter of pop stars and their “social concerns,” cloning, and, of course, time travel. Riddled with pop culture references that will probably inspire head scratches in the next decade, the film is content with simply existing in the moment. Featuring some rather bizarre performances from a motley crew of character actors that time has somewhat forgotten—not to mention a few slightly more famous folks—Southland Tales is exactly what happens when there’s nobody there to say “No.” And it’s a total blast.

My Blueberry Nights [Wong Kar-Wai, 2008]

This is not America. This is an outsider’s view of America. Wong’s In the Mood for Love depicts two protagonists who are inhibited by their inhibitions—repression is the key to their downfall. My Blueberry Nights presents the exact opposite: hard-drinkin’, hard-workin’, hard-livin’ folks who cannot succeed because of their lack of inhibitions, their lack of control, their excess of feeling. The film is not without its flaws. Natalie Portman was woefully miscast as a veteran poker player, Rachel Weisz cannot pull off a believable Tennessee accent, and Norah Jones is a painfully boring nonentity. Otherwise, Jude Law gives a terrific performance as an owner of a New York diner and David Strathairn pulls off the alcoholic Memphis cop thing quite well. In the last decade, America has been criticized for its impetuous behavior, specifically in world affairs. My Blueberry Nights rather boldly posits that there might be something to admire in such a mindset. America as a nation of hope, where one can pick up and move on, grow and change with each shift in scenery. It may not be true, but we can always dream, can’t we?

Speed Racer [The Wachowskis, 2008]

Speed Racer is a bit of an oddity. It clocks in at a hefty 135 minutes, a rather mammoth runtime that could have easily been whittled down by a good half hour, no damage done to its narrative. (The superfluous, endlessly grating shenanigans of the chubby little kid and his chimp companion should have been the first passages to get the snip.) That being said, the Wachowskis deserve a great deal of credit for some of the formal techniques used throughout the film. The opening race establishes that a wipe, traditionally used to convey the passage of time, no longer strictly serves this function alone. The wipe is used universally here, in lieu of standard cuts and dissolves. The race sequences are the film’s most striking and kinetic examples of formal innovation. In one instance, the cars approach the audience by moving across a series of swinging, two-dimensional planes, creating a shorthand for expressing the travel through actual space. Any other filmmaker would’ve simply created a montage of quick images to present the same information. The Grand Prix race eventually turns into a series of borderline abstract images just before its conclusion. This is not a great movie, but boy does it have balls. -Ezekiel Ornelas