Question: I wanted to respond to your High School Musical 2 comments. Unlike Jena, I didn't mind the song-tastic start to the movie and, like you, I did mind the long songless middle. I felt that the middle was a whole lot of Teen Beat cover boy Zac Efron brooding and emoting, with not enough singing. It's when the movie finally takes an Efron break for the baseball diamond showdown between Ryan (Lucas Grabeel) and Chad (Corbin Bleu) that the movie actually gets its fun back. According to recent reports, the leads (Efron and his magazine-cover costar Vanessa Hudgens) are apparently going for more cash to return for HSM3. I know Efron and Hudgens sell magazines, but is their romance really (or does it have to be) what advances the movies? For me, HSM has always been about the peripherals, like hat-loving Ryan, food-cooking Zeke, piano-playing Kelsey and move-busting Martha. Considering the fact that youngsters will flock to Disney's mega-franchise no matter what, can't they make a third ...
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Question: With all the best- and worst-of-2005 lists I've seen, I've been wondering about the worst movies of all time. But though I've seen dozens of lists, with the exception of Plan 9 from Outer Space and Glen or Glenda, the movies on the lists all seem to have been made between 1980 and the present. Are there any bad-movie lists that go back to the early days of film, or is it just that movies started getting really bad in the 1980s?
Answer: I'll answer the second part of your question first: It's not that movies have gotten worse but that smarty-pants treasuring of "worst movies of all time" lists is a relatively recent phenomenon, one that I blame on Harry and Michael Medved and their condescending Golden Turkey Awards. I'm not saying that there aren't terrible movies out there, only that squandering energy that could be better used in any of a hundred ways on hunting down and cata
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