[ This essay was originally published on 01/16/2001 in W6 Daily, but thanks to video, the opinions are still as valid or invalid as they were then. It doesn't fit my usual review format: there is no synopsis at the bottom. ]

This is Part 2 of 2. Part 1 of this article featured The Good and The Bad parts of The Good, The Bad and The Ugly.

The Ugly
My wife rented Jack Frost over the holidays. She should have rented the horror movie with the same name. I haven't seen it, but it could hardly be worse. Why must holiday movies be so awful? Why are all of the decent holiday movies so old? My favorite holiday movie stars Bruce Willis.

In 1971, Silent Running must have seemed like a good idea. With a couple of songs sung by Joan Baez, it must have seemed truly goovy. The plot would have made a good nine-minute movie, which was unfortunately stretched into 90 minutes. It's the same old story really: Earth is devoid of plant life, and the poor picked-upon plant-nerd is ordered by a disembodied voice to destroy the last samples of plant life in outer space, so instead he kills his human shipmates and trains a little robot to take care of the plants forever in deep space. Sigh. I fast-forwarded through parts of this one, and didn't miss anything. Someone should have fast-forwarded in the editing room and saved me the trouble.

The Should-Have-Been-Better
I love Nothing To Lose. It's hilarious, and Martin Lawrence is hilarious in it. So why wasn't Blue Streak funny? Wait, I take that back. It was funny. It was even laugh-out-loud funny. But it was also slow and laborious. Where Martin and Tim kept the movie moving from start to finish, Martin alone juggled and juggled and sometimes dropped the ball. I know, I shouldn't expect comedies to have consistent plots. Maybe I just got tired of hearing Martin say "believe that" pronounced "buh-lee dat." I'm not sure what would have made this movie better, but it needed whatever it was missing.

Speaking of funny people, Bowfinger had at least two of them. Maybe it was the very-unfunny and very-untalented Heather Graham that hurt the film, or maybe it was something else, but Bowfinger just barely missed being truly bad. How do Steve Martin and Eddie Murphy make a movie that isn't funny from the opening title to the end credits? I don't know, but they managed it somehow. The concept seems like a home run, and maybe the problem is that Steven Martin figured the concept would sell the movie. Unfortunately, the execution of the concept didn't quite work. Or maybe there were just too many movie industry in-jokes that didn't make me laugh like they made the studio executives laugh. I think this movie would have been much better with another plot twist thrown in, because a movie star that doesn't know he's in a movie just wasn't enough by itself.