MICK LaSALLE, San Francisco Chronicle Staff Critic
Critics, alas, have to care about what's hot and what's not. That means, for example, having to sit through the insufferable ``Forrest Gump,'' if only to figure out what's wrong with people. But a year from now, will you really be glad you saw it? Or ``Stargate,'' for that matter? Or ``Star Trek Generations,'' ``Clerks'' or ``Interview With the Vampire?''
I don't buy the concept of ``wait for the video.'' If a film isn't worth seeing on the big screen, it's not worth seeing on a TV screen -- especially when you consider the amazing availability on video of 80 years' worth of movies, foreign and domestic, that really are good and that you never have time to see.
We can quibble over the borderline cases mentioned above. But there were other films this year -- utter, raving disasters -- about which most of us can agree. These films, the worst of '94, more than wasted our time. They were affronts against time itself, pictures whose sheer horrendousness made us do the grim math: 26,000 days in an average life span . . . 24 hours in a day . . . two hours spent on this awful thing . . .
A personal note: For the purpose of compiling this list, I've developed my own method of separating the beyond-chaff from the chaff. I call it ``the blank-screen test.'' I ask myself, ``Would I have had a better time looking at a blank screen, communing with my thoughts?'' The following are 10 cases, beginning with No. 10, in which the blank screen won by a mile:
10. ``Cabin Boy'' and ``In the Army Now'': I class these together because they are, essentially, the same film. Both comedies without laughs, they each starred an unfunny TV comedian (Chris Elliott and Pauly Shore, respectively) as a sophomoric geek thrown into a macho atmosphere -- a fishing boat, the Army, etc. Neither Elliott nor Shore had the charm to put themselves over, and both seemed to be satirizing the notion of acting.
9. ``Blown Away'': You could look at this as a piece of conceptual art, a movie about bombs that was, itself, a bomb. Tommy Lee Jones, in what turned out to be only his second worst performance of the year, played a mad bombing Irish terrorist intent on blowing up Boston. Boston? The fact that the worthless ``Maverick'' wasn't the worst of the big summer releases gives you an idea of the quality of ``Blown Away.''
8. ``Milk Money'': A bittersweet comedy about the heartwarming family fun that ensues when a boy brings home a prostitute (Melanie Griffith) for his lonely dad (Ed Harris), this was one of the most tasteless, clueless films of the year -- and a degrading exercise for Griffith, who showed up in one scene as a visual aid for Junior's oral report on the female reproductive system.
7. ``The Getaway'': Alec Baldwin and Kim Basinger, in what for all the world looked like a vanity production, starred in this badly paced remake of the Sam Peckinpah classic by Roger Donaldson. To present the duo as a romantic couple for the '90s, the film removed any tension between their characters and added ludicrous and self-conscious sex interludes. Everyone looked foolish.
6. ``Blankman'': Speaking of looking foolish, there was Damon Wayans acting like a bald, black version of Jerry Lewis. Wayans had an idea: How about a super hero without super powers? Some idea.
5. ``Trapped in Paradise'': Jon Lovitz, Nicolas Cage and Dana Carvey were wasted in this airless, laughless, endless exercise by writer-director George Gallo.
4. ``Cronos'': This much-hyped Mexican offering combined the dead weight of a bad art film with the banality of a lame- brained vampire story -- a deadly concoction.
3. ``Salmonberries'': Only a sincere effort could result in a film as earnestly awful as this one, about a lesbian Eskimo (k.d. lang) and her friendship with a German librarian. Directed by Percy Adlon, the film was all talk -- boring talk.
2. ``Nell'': The limits of Jodie Foster's technique were never so apparent as in this complete stinker, in which Foster played an innocent, wild woman of the woods. An insipid, fraudulent piece about the redeeming power of stupidity, the film was predictable, tiresome, imitative and uninspired. A real misfire.
1. ``Natural Born Killers'': Oliver Stone bought himself about two weeks worth of good publicity by saying in prerelease interviews that intelligent, with-it people would appreciate the film's ``satire,'' while closed-minded prigs wouldn't have a clue. Turns out, the film wasn't a satire of anything. It was a mess: a two-hour bombardment of sound and light signifying nothing but a handful of oft-repeated cliches about the callousness of the media culture. This was a wreck with no survivors.
Disappointment of the Year: Tommy Lee Jones, who was rightly praised for his performances in ``Under Siege'' and ``The Fugitive,'' looked as though he could do no wrong at the start of 1994. But his heavy-on-the-ham numbers in ``Blown Away'' and ``Natural Born Killers'' showed once again that too much of a good thing isn't good from anybody. He has a chance to redeem himself in ``Cobb,'' which opens in early January.
Ridiculous Hype of the Year: Feature stories were written up and down the country about Terence Stamp's turn as a transsexual drag queen in ``Priscilla, Queen of the Desert,'' as though in doing so Stamp were taking some chance.
At the time we all accepted this story, but think for a minute. What chance was Stamp taking? This is an actor whose film career was down the drain anyway -- in 1986 he starred opposite a monkey in ``Link.''
And as far as the career risk of having people think he's gay, the ``Priscilla'' interviews gave Stamp endless opportunities to tell the world he's straight -- which he did, again and again and again.
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