6) Mel Smith. For many years Mel was a comedy star of British TV in Not The Nine O’Clock News and Alas Smith and Jones. His success continued when he and Griff Rhys Jones set up Talkback Productions and then generously rewarded the staff when they sold it in 2000.
So we can forgive him his directorial follies, which include the flops
High Heels and Low Lifes, Radioland Murders (pictured) and
Blackball, the latter – a comedy about bowls, yes, bowls – taking just $48,000 at the US box office. Weirdly, in the middle of all these he directed
Bean, which cost $18m to make and grossed, er, $251m.
5) Pete Doherty. Ah, Pete Doherty, not so much a car accident of a man as a plane crash. A plane crashing into a car wreck. Rock star (or he might be if he ever kicked the smack and actually played some rock) Doherty’s acting debut as a dandy in Sylvie Verheyde's adaptation of the Alfred de Musset novel Confessions Of A Child Of The Century (yeah, we hadn’t heard of it either) was panned earlier this year. Catherine Shoard’s one-star review in the Guardian memorably put it: “The shambling amateurism of Doherty's line reading, his sixth-form fidgets, his uncertain eyes, sadly don't share the apt emotional ineptitude of, say, Ryan O'Neal in Barry Lyndon – a film Confession faintly resembles, in the same way that a crab stick resembles a Dover sole.” Next.
4) Bob and Harvey Weinstein. Merely by writing the words “Bob Weinstein” we are almost putting our lives at risk, if all the publicity (notably Peter Biskind’s brilliant book Down And Dirty Pictures) is to be believed. But we can’t ignore this fantastically indulgent slice of celluloid crapola, a doomed attempt by the impossibly powerful former Miramax owners Bob and Harvey Weinstein to make a comedy about three inner-city teenagers attempting to strike it rich by turning a hotel into a rock 'n' roll resort. Down and Dirty Pictures chronicles the whole mess, including the financial woes and he ridiculous situation where one brother would tell the cast/crew to do one thing and then the other brother would tell them to do another. Caryn James of The New York Times wrote, "[The film] is so low-budget innocuous that it resembles a below-average episode of the television series Fame. It probably should have bypassed theaters altogether and gone directly to videotape or television, where its staleness might have been less conspicuous.” All you lovers of filmic curios will be cock-a-hoop to learn that you can rent the film from Lovefilm.
3) Madonna. Her directorial debut Filth and Wisdom has been described as like a sixth form project, which is unfair because it’s more like a high school project. A high school project that’s been made by primary school children who were for some reason visiting the high school. This London-based, er, comedy (?) is the story of a Ukrainian immigrant named A.K. (Eugene Hütz) who finances his dreams of rock glory by moonlighting as a cross-dressing dominatrix and his two female flatmates. If you think bondage is brilliant and shocking rather than exceedingly boring then you could give this a ago. The upside is it’s only 81 minutes.
2) Andy Garcia. His 2005 pet project The Lost City attracted two star names in Dustin Hoffman and Bill Murray. Unfortunately it failed to attract two paying members of the public. Okay, that’s an exaggeration but not much – it only took just $4.3m from a $9.6m budget. As vulture.com put it: “A bloated, incomprehensible pet project, Garcia's paean to a prerevolution Cuba took 19 years to make, probably because nobody could make it through the script without falling asleep.” The Lost City wants to be The Godfather, but, well, it's not.” Maybe it was the 2 hour 23 minute running time that put them off. Let’s face it, you can get to Cuba and back in that time.
1) Crispian Mills. It takes great craftsmanship to write a great screenplay but sadly there are no laws from everyone else having a go either. And so it is with Crispian Mills, lead singer of 90s Britpop act Kula Shaker, who has suddenly popped up out of nowhere and bagged none other than Simon Pegg to star in Mills’ screenwriting/directorial debut A Fantastic Fear of Everything. We haven’t seen this tale of a paranoid writer who is abducted by a serial killer, but the Daily Telegraph has, and they give it one star out of five. Meanwhile, The Standard raves: “Simon Pegg's latest outing offers the perfect example of how not to make a film.” Note to Pegg: you don’t have to star in everything.
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