And the award for the most ludicrous and utterly painful movie of the year goes to (drum roll not even deserved)ÉThe Glass House!
This new thriller starring LeeLee Sobieski and Stellan SkarsgOrd is so excruciating, it almost warrants comparison to last year's "Who-In-God's-Name-Greenlighted-This-Piece-Of-Crap?" winner, Battlefield Earth.
The Glass House is the type of film you wish the bigwigs at the Motion Picture Association of America could screen and decide not to release to the public before kicking its writer (Wesley Strick) and director (Daniel Sackheim) out of Hollywood forever.
"We gave you your chance," the letter to this dynamic duo could read, "but you failedÉ miserably."
Strick's poor excuse for a script has Sobieski's Ruby and her younger brother, Rhett (the slightly annoying Trevor Morgan from Jurassic Park III), living in their former neighbors' house after their parents are killed in a car accident.
SkarsgOrd and Diane Lane are Ruby and Rhett's new guardians, Terry and Erin Glass. The Glasses live in an enormous glass house high in the Malibu hills.
If you hadn't figured it out from the trailers, it takes about 10 minutes to realize that Terry is absolutely psychotic, in deep financial trouble and probably involved with the accident. Erin, on the other hand, is a morphine addict who's a few cards short of a full deck.
The dialogue is so laugh-out-loud painful, it's difficult to describe. Isolating an example is impossible, because no one awful line deserves mention over any other.
The acting isn't much to write home about either.
Sobieski--who looks so much like Helen Hunt it's almost scary--proves once again that she is one of the most unappealing young actresses in Hollywood. She just sits there on the screen, evoking little interest in whether the Glasses, of whom she is suspicious from the beginning, killed her parents. (The fact that she calls her parents' estate lawyer but not the police for help at the end of the film also testifies to Ruby's half-brained motivations.)
SkarsgOrd, who has been brilliant in small independent films like Good Will Hunting and Dancer in the Dark, is absolutely wasted in this big-budget disaster.
Possibly the only thing that saves The Glass House from dropping to the level of Battlefield is that the film takes place in easily the most drop-dead gorgeous house in Southern California.
So, kudos to the film's location scout. God knows no one else involved in this debacle deserves any credit.
--By Alex Garinger
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