A candidate for Worst Movie Ever?

If you've watched the NFL or the baseball playoffs lately, you've seen the trailer for this new Adam Sandler movie called "Jack and Jill." If you haven't, stop for a second and watch. You really need to see this.



Let's start with the possibility that any movie could be a five-star movie, but various aspects of the movie could cause it to lose stars. So, based on the trailer:

-- It's an Adam Sandler movie. (Minus 1 star.)

-- It's an Adam Sandler movie where he dresses in drag to play his own twin sister. (Minus 3 stars.)

-- It's an Adam Sandler movie where he dresses in drag to play his own twin sister, and Al Pacino (playing himself) has the hots for the twin sister. (Minus 37 stars, and Pacino has to give back his Oscar.)

Somehow poor sweet Katie Holmes ends up in the middle of it all. We can only assume that Tom Cruise was at home jumping around on the couches, and she said yes just to get away for a few weeks.

Now... it's possible that the rest of the movie could be full of uproarious gags and tender reflections on the duality of the human spirit. But you'd think that if they had any of that, they would have put some in the trailer. Maybe in place of the "Twister with your sister" line.

The truth is, this trailer leaves me a little giddy. Because we might have a new candidate for Worst Movie of All Time.

There are lots of bad movies out there, of course. But to make a run at Worst Movie of All Time, you have to be special. B-movies don't count. Some of them are good, some are terrible*, but they're playing under different rules -- you can't count Arena League records in the NFL.

*I worked at a drive-in theater in high school and a couple of summers in college... we specialized in three types of movies: first-run movies after the indoor theaters got tired of them; X-rated movies with all the X-rated parts cut out; and random B-movies. Having seen hundreds of B-movies, I can state without a doubt that the best bad movie of all time is "Gymkata." A spy is sent to a distant country to run through the woods in a game to the death. His special survival skill? Gymnastics. Which comes in handy when he arrives in a village of crazed killers -- and there, in the middle of the town square, is a pommel horse. All I can say about this clip is, well, you're welcome.



So, to have a shot at Worst Movie of All Time, you have to have the money and stars to make a good movie; you have to be trying to make a good movie; and you have to fail totally, utterly, miserably.

About 20 years ago, my friend Matt Brunson had a couple of extra passes for a screening. So I went with Matt and our buddy Joe Posnanski to see a comedy called "Hudson Hawk." It starred Bruce Willis (coming off the first two "Die Hard" movies), Danny Aiello (so good in "Moonstruck" and "Do the Right Thing") and Andie MacDowell (not long after "Sex, Lies & Videotape"). Willis and Aiello were master burglars, MacDowell the love interest... we figured it had a chance to be good.

Instead, for the next two hours, we watched a trainwreck on the screen. What was this movie not? Let me count the ways: Not funny, not smart, not clever, not well-acted, not interesting, not compelling, did I mention not funny? The main thing I remember, 20 years down the road, is that the villainous mobsters were called the Mario Brothers. Like the video games. I had forgotten, until I read the Wikipedia entry, that the other bad guys (there were lots of bad guys) were named for candy bars. Here's part of the plot synopsis:

Kit Kat and Butterfinger take Anna to the castle. Tommy trips Snickers, causing his bomb launcher to shoot a bomb onto his head. Hudson and Tommy escape while Snickers and Almond Joy are killed when the bomb goes off.

Sorry for the spoilers.

Afterward we stood outside in the parking lot, and we could barely talk about it -- it was like trying to review somebody belching the national anthem. To this day no bad movie I've seen has topped it, by which I mean, bottomed it.

But "Jack and Jill" has real potential. There's a moment in the trailer when you see Adam Sandler, in drag, wearing a trenchcoat. I'm guessing, at some point, the trenchcoat comes off. And when it does, Worst Movie of All Time might be in play.

A Loomis Fargo heist movie? Please make it so

The latest issue of GQ magazine has an interview with the great Danny McBride, star of locally-made cult classic "The Foot Fist Way" and HBO's "Eastbound and Down," co-star of the new movie "Your Highness," and graduate of the N.C. School of the Arts.

The interview's not online far as I can tell, but one quote near the end made me really happy. The interviewer asked McBride what he might do next:

"He mentions a movie he and (writing partner) Jody Hill wrote a year after 'The Foot Fist Way,' based on a 1997 robbery of a bank in Charlotte, North Carolina. 'These rednecks robbed Loomis Fargo for over $17 million,' McBride says. 'And they would have gotten away with it, except they stayed in the town they were living in. They literally moved from trailers into the richest neighborhoods in town, lived like kings, bought their wives t-- jobs. Jody wants to make it like a southern 'Godfather.'"

The Loomis Fargo heist is the craziest story I've ever covered, and the one that felt the most like a movie. If you're not familiar with it, this Wikipedia article has the basics, although as always with Wikipedia, buyer beware on some of the facts. If that tweaks your interest, my former colleague Jeff Diamant wrote a great book about the whole thing.

The memory that stands out the most for me came when the suspects were first hauled into court. One of them was the man who was supposedly hired to kill David Ghantt, the Loomis Fargo employee who actually stole the money. When the guy walked by me I noticed something strange about him, but I couldn't quite believe my eyes. At a break I went up to one of the marshals.

"Um, could you check something for me?" I said.

"What is it?"

"I think that tall guy had a tattoo on his neck of a Klansman riding a horse."

"Aw, come on."

He went into the holding area to check. He came back out with both eyebrows as high as they could go.

"You're right," he said. "God almighty."

That would be some amazing movie.

Watching "Waiting for 'Superman'"

They gathered in a row at the Manor Theatre, talking about a movie that hurts your heart and makes you think.

It's a documentary called "Waiting for 'Superman,'" and it's causing buzz in education circles nationwide. It tracks five kids who are trying to get out of the public school system and into charter schools -- publicly funded schools that don't report to local districts and have freedom to try different approaches.

The people in the audience are invested in education. Nancy Guzman, principal of Sterling Elementary in Charlotte, has a history of turning around troubled schools. Randolph Frierson is a counselor who works with kids in high-poverty schools. Keith Burnam founded KIPP Academy Charlotte, part of a national network of successful charters. Marvin Hamilton is president of the parents' organization at KIPP Academy; his daughter, Rebekah, is in eighth grade there.

We get together Tuesday for a press screening (the movie officially opens at the Manor on Friday). Together we watch. The kids flounder in struggling public schools. Their families fight to help. Statistics show how bad schools defeat bright children, and how bad teachers are almost impossible to get rid of. Finally, the kids apply to charter schools, where so many people apply that the schools hold lotteries to get in. The movie implies that winning the school lottery might be the best chance these kids have to make it.

There was sniffling in the theater.

Afterward, the group talked about what they saw -- and didn't see.

"I thought it was powerfully moving, and extremely accurate," Guzman said. "One thing that impressed me was the passion those parents had. I wish we had that for all our children."

"All those kids (in the movie) had an involved parent," Frierson said. "That's just not the reality in the populations that we serve. In a lot of cases, that natural support isn't there. In those cases we have to beat the bushes -- volunteers, extra teacher help, trying to get some community support. It's hard to count on that."

"What jumped out at me was the importance of teachers," Burnam said. "At our school 70 percent of our staff is Teach for America. But with a lot of work and coaching and support, we've been able to create a setting where teachers are motivated to get better. And then they motivate the students."

"When Rebekah was in public school, one time she had 50 students in one class," Hamilton said. "She always wanted to just go to school and learn. But all this other stuff got in the way."

The movie is hardest on teachers' organizations; it shows a battle in Washington, D.C., over a plan to reward high-performing teachers and deny rewards to the worst teachers. The union wouldn't even let it come to a vote.

In Charlotte, Supt. Peter Gorman gives incentives to teachers who transfer to academically suffering schools, and he is installing a pay-for-performance plan for all teachers. But Frierson said that can cause resentment at schools.

"You get a teacher coming into your school making $5,000 more than you're making, and you're teaching the most difficult students..." he said. "In this economy, that's a hard pill to swallow."

"But if it's done correctly --" Guzman said.

"Sure, if it's done correctly," Frierson said. "But that doesn't always happen. I've seen it go wrong."

Everybody agreed on some fundamentals. Teachers ought to be paid more. Parents need to be more involved. The community as a whole needs to see education as an investment -- one that's a lot cheaper than supporting uneducated adults, or building jails.

The movie describes giving kids a great education as a series of simple steps that are hard to take.

"Great teachers, coming from great principals, can accomplish almost anything in a classroom," Burnam said. "Every child can learn if we provide the right setting."

"We know what works," Guzman said. "Why are we not doing it?"

Alvin Greene, being there

Alvin Greene, the unknown, unheralded, un-everything U.S. Senate primary winner in South Carolina, kept reminding me of something -- and somebody. Finally figured it out.

If you've seen Greene on TV, you learn two things: One, his interviews set the Guinness record for awkward pauses, and two, it's clear he doesn't have a clue what's going on. All he does is repeat the same lines about "Sixty percent of the vote is no accident" and "I just conducted a simple old-fashioned campaign," which is especially funny because I'm still not aware of anyone in South Carolina who went to an Alvin Greene rally, or had Alvin Greene come to their house, or even saw him on the side of a road waving a campaign sign like those kids doing a car wash for the glee club.

He might have won the Democratic primary because he's black, or he might have won because he was the first candidate alphabetically, or he might be a Republican plant, but one thing is clear -- he didn't win because the people of South Carolina deeply desire to put him in Congress. Although they've probably done worse.

If you watch him on TV, you think, what a disaster. But when I figured out who he reminded me of, it started to make sense.

The 1979 movie "Being There" is about Chance (Peter Sellers), a gardener born with "rice pudding between the ears." All he can talk about is gardening. All he likes to do is watch TV. But through a series of events, he ends up in the home (played by the Biltmore House!) of a rich businessman with political connections. And so Chance the gardener becomes Chauncey Gardiner, whose empty-headed homilies about the weather sound like Zen in a different context.



(He also ends up in bed with Shirley MacLaine, who doesn't quite get what he means when he says "I like to watch.")

So it's possible we've misunderstood Alvin Greene this whole time. He might be our Chauncey Gardiner, our homegrown Zen master of politics, and we're just not deep enough to get it.

I will just add this. If he does ever hold a campaign rally, and it's by the side of a lake, bring your camera.