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The only movies worse than movies about orphaned children who just want to find their parents are movies about children of divorced parents who scheme to get them back together again. What’s that all about? Divorce is almost always for the benefit of everyone involved, and no amount of summer camp hijinx or locking your parents in the basement until they love each other again is going to make up for the deep, irremediable wounds inflicted by two people who’ve lost all interest in each other romantically, and often platonically as well. Any child who actually succeeded in one of these poorly imagined schemes would end up in a domestic nightmare of Eminem and Kim Mathers proportions. Stop it, kids of divorced families in those movies!
August Rush happens to be the former. But with its combination of star-crossed love and Beautiful Mind But For Music And In A Child plotlines, it quickly surpasses the latter. On the way down. To the bottom. This thing is more painful than a stepfather’s belt whipping! (Ouch! That joke is terrible! As an homage to how this movie is terrible!)
August Rush is about a little boy who can hear the music in the wind and in street traffic, because this movie came out in 2007, long after Dancer in the Dark had been buried beneath the sands of time and turned into coal. No, wait, August Rush is about two incredible musicians (NOT incredible musicians), Keri Russell who is a world-class cellist in the symphony, and Jonathan Rhys Meyers who is in DriveShaft. They meet at an NYU party and fuck on a moldy couch on a roof because love at first sight. They agree to meet up again at 10 (in the morning? At night? Who knows!) by the arch in Washington Square Park, but Keri Russel doesn’t show up, and so Jonathan Rhys Meyers jumps out of his cab on the way to the airport and runs to where she is (even though I’m pretty sure she never told him?) but her dad doesn’t like this relationship (already?) and forces her into a limousine. Now they are star-crossed lovers, and one of them is a pregnant star-crossed lover.
Jonathan Rhys Meyers quits the band because he is too much in love with the person he met that one time? And then, after a fight with her dad, Keri Russell is hit by a car, and while she is in the hospital for car injuries her dad forges her signature and gives her baby up for adoption. That car knocked the baby right out of her! And apparently dads can do that! So now, many years later, Keri Russell and Jonathan Rhys Meyers are still star-crossed, and their son who they don’t even know they have is waiting for them to come find him at a New York orphanage. So one day, he runs away because he needs to “follow the music” or something and he knows that if he can just “make the music” then his parents will “hear him” and they will love him or something. He gets picked up by a farmer on his way to the farmer’s market, who calls Terrence Howard, the state-appointed social worker assigned to the little boy’s case, and then he gives the boy 12 dollars and tells him to wait for Terrence Howard to take him back to the orphanage, and then he PEACES OUT. Because being a farmer at the farmer’s market is busy stuff, and you can’t just sit around all day making sure CHILDREN DON’T DIE. Anyway, SPOILER ALERT the little boy doesn’t wait for Terrence Howard. Instead, he goes to Washington Square Park and meets a sassy little black boy playing guitar. He befriends the sassy black boy and goes to live with him in a condemned theater full of self-sufficient, musically talented, runaway children, like something out of Hook (Jesus Christ). Speaking of Hook, this secret society is led by Wizard (Robin Williams), who looks like 12 miles of bad road on the way to a Josh Homme solo show.
He is blown away by the little boy’s innate musical talent and tries to exploit him. But also he sees a lot of himself in the little boy, because of course he does. Then one day there is a police raid on the condemned theater and the little boy, now named August Rush because of a TRUCK THAT DOESN’T EVEN MAKE ANY SENSE–
is in Brooklyn. At first he is scared because a car full of black people playing hip hop drives by, and even though he can hear the music in the electrical hum of high-tension wires or the clatter of a subway running through a tunnel, he still is scared of hip hop. Anyway, he wanders into a church and a little girl gives him a little girl’s explanation of how to read music and suddenly he can both read and write music and play the organ. Sure. So the pastor takes him to Julliard and now he is at Julliard and now Julliard has decided to let him conduct the New York Philharmonic in Central Park. AS LUCK WOULD HAVE IT, Keri Russel has just found out that he exists from her father on his death bed. AND she has been asked to rejoin the New York Symphony Orchestra as the world’s most famous cellist. But then Wizard finds August Rush and says “You can’t conduct the philharmonic because I have become the villain in the second half of this movie,” but eventually the sassy black boy hits Wizard with his guitar and August Rush runs into the subway tunnel and is covered in dirt and panicky sweat, but he manages to emerge in a TUXEDO, just as the Philharmonic is going to begin playing. And Keri Russell has already finished playing the cello but she hears his music as she walks away in a straight line across the park (Dear Keri Russell, that is a ridiculous way to get home) and Jonathan Rhys Meyers has left his job as a rich BUSINESSMAN (of completely indeterminate nature, but it’s definitely not the “business of being in a horrible band”) and is playing music at Irving Plaza to a huge crowd of people because that’s the size of crowd that always greets a no-name band that hasn’t played together in 11 years, and he just happens to see a streetlight banner for the concert with his lover’s name on it and he rushes out of the cab (again!) and gets to the park just in time to hear the music of his son (who, incidentally, he JAMMED with in Washington Square Park earlier but they didn’t even know it! Sure!) and he sees Keri Russell and somehow they both know that this is their son and the little boy turns around and sees them and knows that they are his parents.
The end.
HOLY.
SHIT.
Now, any movie that tries to capture the ineffable, like where creativity comes from, or the exhilaration of love, it’s easy to fall short. There is a reason those things are ineffable. Because they aren’t effable! But this movie! This movie fails on so many levels!
First of all, the acting is impossible.
YIIIIIIKES. The green screen is better at acting in that scene, and the green screen is terrible! Oh, and that harmonica player in the park? It turns out later that is Robin Williams. Ugh. Not to mention that this cheesy encounter between a womanizer and a pixie idiot, resulting in a one night stand, is the central fulcrum for this whole movie? I’m supposed to care that two 20-somethings who fucked at a party can’t seem to get their lives together? Not to mention the complete emotional implausibility of every relationship in this movie. Like, sorry, but crazy homeless people who govern condemned buildings full of children are much more likely to rape and/or stab them then they are to try and exploitatively manage their musical careers. And people who haven’t seen each other in 11 years are going to have a lot of shit to work out even without the functionally retarded idiot savant child that one of them didn’t even know existed. And children who have just survived a harrowing couple of weeks being homeless on the streets of New York after being raised in institutional foster care are probably going to be cutters. And what does Terrence Howard even do in this movie? He’s supposed to be a benevolent state-appointed social worker, but he never finds the boy, he never reconnects him with his parents, he never brings Wizard to justice, he just makes sad faces and ignores faxes that have fallen on the floor.
Wait, hold on, go back to the beginning for a second. Why can’t they find each other again? Like, at one point, Jonathan Rhys Myers, now a BUSINESSMAN, is looking at Keri Russell’s profile on her webpage?
Yup, that is what a webpage looks like. I’m glad they spent 10 seconds on this webpage so that we would know for sure that the director has seen a webpage before. But, um, so, why doesn’t he just email her? Why didn’t he email her 11 years ago? Why didn’t he specify whether she was supposed to meet him at 10AM or 10PM in the park? That seems like an important detail. And why does it actually turn out to be 10AM? That is such a weird time to meet someone!
And of course, because this is a movie about music, it’s got to be filled with UNBEARABLE MUSICFACES.
YUCK.
This movie, with its pretentious artsiness*, its horrible performances, its completely unrealistic everything, and its Robin Williams is easily one of the very Worst Movies of All Time! I am putting it in a close second, right behind Elizabethtown.
Next Week: I am going to a wedding next weekend, so I am going to take one PRECIOUS weekend off from watching a terrible movie, if that is alright with you MONSTERS. But we’re actually done with this round of nominees, if you can believe it, so next week we will outline the next round.
*If August Rush had not been shot on film it would have been shot on a batiked peasant’s blouse.
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I’d like to suggest Gran Torino.
The stupid fucking Lady in the Water. That movie is how old now? (it’s just not worth my time to look it up on imdb) and i’m still pissed at the 2 hours it stole from my life. Together with damage done to my brain by The Village, I think I might have to sue stupid M Knight Shyamalamalan. I hate him so much for making the 6th sense and then turning out so much crap, i will never see another movie of his ever.
The stupid fucking Lady in the Water. That movie is how old now? (it’s just not worth my time to look it up on imdb) and i’m still pissed about the 2 hours it stole from my life. Together with damage done to my brain by The Village, I think I might have to sue stupid M Knight Shyamalamalan. I hate him so much for making the 6th sense and then turning out so much crap, i will never see another movie of his ever.
Gabe, I hope that COLOR OF NIGHT (1994) makes the cut for the next round. You could not any worse. The ultimate Bruce Willis fail movie. Brad Dourif and Lance Henriksen in a race for last. Scott Bakula shows up. See, they were so super serious about making a good movie, this is what makes it the very worst.
Bobby
Radio
The Postman (Tom Petty PLAYING HIMSELF)
Masked and Anonymous
OMG! I freaking love you! I ended up having to watch this twice, because one of my English professors had a perverse fascination with horrible movies based on Victorian novels….
P.S. this was in reply to Staveitoff, and I second the Dracula.
I want to see The Love Guru in the hunt. In a long line of terrible Mike Meyers movies, it is easily The Worst. But it doesn’t want to settle for merely being the worst Mike Meyers movie. Oh no. It wants to be TWMOAT. That it IS TWMOAT is perhaps its only success.
Please look at Cheri starring michelle phieffer and directed by Stephen Frears. It is the biggest pile of expensively dressed guff I ever did witness.
Theodore Rex! Whoopi Goldberg is paired with a wacky anthropomorphic dinosaur in this futuristic buddy-cop movie!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ez5GFtMLvYc
Theodore Rex! Whoopi Goldberg is paired with a wacky anthropomorphic dinosaur in this futuristic buddy-cop movie!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ez5GFtMLvYc
x-men origins wolverine. cahm ahn.
I must nominate Knowing with Nicholas Cage.
Come on — freaky girl predicts end of the world with numbers, mysterious beings whispering in the ears of a random little boy, space pods transporting people out of Earth, and Nicholas Cage?
That is prime Worst Movie material.
suggestions for the worst
1. “the happening”
2. “wild wild west”
3. “godzilla” (1998)
4. “batman & robin”
5. “twilight”
I nominate R.O.T.O.R.
Vantage Point. This movie sucks for so many reasons, the biggest being the end is supposed to be happy, but in reality is horribly horribly sad.
Yes.
This movie totally deserves it ? absolutely the worst movie about music I’ve ever seen.
But the heckling the little boy’s musicfaces ? awww, that’s a tad harsh.
But fuck it, go for the throat.
I thought August Rush was a good movie. It was very inspirational and although you have some good points if you actually paid attention to the movie you would find that all those questions you raised, were all actually answered. i rate it an 8/10
I nominate Kicking and Screaming
Worst movie EVER
I nominate Kicking and Screaming
Worst movie EVER
I’m glad you did August Rush. It was Awful. I sat through it with my mother-in-law who was on the verge of tears the who tlme! Then I figured it was just made for nearly sixty year old women.
OH man. Once again, better you (or anyone else) than me, to have to subject myself to such bad ‘art’ (batik peasant blouse, snort.) but reading the TWMOAT entries translates into pure joy. Jonathan Rhys Meyers – does he make any other female kind of hate him? But want to hate fuck him? And you sort of can’t look away? Like someone embarassing themselves or a car accident?
rules be damned! I love this kid’s music faces! and I love how Keri Russell and Terrance Howard have a “we sound like we have down syndrome, but surprise, we dont!” contest.
august rush is a beautiful movie, and by far not the worst movie
I’d love to see a movie about a kid trying to get his parents together by using his prodigous talent for thrash black metal.
These posts make me so happy. Whenever I’m feeling down, I go to this site and think about how much worse my life would be if I were watching any of these movies. You are a good person–nay, a saint–for subjecting yourself to this torture.
i dont know what it is but i really want to punch the kid in this movie
P.S. I Love You
The Lakehouse
Georgia Rule
These movies should be burned.
You have zero taste, sorry, but saying that this movie is the worst, you are just being tasteless. What about Dragon Ball Z Evolution?? there you go, if you put August Rush below Dragon Ball Z Evolution, you have just no taste, not even in music! Now go and listen to your 50 cent mp3, because real music is not your choice.
every movie so far has been truly terrible
but
nothing ive seen compares to Purgatory House
i cannot believe Purgatory House is even in distribution
THIS IS MY FAVORITE MOVIE… YOU CAN’T SAY THIS WHEN YOU NEVER FEEL THE MUSIC…
SUS CORAZONES DEBEN ESTAR QUEBRADOS…
THIS MOVIE IS SO REAL… THIS MOVIE IS AWESOME, IS MY STORY… I CAN FEEL THE MUSIC…..
LA MUSICA ESTA EN TODAS PARTES, SOLO TIENES QUE ESCUCHARLA, SENTIRLA, VERLA, INCLUSO PUEDES SENTIR SU OLOR….
ESTO DEFINITIVAMENTE ES UNA GROCERIA….
FUCK U!!! seriously, it is SUCH A GOOD MOVIE!! just cos u got no musical talent!!! GOSH! people these days.
Well, Roger Ebert liked it.
Whoops, I mean
Wow!!! I just have to say this: WTF ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT?!?! I mean, just because you are too insensible to even understand the meaning of this movie doesn’t mean it’s one of the worst movies ever!!! It’s one of the greatest!!! You know why he learned to write and read music in no time? If you saw the movie and understood it (which you didn’t, obviously), you would have noticed that he is a PRODIGY!!! He has music in his blood!!!! And you’re right, it may be a little unrealistic, but I didn’t see the “based on a real story” in the bottom of the poster. That’s why they call it F-A-N-T-A-S-Y. Another thing, you know why the parents get separated and everything? Haven’t you heard about something called DRAMA?! Yeah, IT’S THIS MOVIE’S GENRE FOR YOUR INFORMATION!!!
Before you even start criticizing one of the best movies ever…think about what you’re saying and try to understand the meaning of it ok??
P.S. You can say that the acting is bad when you are at Freddie Highmore’s level!!