Ishtar is a great movie but it never had chance.
The production was plagued with problems and it went way over budget. It was getting trashed in the entertainment press daily before it was even completed. Making fun of it turned into meme. It was a running gag on Johnny Carson.
Eventually, things got so bad with the production that even the studio execs were talking shit about it to the press. They hated director Elaine May and wanted to tank her movie and her career. They got her blackballed, the film bombed and Ishtar got the reputation as one of the worst movies ever made despite the fact that nobody even bothered to see it.
Watch it. It’s a lot of fun.
I was just upvoting the silly cartoons and now I respect the author because of this apology.
Bless you Gary
Great Hollywood story about the curse of Ishtar.
They send a team ahead of the main unit to set things up. One of their tasks is to buy an ugly camel, because the script calls for them to have the worst camel ever. The team goes to the camel market and the first camel they see is hideous, the the guy in charge says that they can’t just buy the first camel they see. Over the next few days they see dozens of camels, and everyone agrees that the first was by far the ugliest. The boss admits his error and goes back to the first seller.
“Sorry, you can’t have that camel.”
“Why not?”
“We ate him”
The moral of the story is “Buy the first camel.”
The moral of the story is “Buy the first camel.”
Nah, there’s information to be gained via the selection process.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secretary_problem
The secretary problem demonstrates a scenario involving optimal stopping theory that is studied extensively in the fields of applied probability, statistics, and decision theory. It is also known as the marriage problem, the sultan’s dowry problem, the fussy suitor problem, the googol game, and the best choice problem. Its solution is also known as the 37% rule.
The basic form of the problem is the following: imagine an administrator who wants to hire the best secretary out of n rankable applicants for a position. The applicants are interviewed one by one in random order. A decision about each particular applicant is to be made immediately after the interview. Once rejected, an applicant cannot be recalled. During the interview, the administrator gains information sufficient to rank the applicant among all applicants interviewed so far, but is unaware of the quality of yet unseen applicants. The question is about the optimal strategy (stopping rule) to maximize the probability of selecting the best applicant. If the decision can be deferred to the end, this can be solved by the simple maximum selection algorithm of tracking the running maximum (and who achieved it), and selecting the overall maximum at the end. The difficulty is that the decision must be made immediately.
The shortest rigorous proof known so far is provided by the odds algorithm. It implies that the optimal win probability is always at least 1/e (where e is the base of the natural logarithm), and that the latter holds even in a much greater generality. The optimal stopping rule prescribes always rejecting the first ∼n/e applicants that are interviewed and then stopping at the first applicant who is better than every applicant interviewed so far (or continuing to the last applicant if this never occurs). Sometimes this strategy is called the 1/e stopping rule, because the probability of stopping at the best applicant with this strategy is already about 1/e for moderate values of n. One reason why the secretary problem has received so much attention is that the optimal policy for the problem (the stopping rule) is simple and selects the single best candidate about 37% of the time, irrespective of whether there are 100 or 100 million applicants.
You can’t eat the secretary.
lemmynsfw would like a word
Also, relating to anecdotes about camel consumption, previous French President Francois Hollande, for those who didn’t read the story then:
https://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/10/world/europe/hollandes-camel-a-gift-from-mali-becomes-tagine.html
Hollande Finds His Gift Camel Was Consumed
PARIS — As if President François Hollande of France did not have enough trouble with a stagnant economy and a scandal over his former budget minister’s secret overseas bank accounts, now his camel has been eaten.
Grateful Malian authorities gave the baby camel to Mr. Hollande during a triumphant visit to Mali in early February, after French troops intervened to drive back Islamist rebels who had seized the north of the country.
The French president, who was traveling with his defense minister, Jean-Yves Le Drian, joked then that he could use the camel in Paris to get around traffic jams. But the animal screeched constantly, and did not seem to enjoy the president’s attempt to pat it on the head. In the end, Mr. Hollande left his camel in the care of a family in Timbuktu.
The family, evidently misunderstanding the purpose of the custody arrangement, proceeded to slaughter the camel and feast on it. According to local reports, it was fashioned into a tasty tagine, a regional type of slow-simmered stew.
Embarrassed Malian authorities said on Tuesday that they would give Mr. Hollande a replacement camel, and that this time they would deliver it to him in France.
“As soon as we heard of this, we quickly replaced it with a bigger and better-looking camel,” an official in Timbuktu told the Reuters news agency. “We are ashamed of what happened to the camel,” said the official, who asked Reuters not to identify him because he was not authorized to speak to the news media. “The new camel will be sent to Paris. It was a present that did not deserve this fate.”
Mr. Le Drian, the defense minister, was in charge of giving Mr. Hollande regular updates on the camel’s status, and had to inform him of its piquant end last week, according to the French magazine Valeurs Actuelles.
“The news came in from soldiers on the ground,” a French government official said.
If he remade that cartoon today what film would he put in it’s place?
Battlefield Earth
Yeah, that’s an embarrassing one I haven’t thought about in years. I should check the credits and see how many Alan Smithees worked on it.
No Alan Smithees, but probably a bunch of Scientologists.
Most movies have a bunch of Scientologists working on. This Battlefield Earth is spacial what with being based on a Hubbard book. Like most cult leaders, he hated psychologists and named the villains Psychlos. Some real high class subtle writing.
I’m surprised no one has said the obvious yet: Morbius
So forgettable the public even forgot to throw shade at it
It’s funny, I watched Morbius on Netflix and, when I started it, I thought it was a show. I didn’t think it was amazingly great, but I was entertained. Then, halfway through, I realized it was a movie and I couldn’t help feeling like the expectations bar should be higher, and it was lacking.
Morbius is… just bad. I’d put The Last Airbender.
Every review of Madam Web that I’ve come across says that it’s worse than Morbius.
Obviously, all films are
Freddy got fingered
Daddy would you like some sausage
I only see 1 Lebaron Freddy, I don’t see 2 Lebarons!
You take that back. That’s a cinematic masterpiece.
Left Behind
Every time someone tells me they love Nicholas Cage, I point them here. It also fits the theme of Hell. :)
I mean, Nick Cage when he’s trying is great. There are just those “Collect a Paycheck” movies he does that should be stuck in a separate category.
That movie and his role in it made me realize how much money was stolen from him and what he would do to get it back.
“stolen” his lack of money was because he had failed to pay taxes on the enormous income he spent. He was taking any job to recover from his tax bill
To his credit he did a good job on that crap film
Oh man, now I gotta watch that
Edit: oof it’s included in Amazon Prime
Little Nicky, Adam Sandler’s acting is like nails on a blackboard.
I have news for you, that wasn’t acting…
I’ll watch that movie solely for the Hitler with a pineapple scene
Yeah, I would place Little Nicky just within the greenzone for Adam Sandler movies. The paid advertising was still an odd quirk and before his brand started getting tiring. The Chicago scene is still a good joke.
Cats.
Anaconda. Worst film ever🤢.
The worst objectively bad movie I’ve ever seen I thought was called something like “Kong: King of the Jungle”. However, I just tried to search for it and couldn’t find anything like it. So either it was so obscure that no one knows about it, or my brain has garbled the memory of it into uselessness.
But seriously, it had no beginning, it just started in the middle somewhere with no explanation of how things started. It had no end, as in a conclusion. It lacked plot, characterization, direction, consistancy, anything resembling competent sfx (even primitive ones). It was like a class project by college students who went on to fail film school. 🤮
Has anyone else seen this? Am I remembering the name even remotely right?
Transmorphers
My dad took me to see Ishtar when I was a kid. I remember nothing about it, but I didn’t hate it.
My friend loved it as a kid. He showed me it before I knew it was supposed to be a flop. It’s a bad movie, sure, but it’s hilariously bad and action packed. And honestly it’s a really good lesson on how to keep a story moving. The story makes no goddamn sense but boy do they just keep moving forward from what I remember.
Tellin the truth can be dangerous business
Three two three four four two three and
These men are pawns!
I’ll put a price of twenty thousand dirham on their heads
Thanks now that’s stuck in my head.
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