In the Can: The Greatest Career Missteps, Sophomore Slumps, What-Were-They-Thinking Decisions and Fire-Your Agent Moves in the History of the Movies

Lou and Eric are not talking about the Armageddons— stinkers that still made big money. Nor are their targets the Shawshank Redemptions—movies reviewers loved but audiences ignored. Instead, the authors focus on cinematic flops reviled by critics and moviegoers alike:

· John Travolta’s Battlefield Earth—a movie so bad it almost demands that a drinking game be built around it.

· Angelina Jolie’s Beyond Borders—which inspired a more hostile reaction from critics than any other movie in this book.

· Bruce Willis’ Hudson Hawk—a heist adventure in which the leading man’s smirk got more critical attention than the leading lady.

· Madonna’s … well, for Madonna there are a lot of choices.

· And many, many more.

IN THE CAN also examines TV stars who just didn’t manage the jump to the big screen—otherwise known as The David Caruso Effect. They reminisce about embarrassing last hurrahs, including that of Orson Welles, who went from being the genius behind Citizen Kane to doing voiceovers for Transformers: The Movie. They cluck over unworthy Oscar follow-ups—for example, Mira Sorvino’s rapid descent from garnering praise for Mighty Aphrodite to chasing giant cockroaches in Mimic. And they shine the light on a parade of great directors who have an awful lot of explaining to do.

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All Customer Reviews
Average Customer Review:
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

One of the Worst Movie Books Ever--Deserves Zero Stars, 2008-07-04
This book is a waste of money. The authors claim to have spent "hundreds of hours" watching films to come up with a list of the worst movies that famous actors made. But there is no evidence they even saw some of the movies. It's just a rehash of stereotyped film flops, such as Ishtar, Town & Country, Catwoman, etc.

Each "chapter" is merely a couple of paragraphs that summarizes an actor's career and then gives a little synopsis of the worst flop of that performer's career. There is no evidence of any research being conducted other than a quick Internet search. You'd find more information on Wikipedia than you'll find here. Some "chapters" are literally four paragraphs and say nothing other than someone like Madonna is a bad actress.

Get ten pages into this book and you'll regret buying it. Here's a sample from just the first few pages: Ben Affleck "not only isn't funy, he isn't remotely charming." Tim Allen "hasn't shown he has the chops to pull off any performance on the silver screen." Drew Barrymore has "not played the lead in any motion picture of any consequence."

Do you see where this is headed? They make catty remarks about easy targets but offer nothing of substance. And their opinions are so off-based that you have to question everything in the book.

One problem is that the book is divided by actors (alphabetically). But really what these authors are doing are reviewing (in a couple paragraphs) the bad movies the actors were in. The book should have been divided by movies--but there have already been a couple (much better) books done that way, so the only way to justify this book was to divide it by actors even though the content really is more about the film than the performer. For example, for Warren Beatty there are paragraphs about how bad the movie is but little mention of the actor himself. For Alec Baldwin, they make fun of him for being in the children's movie Thomas and the Magic Railroad, but then admit he's better than the other performers and basically just don't like the movie.

Don't waste your money on this. The publisher loses credibility when this type of poorly-researched, badly-written waste of time gets put into print.


29 of 29 people found the following review helpful:

Disappointning, underresearched effort, 2006-06-02
This book sounded good: An alphabetical listing of nearly all recent movie stars with a discussion of each star's worst film. To qualify, a film had to be both a commercial and critical disaster. Only problem is the authors appear to have written the book over a long weekend. The entries are very short -- usually a page, sometimes less -- and contain almost no background on the films, apart from their box office take and, occasionally, quotes from reviewers. We all know Halle Berry's a fine actress and Catwoman was a bomb. Why not tell us how she came to make the film, what problems the film encountered in production that made it so bad, and so forth? The authors did essentially no research that might have enabled them to discuss these issues. Instead they provide a brief summary of the actor's career before and after the bomb under consideration and make a few smart remarks about the movie itself. They would have to be far wittier than they are to pull this off. In short, if you are movie fan, you probably already know everything you will read in this book. For a much better book on the same subject, check out James Robert Parish's Fiasco.


8 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

A great idea...and a fun, informative read, 2005-10-05
The authors seem to have had a very rough job while researching this book--it consists of nothing but big, big Hollywood bombs. I never thought it would be this fun reading about Battlefield Earth, Surviving Christmas, Mary Reilly and other tanks by Hollywood's biggest stars. Lots of interesting information. It's a page-turner.

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