Occam's Razor

We like the occasional bad movie and Ishtar has a certain reputation in this category. The problem was for years I could not find it. Netflix did not rent it. It stayed in my queue for years. This movie about two terribly bad and tone-deaf songwriters (played by Warren Beatty and Dustin Hoffman) getting a singing gig in Morocco sounded unique enough to sample, despite its reputed extreme stench. And then finally there it was on Netflix and I could stream it anytime I wanted to. Nonetheless it took a few weeks before we found the time and the motivation to sit down together in front of our entertainment center for this special “entertainment”.

Well!

My goodness!

Yes, Ishtar is a bad movie. But it’s the worst kind of bad movie. It’s not the kind that you can laugh at. It’s the kind of bad movie that feels like someone is jamming steel spikes into your head as you watch it. You have to wonder how many people simply walked out of the theater after the first fifteen minutes when this was in the theaters. (My guess is all but a handful.) Both my wife and I kept exchanging glances during this movie. We like a bad movie, but a “bad bad” movie? Our thumbs hovered over the stop button on our remote for most of the movie, but somehow we made it to the end. However, we could not endure the credits, which had we watched them probably would have been the only good part of the movie.

So no wonder this movie had been hard to find. It was likely that Beatty and Hoffman, when they saw the result, went on a vendetta to keep the movie from being seen at all, let alone make its way to video. Strangely, they both survived their debacles in this movie. Presumably those that subsequently hired them forgave them or (more likely) never saw the movie.

Thus truly you can skip this movie too with no feelings of regret that you missed some sort of classic bad movie. There are so many other candidates out there to enjoy, including my favorite bad movie made three years earlier and starring Tanya Roberts: the immortal Sheena where for 117 minutes you can enjoy an attractive blonde woman cavorting around the jungles of Africa on a horse painted to look like a zebra. If you do choose to rent Ishtar here’s some of what to expect. Warning: you may not be able to finish this review because just recapturing it is likely to make you feel the pain we endured for its 107 minutes.

The movie is all about Lyle (Beatty) and Chuck (Hoffman) and their collaboration as “songwriters”. They both have the itch but unfortunately neither has the least bit of talent. Neither of them can sing either. So it’s the worst of both worlds: songs or snippets of songs that make your teeth grate echoed by voices that would make you sound brilliant singing Karaoke. Truly, it’s like fingernails on a chalkboard, except while that lasts just a few seconds at most, this just goes on and on.

And their “characters” are the worst sort of pathetic excuses for human beings. You find yourself hoping they’ll get run over by a bus, or that someone will murder them so they don’t reproduce. Both Lyle and Chuck feel washed up, as they are middle aged (both Beatty and Hoffman were 50 at the time) which makes it hard to find an agent to market their “songs”. They hound a third rate talent agent played by David Margulies who finds them a number of very unattractive gigs. You know he’s a bad agent because no agent in their right mind would book these two for anything, so he is as talent deaf as they are tone deaf. Their choices are two very underpaying gigs: one in Guatemala and the other in Morocco. They choose Morocco because there is no civil insurrection going on there. Or so they think.

There is the CIA in Morocco, however. Emir Yousef (Aharon Ipalé) is busy doing what a lot of emirs do in that area: oppressing his citizens through martial law for his profit and he uses CIA agent Jim Harrison (Charles Grodin) to facilitate his dirty work because, well, communism! Nuff said. His subjects though are feeling rebellious, and that includes Shirra (Isabelle Adjani), a Muslim woman showing so little skin that both Chuck and Lyle assume she is a he. This leads to some painful to watch scenes, including one where Lyle frisks her and discovers “he” has breasts but he can’t put it together that he is a she.

Somehow Chuck gets recruited by Jim to be a CIA agent but what the Emir really wants is them dead, because Chuck sort of likes Shirra, to the point where at her direction he goes to find a man who will sell him a blind camel. This leads to scenes in the desert where they are supposedly going to find an oasis, but they are basically being sent into the desert to die, with a blind and recalcitrant camel. Much more really bad dialog between Chuck and Lyle happens in the desert, not to mention more explicit attempts to kill them by air. First though they have to do their act, and the tourists are apparently tone-deaf too and lacking in even a modicum of discernment to realize they are wretched. They applaud and Chuck and Lyle think they are a hit.

So if this is your idea of a comedy or entertainment, please go ahead and rent it. You may be the first human being to actually like the movie. This is pretty much the plot, such as it is, and it’s so thin it’s hard to understand how it was stretched out to 107 excruciating minutes until you realize it was padded with more and more heaping doses of excruciatingly bad dialog between these two talentless jerks.

I’ve never rated a movie a zero before. Trust me: this qualifies. It has no redeeming qualities whatsoever, not even a moment of humor that is even a tiny bit funny. Basically it is an intensely painful experience. It must have been equally painful to make, and it’s a wonder it made it into the theaters at all, however briefly.

Yech! Make that double yech! Avoid! Avoid! Avoid!

[xrr rating=0/4]