This isn't a film blog I know, but it's useful at this point let you know that if pushed on what I think is the worst film I've ever seen, I tend to plump for 'Elizabethtown'. Which might surprise many; after all, there are clearly plenty of objectively 'worse' films out there than Cameron Crowe's 2005 epic, but when you weigh in the balance the big studio production, the acclaimed director, the (then at least) A list stars in their pomp then the sprawling, uninvolving, emotionless, directionless, humourless, cod-philosophical car crash of celluloid waste is one of the most painfully unenjoyable things I have ever sat through. For its entire 123 minute running time, nothing about it works. Absolutely nothing.And so to 'The Last Waltz'. Again, I'm not going to say that it's the worst number one we're going to come across here because it isn't. Not by a good margin. But like 'Elizabethtown', nothing about it works. Absolutely nothing. Les Reed and Peter Sullivan aim for easy Bacharach pop on the opening verse, but Humperdinck steamrollers his way over it with an eye bulging intent that crushes any subtlety with the grace of an elephant in a field of daisies and it's soon abandoned in favour of balladic carpet bombing that reduces sentiment to cold hard rubble in its wake.
Not that there is much subtlety to be wrung - Hump spies a girl across a dancefloor, they dance, they get it on ("IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII fell in love with you") but he's left heartbroken when the "flame of love" dies. But just as it all gets too much he pulls himself together to go off piste with some bi-polar "la la la la la" - ing that only need him to stick his fingers in his ears child-like to demonstrate he's not actually listening anymore. Which makes two of us I guess. Awkward, stilted, bombastic - 'The Last Waltz' is an empty vessel making a lot of noise, an awful single of boom and bust that's as emotionally empty as the hole in the middle of it. But at least it's two hours shorter than 'Elizabethtown'.
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