My Year of Flops

In the beginning, Nathan Rabin set out to re-examine infamous films that are reviled for the sheer weight of their failure: whether it was bad acting, bad directing, bad writing, or the colossal amount of money spent to produce them. "My Year of Flops," Rabin's column, appeared regularly in The A.V. Club, the entertainment section of The Onion, starting in early 2007, and it became so popular that he extended his experiment indefinitely. In many cases, he agrees with popular opinion and therefore labels the film a "Failure." However, as we all know, failure can often be fascinating, in which case, Rabin calls the results a "Fiasco"-from The Bonfire of the Vanities to Waterworld to Elizabethtown. Better, still, are the films that emerge from the ashes and turn out to actually be pretty good. Those are the "Secret Successes." Some of these include The Wiz, Heaven's Gate, Joe Vs. the Volcano, and even everyone's favourite film flop punch line, Ishtar.