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"Blood Work" with Clint Eastwood was the most disappointing movie I'd seen in the last five years or so. It was awfully stale, tired, predictable,and boring. Ebert and others didn't object because they liked Eastwood's other work.

Then I saw "Sin City." It was a visually beautiful attempt to render comics based on film noir on the screen. But the plot was nonsensical and hard to find, and the violence was reprehensible. In spite of some really striking cinematography it was trash.

I'd say the same thing about "Kill Bill" (both volumes). Some talent on the technical side, but just garbage so far as characters, motivations, and morals were concerned. Tarantino was shocking and offensive in his early movies, but there was more than just stabbings and beheadings to hold our interest.

The problem with talk about "worst movies" is that most of us have never seen the really worst movies and never will. Those are the hard core porn films that don't have to satisfy or appeal on any other level. There are soft core porn, horror, and martial arts movies of similar rottenness.

Apart from those genres, the worst movies of all time were probably made by Rainer Werner Fassbinder. There's a political moral here. Fassbinder got his funding from the German government and German public television. They were desperate to show the "New Germany" and gave out money for all manner of trash. Fassbinder boasted that he could turn out a completed movie while his competitors were still trying to read their grant forms. It's easy to be fast when you don't have to worry about plot consistency, character development or the quality of the acting. It's cruel to say it, but it's a good thing for filmgoers that Fassbinder died before Paulie Shore and others started their careers. It spared us films that would be so bad that they could destroy the universe.

I'd say more or less the same thing about John Waters and Lina Wertmuller. If you look at it right, they made the same films. Just substitute class-conscious workers for fat girls, fascists and millionaires for uptight squares, and Marxist kitsch for gay camp.

But yes, "The Unbearable Lightness of Being" was unbearable. I left about the time when their dog died. It was insulting that they expected us to cry after all that boredom. I felt like vomiting. The funny thing is that the novel was supposed to be a protest against "kitsch" -- and the film embodied it.

Also horrible -- "The World According to Garp." I felt like killing Robin Williams when he explained "what it all meant." The point of it all was that life is worth living in spite of everything. That's the reason for two hours of unmemorable penis jokes. Nice to know that life is good, but I'd feel better if the film makers convinced me that they'd made a movie worth seeing after all.