Reid About It

As many of you know, one of my favorite pop culture hobbies is bad movies. And even better than a stand-alone bad movie is a good actor in a bad movie (a "GABaM"). An article on MSN talks about good actors working in bad movies, and my buddy Christine added in some of her own well-chosen "What Were They Thinking" picks. Not everybody can be Tom Hanks, and use their Oscar clout to pick good movies. Some people apparently feel like they have to pull a Jude Law, and take every script that comes their way. Here are a few of my favorite GABaMs.

Kevin Spacey is a good example. After years of working his way up, he makes it big with first "The Usual Suspects," and then "American Beauty," getting Oscars for both. How to follow it up? Why, by playing a mental patient who may or may not be an alien in "K-Pax", of course! Lift a plotline from "Happy Days" and run with it!

Then there's Cuba Gooding, Jr. An Oscar winner for "Jerry Maguire," but sadly enough, not for the fake-gay boat movie ("Boat Trip") or the movie with the talking dogs ("Snow Dogs"). Cuba was so forgotten, he had to take the old reliable career trick of playing a mentally retarded person just to rebuild his acting creds. Perhaps firing Reuben Kincaid and hiring new management would help.

And of course, my favorite GABaM of all time, Michael Caine. He won his first Oscar for "Hannah and Her Sisters," but could not attend to pick up the award, because he was on location filming "Jaws: The Revenge", a touching story about a woman who, being stalked by a shark, refuses to move to a land-locked state such as Kansas or Nebraska, opting instead for the Bahamas. Yeah, one look at that script should have produced more logic holes than the Tom Cruise-Katey Holmes marriage, but Caine signed up anyway.