Who Says Americans Don't Have Taste?

Paris Hilton did some jail time for driving drunk, but there is no law against movies like The Hottie and the Nottie. But the box office has spoken and her new vehicle did an extraordinarily atrocious $250 per screen on its opening weekend.

As Joe Queenan, The Guardian's movie critic notes, this will revive the debate on the worst movies of all time.

These include Attack of the Killer Tomatoes or Plan 9 From Outer Space, Showgirls, Ishtar, Heaven's Gate, Battlefield Earth, The Postman, Gigli and Swept Away.

But Queenan says comparing The Hottie to some of those movies is not fair:

"It is not fair to Kevin Costner, it is not fair to Jennifer Lopez, and it is certainly not fair to Madonna. Though it is a natural impulse to believe that the excruciating film one is watching today is on a par with the excruciating films of yesterday, this is a slight to those who have worked long and hard to make movies so moronic that the public will still be talking about them decades later. Anyone can make a bad movie; Kate Hudson and Adam Sandler make them by the fistful. Anyone can make a sickening movie; we are already up to Saw IV. Anyone can make an unwatchable movie; Jack Black and Martin Lawrence do it every week. And anyone can make a comedy that is not funny; Jack Black and Martin Lawrence do it every week. But to make a movie that destroys a studio, wrecks careers, bankrupts investors, and turns everyone connected with it into a laughing stock requires a level of moxie, self-involvement, lack of taste, obliviousness to reality and general contempt for mankind that the average director, producer and movie star can only dream of attaining."