Ishtar couldn’t possibly be as bad as people say, right?
The worst crime of any comedy is being unfunny, and Ishtar is a comedy-jailable offense
Ishtar couldn’t possibly be as bad as people say, right?
The worst crime of any comedy is being unfunny, and Ishtar is a comedy-jailable offense
⭐
The cats & I LiveSky film reviews over on **BlueSky, and then piece those threads together with commentary to make our full reviews here on [Medium](2) before they go to [Letterbox’d](https://letterboxd.com/KCookandCatsCo/) and ReelRank**. Please subscribe anywhere/everywhere you can for more of our shenanigans…
How bad could it be?
“Let me tell you girls the three most important things I learned about life. Number one: Hold fast to your friends; number two: There’s no such thing as security; and number three: Don’t go see Ishtar.” — Sophia from Golden Girls
When I was growing up, Ishtar jokes were everywhere.
Late-night talk shows, sitcoms, grocery-store queue periodicals, parents’ friends who watched late-night and sitcoms, and read those periodicals, etc.
Everywhere.
‘The movie Ishtar’ might be the most omnipresent punchline from my entire childhood. I remember a lot of jokes from the era I didn’t quite grok, like one I didn’t understand about Dan Quayle (‘did you know Mickey Mouse wears a Dan Quayle watch?’), I definitely didn’t get why or to what end everyone got called a ‘communist’ all the time (I think in jest), but most of all, grown-ups loved to tell each other how bad Ishtar was.
Had any of them seen it?
In most cases, probably not, but regardless, everyone knew how bad Ishtar was. Ishtar’s notable terribleness was comedic currency, and that was an era of especially-hack comedic writing, so believe me when I say it was wall-to-wall Ishtar jokes growing up, and I always figured, ‘I’ll get it when I watch it someday.’
Guys, that day is today.
I get it.
And I don’t know that I could possibly convey to you how bad this movie is, but I’m going to try.
What’s so bad about Ishtar?
[embed]Don’t click these embedded BlueSky posts (bleets) if you’re not technologically-savvy enough to make it back to this article once you have.
I’m honestly torn about whether or not to ‘recommend’ seeing this movie.
This is indisputable: it’s one of the worst movies I’ve ever seen, and I’ve made a life and quasi-career out of watching and writing about movies.
There’s this ‘so bad it’s good’ idea in film-appreciation (one of my favorite podcasts, ‘How Did This Get Made?’ is basically built around the conceit), and this isn’t that. Get that out of your head.
That’s what I thought it might be when I sat down to watch it.
I thought wrong.
I had intended to ‘reclaim’ Ishtar or find the good in it, or, at a minimum, contrarily explain why all of those hack jokes I heard growing up were thoughtless and wrong.
Nope!
If anything, how bad Ishtar is was undersold to me somehow.
So you might naturally be thinking, ‘Gosh, maybe I need to see this horrible movie…’ but I posit that it’s not bad like that. Stick with me till the end of this article, especially if you’ve never seen Ishtar, and I think you’ll be better informed in regards to your own decision.
I think what you’ll find from my viewing experience and explication is that this is a brutal watch. It’s one of the most unpleasant filmic things I’ve ever subjected myself to, and while I am by nature hyperbolic, I’m not exaggerating (as far as I know) (it can be hard to tell with me, even for me).
In the BlueSky thread, I said that Ishtar was less funny than any other media I’ve ever seen, including proof-of-life hostage videos, which is a joke, but also kind of actually true, because at least hostage videos aren’t trying to be funny and failing.
Comedy is the most-doubly-edged of swords.
I mean, think about it: what’s worse, someone who’s just unfunny or someone unfunny trying to be funny?
I’ve never seen so many people try so hard to be funny for so long and just never manage it.
Everything is wrong with this movie, though I’d argue the deepest flaw of any and every unfunny comedy is that it’s unfunny. This movie is not funny, which (as an alleged comedy), I’d argue is its biggest flaw and a fatal one.
But Ishtar also makes the wrong decision every time there is a decision to be made (to the point that I had to wonder if there was some The-Producers-style gambit going on, but, as far as I can tell, everyone here set out with the intention to make money), and literally nothing in it works, making it a bit of a Herculean task to parse what exactly is so bad and why.
But that’s what we’re going to do, starting with the least-egregious and most-overcomable obstacles and crescendoing into what I think is the central, insurmountable flaw in the storytelling here (aside from just not being funny).
Buckle up…
5. It was a huge flop
This L.A. Times article, published following Ishtar’s opening weekend is illuminating:
[embed]THE HIGH COST OF 'ishtar' In Peoria, Ill.www.latimes.com
How big a flop was it?
A pretty big one, but that’s not what’s most notable about it to me in hindsight, and while the fact that it was bombing (historically, at the time) probably convinced lots of people not to go see it, it doesn’t really play into the storytelling, and this point is mostly just for our historical context.
If you were to read that L.A. Times article (and you should; it’s wild), you’d find that, while studios are always cagey about budgets, there might be no film in history more opaque in terms of how much was actually spent, either to film or promote it.
What we know is this: Warren Beatty and Dustin Hoffman both commanded a $5.5M salary (with Beatty receiving an additional $500,000 for his work as a producer), and director Elaine May was paid $1.5M, all up front, meaning $13M was spoken for before a frame of Ishtar had been shot (roughly $38M in 2025 dollars).
It’s impossible to say for certain, especially since everyone who definitively knows has an incentive to lie about it, but the studio (Columbia Pictures) probably spent something like $20M in total on advertising and promotional expenses. Cost overruns do appear to have been a factor (despite studio reps staunchly denying it and acting insulted even by that line of questioning; ‘Imagine I’m smart’), and I was positively mind-boggled by the description of Elaine May’s directorial style as ‘improvisational,’ an adjective I’ve literally never heard used to describe a director (a good modern comp, Paul Feig, is probably best known for encouraging his actors to improvise and for the improv mouthfeel of his films, but I’m not sure whether anyone would call him improvisational; it’s generally not the prerogative of directors to improvise).
I did a little research and a bit of math as a curiosity, and here’s where (adjusted for inflation) Ishtar would have fallen among 2024’s five biggest flops, as best as I can work out:
- Joker II (-$144.25M)
- Furiosa (-$119.6M)
- Ishtar (-$106M)
- Borderlands (-$80M)
- Megalopolis (-$75.3M)
- Kraven the Hunter (-$71M)
But who honestly cares how much money a film lost its studio?
The budget and box-office performance of a film have very little to do with its quality, to my mind, and I can think of many more examples of movies that achieved creative success, or even brilliance, because they had to operate frugally and creatively within narrow financial parameters than movies whose storytelling would have benefited substantively from a bigger budget.
Ishtar is bad, but its badness has almost nothing to do with box-office receipts and studio financials, and, while it being a mega-flop certainly figures into its reputation, it’s probably the least-consequential factor we’re going to look at from a narrative perspective.
But it was a flop. Believe that.
4. It has a terrible score
[embed]Jury very much out on whether you might ‘need to’ see Ishtar. Use your best judgment.
Ishtar has the worst score I’ve ever heard in a film, and it’s honestly not even really close.
People frequently say, of filmic musical scores, that if it’s a good one, you don’t really notice it. I was constantly aware of the (dreadful) score to this film, which doesn’t even include the cringey Rogers & Clarke numbers.
Not that I ever had a chance to ‘get into’ the vibe of this movie, but if it’d had a vibe that anyone ever wanted to climb into, they would likely be utterly unable to because of the intrusive, archaic, absurdly-inapt score.
3. It’s racist and rapey
I do not want to get dragged down the rabbit-hole of trying to rank whether the racism or rapeyness (rapiness?) is ‘worse’ in this movie, because they’re both wire-to-wire problems and both are egregious, so I split the difference and put them both here on the same bullet point.
Let me ask you something:
Have you ever wanted to see Warren Beatty comedically punch his actual, IRL girlfriend in the face, and then sexually assault her onscreen once he has her on the ground? For literal minutes of screentime?
The line as he grabs her tits is, and I’m not kidding even a little bit, “DUHHHHH, are those BREASTS??”
Have you ever wanted to see Dustin Hoffman scream racist gibberish and wildly ululate and gesture at the natives of a fictional Middle-Eastern country? For literal minutes of screentime?
This is unspeakably unfunny, and it goes on for an eternity.
No, of course not.
No one wants that, nor has anyone ever wanted it. But Elaine May put it on film, and here it is.
Take out all the racist and rapey bits in Ishtar, and I’m not sure what all is even left.
For one, you lose the entire character of Shirra Assel (not a huge loss, because she’s barely a character, but also, she’s in most of the movie), because every second Isabelle Adjani (doing her best, bless her heart) is onscreen, either Chuck or Lyle or both is sexually assaulting her, physically striking her, threatening her, won’t stop touching her…
I’m honestly getting upset just thinking about it. And this movie was directed by a woman.
Which probably just goes to show: you don’t get a patriarchy from just men doing bad, hateful things. It takes a village to patriarchy.
This bullet point is unrecoverable. The racism and rapiness (rapeyness?) are so integral to this movie’s vibe on a molecular level that they inform nearly every scene, and are arguably, in part, what this movie is about, to the extent it’s ‘about’ anything.
2. It’s edited terribly
This is one of the first things I noticed about Ishtar, and in its opening seconds.
I’m not a film editor (I used to edit all of my podcasts, but I’ve never so much as edited a YouTube video), so this is about as far from my area of expertise as we can even get within the world of film.
I’ll be honest: I don’t usually have any thoughts about the editing in a film. That’s how little I know about it, notice it, or have the capacity to comment substantively on it.
The editing in Ishtar is absolute dogshit, and I noticed it immediately.
On BlueSky, at around the two-minute mark of Ishtar, I bleeted, ‘Something about this pacing and editing is breakneck. I keep startling as we jump into and out of cuts and scenes, and we’ve only had a handful. It’s alarming every time.’
And then, immediately following that, while in the nightclub with Marty, Chuck, and Lyle, I started picking up on huge shot-continuity errors. I ordinarily don’t even notice these (I’ve come out of many screenings with film-editor friends and frequently had them be appalled at me not noticing even one of the thousands of things that drove them up a wall), but the film editing was one of the most noticeable things going in Ishtar.
To wit, these two screenshots were captured less than a quarter-second apart, and the left shot cuts directly to the right. Notice anything odd?
I laughed precisely two times in this film, and one was when Marty said, ‘I’m going to tell you boys the same thing I told Tony Bennett. Sing songs people already know,’ which is barely even a joke.
Marty Freed (Jack Weston) leans fully forward in the first shot, making a point to the lads, extended about as far as he possibly can towards them, including his hand and arm stretched all the way across the table, nearly touching them.
In the shot we then cut to, Marty is suddenly seated all the way back, with his arms tucked in near his sides.
It’s jarring.
And it happens constantly in this movie.
They say that in comedy, ‘timing is everything,’ and I imagine the same is true of good editing, plus this is a comedy, or at least trying (so hard) to be, so one supposes that timing would arguably be the single, most-important element of any scene, and certainly of the editing in any scene.
Ishtar’s editing is abysmally shoddy, slapdash and largely incoherent (likely because everyone involved had, by the time they got into the editing bay, figured out that the movie was going to be bad no matter what they did, and they had way too much bad, improvisational, disconnected footage shot to even hope to make sense of it), and — as with the score — even if you were, for some reason, trying to get into the ‘flow’ of what Ishtar is doing (but don’t, though), I doubt there’s any way you could, because every bad cut or sudden, alarming pickup feels like getting slapped, and there are literally hundreds of them.
Have you ever been slapped several hundred times in a sitting? I haven’t, but I’d rather try that than ever watch Ishtar again.
Those are all pretty awful problems, every one of which would derail an otherwise good film on their own, much less in conjunction with everything else going wrong, but even if Ishtar had been an enormous hit, had the best score I’d ever heard, weren’t nearly so racist and rapey and were edited flawlessly, it would still be a disastrously-bad creative effort, because, more than any other problem this story has going for it…
1. Warren Beatty is wildly miscast & there’s zero chemistry
You can tell, just at a glance, what the chemistry between these two was like (absent).
Warren Beatty’s casting as Lyle Rogers is just an industry meta-joke. Elaine May thought he was hilariously ill-suited to the role, and she was half-right.
How much do you know about Warren Beatty?
When we were both still in college, my ex-fiancée (for longtime readers, that would be Soov, whom you know already) once made me watch the movie Reds, and I’m glad she did, because I’d literally have never seen it on my own, and it’s kind of an incredible creative achievement. As far as I know, it’s Beatty at his best (it’s either that or Tracy Zooms In, which seems like it couldn’t be real, but which I swear to God is a real thing, wherein Warren Beatty playing himself interviews Warren Beatty playing Dick Tracy on Zoom as a legal dodge in order to keep alive his copyright claim on the intellectual property).
But what I know Warren Beatty from most — in much the same way that I ‘knew’ Ishtar from all the unavoidable jokes at its expense — is that people always titter and joke about how many women Beatty slept with.
Much like Wilt Chamberlain (whose absurd body-count is reportedly 20,000, though, unlike Beatty, that is a claim that Wilt, himself, alleged), there are mathematically-suspect, huge numbers thrown around in terms of how many women Warren Beatty took to bed.
**12,775, according to one of Beatty’s biographers, Peter Biskind, which is both ludicrous and oddly-specific in a way that makes me curious. Beatty’s attorney didn’t help one bit with his suspicious rebuttal, ‘Someone must have made that up,’ which is obviously what I thought until hearing him say that. Now, I think, ‘well, shit, maybe it’s actually not **made-up…’
Regardless, the underlying point is clear: Beatty didn’t lack for sexual partners, and, as far as anyone knows and has spoken about, they were all women and all willing (another of Beatty's biographies is titled ‘The Sexiest Man Alive,’ although Beatty never officially received that dubious ‘honor’ from People Magazine).
For a time, Beatty was the absolute epitome of a ‘ladies’ man,’ and herein lies the meta-joke that drove this whole film (into the ground):
Wouldn’t it be hilarious if Warren Beatty played a guy who's bad with women?
Presumably, if you’re (also) into men and 10–15 years older than I am, you have some lived experience of Warren Beatty as a sex symbol. I don’t.
In my childhood, I had seen bits and pieces of Dick Tracy (not for me), but that’s hardly Beatty at his best, especially from a lady-killing standpoint. A surprising amount of that film is just Dick Tracy trying to keep his aspiring wife, played by (stop me if you’ve heard this before) then-IRL-girlfriend, Madonna, at arm’s length.
But this conceit — wouldn’t it be hysterical for Warren Beatty to portray someone who’s bad with women? — is the most wrong thing about this film (narratively, anyway; the racist and rapey stuff is ethically worse, though also pretty de rigueur at the time), and the reason it would never have worked, no matter what else was done to it.
If you cast Warren Beatty as Lyle Rogers and Dustin Hoffman as Chuck Clarke (God, those names are nothing), your movie about them isn’t going to work.
Quentin Tarantino actually has thoughts (and doesn’t he always just). His supposition is that Ishtar’s budgetary obstacles and chemistry issues could have been solved by casting a then-appropriately-yet-to-break and affordable Tom Hanks and his Bosom Buddies costar Peter Scolari in the two starring roles.
He’s probably right? (Tarantino often is, as grating as he can sometimes be to listen to, something I’ve often heard is true of me, as well, by which I mean the ‘grating’ part, not the ‘often right’ part, though I’d argue both apply to me, also)
Tarantino’s thesis, by the way, is that studios shouldn’t be afraid of making big-budget comedies, and Ishtar scared them away from doing that.
Studios are always taking the wrong lessons from both their wins and their licks.
Be that as it May (pun intended), Warren Beatty doesn’t work in this role, and he doesn’t-work harder than any actor’s performance I’ve ever seen (minus perhaps Aaron Taylor-Johnson in Nosferatu, which I’ve written about, natch).
Nothing he does works. I perhaps have never seen an actor so preposterously miscast. It’s kind of not Beatty’s fault, except he fought for May’s creative control, so it ultimately actually is.
Whew. What a bummer this movie was.
How bad is Ishtar?
If it isn’t the worst film I’ve ever seen, it might be the most baffling, and the most high-profile comedic failure I have ever heard of, and, boy, did it deserve to fail.
Because it just isn’t funny, and Ishtar is trying (so very, very hard) to be funny.
Our verdict? Miss Ishtar (Misshtar; is that anything?)
Closing Thots
The Far Side’s Gary Larson eventually came around on Ishtar…
‘Compels?!’ Really?!
… but he saw it on an airplane. That hardly counts as a ‘real’ viewing.
Still, it’s the only comic Gary Larson has ever ‘apologized’ for, to my knowledge, though he absolutely should not have. ‘Hell’s video store’ is way funnier to me now after having seen Ishtar, even knowing that he disavows this cartoon.
Not only is this not off-the-mark, it’s dead-center-of-target, and I couldn’t even possibly have known how much until I saw Ishtar for myself, and I still think that Ishtar is a better pick for what’s on that Hell-video-store shelf than any other movie I’ve ever seen, because Ishtar has all the things that would tempt you (in your little Hell cell) to actually pop it in, versus just staring at the wall, as you would if the video rental store had only, say, the movie Homestead. Homestead, a ‘worse’ film, would actually be less torturous, because you just wouldn’t bother with that one, while Ishtar seems like there’d be something worthwhile to it, which might keep you coming back in a Sisyphean fashion.
Larson nailed it on spec, and since I was out to reclaim something here, and have so far come up empty, I’m reclaiming this comic.
It’s still hilarious, even more than I knew, and apparently even more than Larson knew.
‘Whoof!’
[embed]It’s probably obvious that Miranda was the one who reminded me of the Golden Girls quote about Ishtar. She’s always got something worthwhile to add! Go follow her!
‘It’s just bad’
I’ve never actually seen a beheading video; don’t @ me.
‘Onaircoop’ is a great handle. I’m sincerely jealous of that.
El Coopitan tried to save me some time and despair, but I was always going to have to find out for myself, anyway it went.
A lot of people say that’s my problem, actually… (people are always telling me what ‘my problem’ is, and I’ve never once asked)
At least Google’s robot liked it…
[embed]Also, it can’t even keep the three (3) characters straight, and confuses buyer for seller midway through. Useless. You’re better off if you manage to somehow not even glance at this AI horseshit.
I strongly suspect that if AI advanced sufficiently to the point where studio executives just fully used it in place of human writers (their goal), Ishtar is precisely the kind of movie those LLMs would write us, filled with a humorless robot’s idea of ‘jokes.’
And I’m talking about a platonic-ideal agentic AI, the kind that doesn’t exist and probably never will. The best AI anyone has ever realistically theorized could probably write you a movie ‘as good as’ Ishtar, and no better.
That’s just my theory, but I’m also certain I’m right.
Don’t sleep on LaRocque & a query for you, the reader
[embed]
Now, here’s an interesting point from Rob LaRocque, whose BlueSky profile bio contains 0 outbound links (which kind of shames my relentlessly-self-promotional ass), plus a David Foster Wallace quote that literally, not kidding, makes me cry every single time I read it.
To your mind, would the ‘worst movie ever’ be a so-notably-it’s-perhaps-interestingly-bad movie, or would just the most boring movie ever made potentially qualify?
Food for thots…
Or, hey, as long as I’m trying to generate some engagement, here's an actual question for you: what’s the worst movie you’ve ever seen, and why is it so?
I’m actually, genuinely curious!
Here (in descending order of terribleness) are the three (other) worst movies I’ve reviewed in the last three years, just in case anyone’s curious (two of these were nominated for Oscars, and one of them won two):
Follow Kay & the cats on BlueSky, where we do more of this kind of blathering:
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