In light of that the DNC is going on, people are totes uptight about stuff, and my head is about to explode due to wedding planning madness, can we please just talk about shit that utterly does not matter? K, thanks. I want to take this moment to bag on a national monument to bad acting and poor project choices: Claire Forlani.

Normally, the Forlani schadenfreude in my household is limited to the family Panda watching Meet Joe Black every single time it comes on TV… So that we may laugh at it. That movie is so bad, it makes us positively giddy. The ‘can’t take a damn thing about this film seriously’ factor is so high, that we can’t even call Brad Pitt’s character “Joe Black”, “The Reaper”, “Death” or whatever. We have to call him “Meet Joe Black.” One of us will get up to go to the bathroom, come back and say, “What have I missed? Is Meet Joe Black on about peanut butter again? That man is positively obsessed!” or “OOH! Is this the part where Meet Joe Black talks all Jamaican for no reason? Fantastic!” The saddest part is, that MJB is probably the best movie Forlani has ever been in, and it’s not like hers was a standout role. She plays “underfed pretty blue-blood girl whose nonthreatening looks and quiet (read: boring) grace cause an undead(?) man to fall for her (like it’s hard or something).” More Forlani bagging and the reasons why to pour yourself a big ole cup of skinny Brit expat h8erade after the jump.

Despite her prominence in MJB, the only time she’s ever been called upon to help carry a movie, most of the time, Forlani’s mousy inoffensiveness is pretty easy to overlook while she’s on screen. The trouble comes with looking at her career as a whole. I mean, really, her IMBD reads like Tori Spelling’s daily positive affirmations. And seeing all her “work” in one place really recalls all of the wooden emoting you spent so much time ignoring: The prettily aloof waitress in Mystery Men. The prettily bitchy girlfriend in Basquiat. The pretty attempt to fill theater seats in Jackie Chan’s The Medallion. The pretty girlfriend Jason London so desperately tries to win back in The Most Dated Movie Since the Village People’s Can’t Stop the Music (aka Mallrats, people). The prettyrexic, unconvincingly depressive Maggie Cassidy character in the utterly unbearable The Last Time I Committed Suicide (seriously, I was only 15 at the time, and well into pointless, depressing, navel-gazing films, but I couldn’t even FINISH this one). The pretty bit-part girlfriend in.. Anti-Trust? GAWW! She was in that stinker? Ugh, and did you guys know it was originally called “Conspiracy.com”? Oh my god, so bad. So bad. Ooh! And look here, she was in a film I’ve never heard of called Going Greek in which she plays a sorority girl (at 30 years of age, people) and IMDB say her scenes were deleted. That’s cold, yo. But, before you start feeling sorry for our gal Claire, I think two of her latest releases have enough pure concentrated douche extract to power-clean your pity glands to an industrial shine.

First, she was recently in a movie called In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale. The title of this should really stand alone in it’s ability to make you chuckle at Forlani’s expense. I was originally going to leave it at that, until I explored further. Prepare yourselves. You may want to sit down and make sure you’re not eating or drinking anything right now, so as not to choke to death on your mirth:

This is a period movie movie. Starring Jason Statham, (What Ever Happened to) Leelee Sobieski, Burt Reynolds’ Facelift, and Ray Liotta. Oh. My. God. And, to make matters worse, it’s a full-on, video-game-based Lord of the Rings ripoff! The plot is based around Statham’s character, the oddly monikered Farmer, avenging the plunder of his family at the hands of hybrid animal warriors. Think about that. Animal warriors that, according to Canada.com’s Jay Stone, are “half beasts that look like Orcs in the sense that the seven-year-old who comes to your house at Halloween looks like Batman”. You can’t make this shit up.

But the worst is yet to come. Ever comfortable in her barely-on-screen love-interest role, Forlani has again lent her copious “acting chops” clavicles to another F-list leading man in need: Toby Keith. Yes, you read that right. Claire Forlani is the leading woman in the racist, redneck propaganda film Beer for my Horses. I trust that anyone reading this blog hasn’t seem B4mH, so I’ll give you the low-down on the plot: All-Amurrican po-lice deppitty and brawny heroman Toby Keith and his All-Amurrican good-guy buddy cop friend set out to protect their small, Amurrican Okie town from being overrun by drugs. Their efforts include trying to protect some fertilizer tanks from being turned into meth. Some Mexican drug lords show up and do bad-guy stuff including try to make and sell drugs and, of course, kidnap Forlani. Now, in case any of you are doubting the “Brown Panic” messages this film is attempting to sell, let’s take a look at the lyrics of the song this film is based upon:

Grandpappy told my pappy back in my day, son
A man had to answer for the wicked that he’d done
Take all the rope in Texas
Find a tall oak tree, round up all of them bad boys
Hang them high in the street
For all the people to see
That
Justice is the one thing you should always find
You got to saddle up your boys
You got to draw a hard line
When the gun smoke settles we’ll sing a victory tune
And we’ll all meet back at the local saloon
And we’ll raise up our glasses against evil forces singing
Whiskey for my men, beer for my horses

Yeah. You read that right. It’s a call-to-arms for rednecks to bring lynching back into fashion. Try replacing the words “bad” and “evil” with, say, “black” or “colored”, if you really need the thinly-veiled message spelled out for you. WOW. Not only can I not believe this film was greenlit (written, produced and starring Toby Keith, natch), but I can’t believe otherwise-not-so-bad people like Forlani, Willie Nelson, and Gina Gershon went along with it. I realize times are tough. The economy sucks and we’re all hard-up. But really, Claire, I never thought I’d say this but- you are better than this. You’re fucking British, OK! What the hell are you doing starring in a movie for violence-romanticizing, war-mongering, xenophobic yanks by violence-romanticizing, war-mongering, xenophobic yanks? As much as I hate most of your movies, I can admit, Claire, that you’re not this bad. You’ve got potential. You’ve got your Fiona Apple-ish looks, your name-recognition factor is pretty admirable for someone who chooses such crap roles, I mean the sheer amount of creepy fansites I stumbled across while researching this post has to count for something, eh? And you’re married to Dougray Scott, which is lovely. So please, lady, don’t throw it all away on racist vanity projects. Please fire your agent. And, you know, were I not concerned about making myself sound like an asshole, I’d also suggest a post-agent-firing celebratory cookie or 10. But I’m not that gal. So keep doing what you’re doing, except… not.

Anyway, tell us which actors you love to hate on in the comments!