Okay, so here's the thing about Gigli: it really wasn't as bad as we were all hoping. Sure, it's pretty bad, downright torturous in places, but no worse than any of the other bad movies I've seen recently. It's just more famously bad than all those other bad movies, which I think is why people are so fascinated by it, and so quick to jump on the "Gigli is bad" bandwagon. We like to see the very same celebrity idols we worship stumble and occasionally fail spectacularly. So when we can see the celluloidal manifestation of Madonna's hamartia in Swept Away, Britney's in Crossroads, or, say, J Lo's in Gigli, we get a certain sick pleasure from it. I hate celebrities as much, if not more, as anyone else, mostly because I am not one of them. But I tried to watch this movie through the most objective lens I possibly could. Sure, it incorporates nearly every bad movie convention: the schmaltzy music to let us know what to feel and when, the tidy and unrealistic denoument, the lovable retarded person, lots of gay jokes. But I do think the bad press surrounding the film was excessive, and makes an interesting statement about how the entertainment media operates. There was a lot of negative buzz around it when it came out, primarily due to the media's contempt for Bennifer, but if you try to remove it from that context�and that's admittedly difficult�it's just a tedious, directionless, awkward movie. It's just too easy to criticize this film, and the same critics that ganged up on it in the schoolyard dogpile are now praising "respectable" fluff like Mona Lisa Smile. And it was more fun to watch Ben Affleck spit out truly terrible lines here than it was to watch him walk woodenly through the more boring and formulaic Paycheck. I'm going to put my reputation on the line here and say that there were parts that would have worked fine in a different, tighter movie that didn't star two of the world's least favorite celebrities. And as bad movies go, it still delivered plenty of horrified laughs. It was bad in a morbidly fascinating way, like color photos of human deformities.

The five best (i.e., worst) lines from Gigli:

1. "There's suckmydick.com!"
2. "I'm the bull, you're the cow."
3. "It's turkey time ... gobble gobble! Lay some of that sweet hetero lingus on me."
4. "I'm the sultan of slick. I'm the rule of cool!"
5. "Put the clam-eater on the phone."

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