If you care (and you obviously shouldn’t), Ishtar is a place near Morroco. In ISHTAR, two aspiring songwriters, Rogers (Warren Beatty) and Clarke (Dustin Hoffman), are so desperate to perform their atrocious songs in public that they’ll take a gig in Ishtar earning peanuts doing standards for morons. Then again, everyone in this movie is dumb, and I suppose I am too for actually watching it.

Rogers and Clarke as absolutely terrible, so the movie forces us to watch them perform over and over. Clearly these scenes are played for laughs; the whole movie, in fact, is actually a comedy disguised as the unfunniest thing you have ever seen. Simply, ISHTAR is flawed from top to bottom, starting with the casting. Warren Beatty is an okay actor, but he is a movie star first, and as a movie star, we cannot accept him as a loser songwriter who can’t sing and is hopeless around women. Adding a slight accent to the Warren Beatty persona does not make him a loser. Isabelle Adjani plays a female that everyone mistakes for a man, but the gag doesn’t work because she looks like a curvy, attractive female. It’s a gag that not only doesn’t work, it aggravates you.

Adjani’s character gets Rogers and Clarke mixed up in a revolution in Ishtar that involves a map, some camels, and Charles Grodin. If ISHTAR was boring and unfunny while they were just songwriters, you can only imagine what happens when they become CIA agents with the fate of the Middle East on their shoulders. In my wildest dreams, I would not have imagined the movie could be this bad. If you’re unfamiliar with ISHTAR, it was briefly famous for being one of the most expensive flops in history. Of course, a box office failure isn’t automatically a creative one. Here, the American public actually did the right thing in burying this film.

I love it when a bad movie unintentionally describes the experience of watching it. In ISHTAR, audiences watching Rogers and Clarke are shown looking bored and confused, two emotions that are at the heart of any ISHTAR viewing experience. When the picture returns to bad singing after an hour of bad spy intrigue the on-screen audience now looks obligated to applaud - there’s even a voice that shouts “Applaud!” after one of the songs. One audience member turns to another and goes, “Unbelievable!” My favorite moment is when Dustin Hoffman, dehydrated and exhausted in the middle of an endless desert gets down on his knees, begins to cry and sobs, “What have I done?” Too late for forgiveness, Dustin.

After one highly fragmented viewing, ISHTAR has plummeted into my Bottom Five Films of all time, right along such giants of garbage cinema as AN ALAN SMITHEE FILM. If you learn anything, ANYTHING, from reading my column, learn this: Never watch ISHTAR. I could not be made to watch it again for anything less than a lottery-size dollar amount. If Warren Beatty and Dustin Hoffman were Hollywood neophytes in 1987, they would have never made another movie again. But since they were established stars, they’ve been allowed to make lots more films in the 15 years since then, including BULWORTH, MAD CITY, and SPHERE. Keep up the good work, guys.