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1. Rocky Balboa (2006)

If you put any ten random people in a room together and asked them what the worst movie they have ever seen is, three of them will tell you it was Rocky Balboa. Three. Every time. That’s how bad this movie is. This movie is so bad that when you Google search “the Rocky Movies,” this film does not show up. This movie is so bad that the 60 year-old Sly Stallone boxing a man 35 years his junior does NOT detract from this film. You will believe Sly is a boxer more than you will believe Geraldine Hughes is a human being with real emotions. Most scenes in this movie are so stilted that they read like SNL skits commenting on the horrific acting.

And so Rocky Balboa makes the ‘Most Offensive’ list for lowering the standards for what we’ll call ‘a movie.’ When trash like this gets put in theaters we lose more than the $9 of our ticket purchase. We lose a bit of trust with the movie industry; That trust that they will screen out (pun!!!) the shlock and shmegma that gets made against many producer’s better judgments, and we will keep paying increasing ticket sales for whatever they put out next. After watching Rocky Balboa, I had to go home and screen Shawshank Redemption before returning to the theater for Beerfest, Borat, and Little Miss Sunshine.

2. 40 Days and 40 Nights (2002)

Ok. Imagine a script that goes like this. Good looking twenty-something woman in the city swears off sex following an intensely bad relationship. During this period of abstinence, she meets a new guy who she falls for. Right before she is ready to give herself to this new partner, her ex-boyfriend breaks into her apartment while she’s sleeping and has sex with her. She only wakes up as he is finishing. Though she is humiliated by what has happened, she is laughed at by her friends and shamed by her new lover.

Not your cup of tea? A little too rapey for you? Yah, agreed. Nonetheless, that is the lion’s share of the plot of 40 Days and 40 Nights except ‘the girl’ is Josh Harnett’s character. The ex-girlfriend actually does break into the guy’s apartment and rides him while he’s sleeping. The movie continues like that is no big deal. That is a big deal! When a candy-pop romantic comedy geared toward young adults plays down the seriousness of sexual assault, no matter the gender, that is corrupting what young minds see as the norm. This film makes the Most Offensive list for its lack of self awareness regarding the ramifications of what begins as a silly game and ends like an episode of CSI:SVU.

3. If Lucy Fell (1996)

Walking out of a movie theater mid-film is an extreme move. Something has to go down seriously wrong with the film or your pants to motivate someone out of a comfortable seat in a temperature controlled room.

Eric Schaeffer’s character Joe has been lusting after the woman in the apartment building across from his. This woman, Jane, is played by Elle Macpherson. (If you are young, and are just seeing a picture of this beautiful woman now, stop what you are doing and immediately go rent Sirens (1993). Joe finds some success in the art world and subsequently ends up inside Jane’s apartment with her. As Joe makes his way down Jane’s body, Jane makes some off-handed remark about getting turned on being watched by Joe across the way.

Joe, the semi-stalker guy, was previously unaware that Jane knew he had been watching her, and this realization somehow triggers a sudden outpouring of self-righteous morality while he is head deep below Elle Macpherson’s waist. He stops, says some version of “I don’t think can’t do this,” stands up, and walks out of Jane’s apartment. Almost simultaneously, every male moviegoer in my party screamed obscenities at the screen and left the theater. (Judge for yourself, the offending scene appears below.)

Talk about breaking the illusion. There is no way in human history that a heterosexual male in the throes of passion with the girl of his dreams is going to stop said passion for any reason short of getting his unit cut off or having a parent die. Even in the later of the two situations, the funeral arrangements may have to wait another 75-90 seconds. This tear in the fabric of reality is so offensive that it ruins the entire film. Oh, and the actual plot of If Lucy Fell involves a pact to jump off the Brooklyn Bridge if Joe and his friend Lucy don’t find stable relationship partners by the end of the month. (Spoiler Alert: Shockingly, they find each other) So yah, it kinda romanticizes the hell out of suicide as well. Not cool.

4. Crash (2004)

It seems ironic that the 1996 film Crash, which deals with characters who seek and act out their sexual arousal by purposely getting into increasingly violent car accidents, did not make the list. The 2006 film with the same title, however, is number one with a bullet. When this movie won Best Picture, any lingering admiration for “The Academy,” dissipated like steam through a sewer grate.

This movie intends to shine a light on the everyday racism that is still alive and well in LA. I was expecting a storyline mixed with nuance, bias, and lots of second-guessing interpersonal interactions. Most modern racism inhabits these ambiguous situations where racist behaviors can be explained away by factors other than race. Racism today doesn’t slap you in the face, but rather it consistently ignores you and waits on the white person next to you.

Crash, instead, lines up scenario after scenario of people getting pissed off at strangers and screaming a potpourri of racist slurs in their direction. An n-word here and a Latino slur there, this kind of old timey in-your-face racism just doesn’t ring true for LA in the 21st century. More corrosively, uninformed viewers leave the theater feeling vindicated that they’ve learned something about racism in this day and age, when in reality, the movie is a noisy distraction of 1980’s racism set in 2004. Lost in this garbage bag of a movie is any real education about the function of race and racism in modern day America.

5. Highlander 2: The Quickening

This pick may be the most personal of the bunch. After a first movie that introduced a premise of immortality so appealing that even after this clunker of a movie, it still bore a successful TV mini-series by the same name. Chris Lambert’s wood-chipper of a voice aside, Highlander 2: The Quickening is a cavalcade of semi-related scenes held together by violence and ozone repairing earth shields. All of the fertile material regarding the rules and regulations that come with being an immortal are set-aside in favor of more slashing and cutting — both in terms of sword play, as well as the haphazard editing which sends the viewer bouncing around across time and space. There is a flashback to life back on the planet Zeist. Need I go on?

While The Quickening may not climb to the levels of offense that some of the earlier entries on this list reached, it makes up the gap by disappointing every movie goer who entered the theater expecting the second installment of the new sci-fi cult movie classic. Instead, the viewers were subjected to a slideshow of unrelated special effects and newly trimmed necks, which ended up decapitating this potential movie franchise.

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Or, most years it’s awarded. In 1987, the Diagram wasn’t handed out because no book title was deemed odd enough. Imagine the controversy! And that was nothing compared to the dispute among lovers of odd book titles caused by the 2008 Diagram winner: The 2009–2014 World Outlook for 60-milligram Containers of Fromage Frais. That heartwarming tale, it turned out, was written by a computer! (These days the tome is a collectors item that fetches $800 per copy).

Will this year’s winner also stir debate? Will there even be a winner? As the world awaits with baited breath the announcement of the 2013 Diagram Prize tomorrow, we only hope that the selection will live up to past Diagram winning titles like Managing a Dental Practice: The Genghis Khan Way and The Big Book of Lesbian Horse Stories.

Click on the covers below to learn more. And if you have a favorite title — or a book you feel was snubbed — our comment section awaits.

For the 2013, the nominees are . . .

God’s Doodle: The Life and Times of the Penis

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Goblinproofing One’s Chicken Coop

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Lofts of North America: Pigeon Lofts

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How Tea Cosies Changed the World

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How to Sharpen Pencils

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Was Hitler ILL?: A Final Diagnosis

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Which is why we appreciate anything that helps us laugh about this condition called parenthood. And the four books we review below certainly do that. If you already have a child, these tomes can provide much needed humor break. They also make for an appreciated baby shower gift or a congratulatory offering to new parents.

Safe Baby Handling Tips

Very few books have ever made Spot Cool Stuff laugh out loud. Safe Baby Handling Tips is one of them.

Simple, yet hysterical, cartoon drawings give dos and don’ts of interacting with babies — the one’s below give a good sense of how the whole book goes. As a bonus, there’s a “Wheel of Responsibility” on the front cover that mom and dad can use to divide baby chores in roulette fashion.

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Let’s Panic About Babies!

Pregnancy is a strange and bloated time, but more important, it’s a time when every single one of your decisions will leave an indelible and unmistakable imprint on your baby forever.

It’s funny because it is true.

Unlike all the three other selections in this review, Let’s Panic About Babies! is a book an adult can curl up in bed with and read. The mix of practical advice and humorous observations will both delight and scare the hell out of any parents-to-be, making this book a baby shower gift with some attitude.

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Go the F**k to Sleep

Warning: Do not actually read this book to your kids!

Go the F**k to Sleep looks like a regular baby book. It has the drawings, the font size and the rhyming prose of a regular baby book. But the language is most certainly not.

This particular book selection is a bit too edgy and, well, crude for Spot Cool Stuff’s tastes; we had originally decided not to include it i this post. Then we were in the store the other day and saw some people laughing at — and then purchasing — this book. So check out an example page below and decide for yourself.

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Baby, Mix Me a Drink

Babies love the contrasting colors and interesting shapes in the Baby, Mix Me a Drink board book. Parents chuckle at the bar tending skills they might be imparting to their little ones.

Because what could be funnier than teaching babies about alcohol. Except maybe teaching them about virtually any other adult subject. Which is why it makes us happy that Baby, Mix Me a Drink is part of the Baby Be Of Use book series.

If you are looking for a book selection with a bit more of an appropriate subject matter, check out Baby Do My Banking or Baby Fix My Car. Of course, if a LESS appropriate subject matter is what you’re after, there’s always Baby Get Me Some Lovin’.

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In fact, we only one we know of one such tome: The Maze of Games. And that book isn’t even published yet. It’s a concept project that’s currently open to investors at the crowdfunding website Kickstarter. And what a cool concept it is.

The idea for the The Maze of Games is inspired, at least in part, by those Choose Your Own Adventure books many of our readers of a certain age no doubt read as kids. Except, instead of choosing your own adventure, it’s more like solving your own adventure.

On any given page of the book you are likely to find either a portion of the story or a puzzle. The prose tells the tale of two teens in Victorian England who accidentally summon a magical creature. The puzzles — word games, logic puzzles and other kinds of mindbenders — contain the answer to a larger mystery hidden within the book. (Click on the example page to the right to see it full-sized in a new window.)

As if that weren’t puzzley enough, there’s a catch: The pages aren’t in order! How you flip through depends on the path you take through each of the book’s four mazes.

Fortunately, find your way the video, below, doesn’t involve solving a riddle. Watch it to learn more about The Maze of Games

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With that in mind, here’s a review of our three favorite travel-themed great board games. As with all games and toys reviewed on this website, each of these three games are ones that adults can enjoy playing too.

Passport To Culture

What should you do before entering the home of a person from Mali: A) whistle, B) knock on the door or C) clap twice outside the door?

That’s one of the many questions posed to players of Passport To Culture. The object of the board game is to fill a passport with stamps by answering multiple choice questions about international culture, geography, language, history and customs. Some of the questions (especially the history ones) are ones based on general knowledge. But the majority tend to involve educated guessing. That makes it fun for adults to play with younger kids — or even on their own sans children.

Four players can typically finish a full game of Passport To Culture in under an hour. We also like how the question cards don’t only give you the answer but also some background info too. So it is for our example question, above. Turn the card over and you’ll learn:

Clapping twice indicates you have arrived. It is not customary to knock on the door of a Mailian’s home when visiting.

Number of players: 2 to 6
Manufacturer’s recommended ages: 10 and over (though we think strong readers as young as 7 could enjoy playing too)

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10 Days In . . .

Out of the Box

From game manufacturer Out Of The Box comes a series of four map-based strategy games: 10 Days In Europe, 10 Days In Asia, 10 Days in Africa and 10 Days in the USA. Each game plays the same way: Players use transportation and state/country cards to organize a hypothetical 10-day trip. The object is to be the first to make your trip arrangements. As such, the game deals with the geography of travel more than the cultural aspects. It’s easy to learn. And great for aspiring travel agents.

Number of players: 2 to 4
Manufacturer’s recommended ages: 10 and up

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Travel Blog: Europe and USA

Z Man Games

Spot Cool Stuff writes a travel blog. So how could we not love a game called Travel Blog? Even if it’s premise is rather unrealistic:

At the start of each game, a blog called Boundless Project hires each player to travel around either the United States or Europe (your choice). The object is to travel to your writing assignments as cheaply as possible. The player with the most money left over at the end wins. (“As a travel blogger, you won‘t get rich” the game’s instructions warn. Yeah, tell us something we don’t know!)

As with the 10 Days In . . . series (reviewed above), Travel Blog is a map based game that’s mostly about geography. But there’s also a finance/budget aspect that we like. The game is played in euros, which is a bit weird when you are traveling around the U.S. but a good introduction to the currency for non-Europeans. A full game with 3 players takes about 30 minutes.

Travel Blog is by Z Man Games, which makes several other board games that also touch on a travel scene. Check out Cities if you are planning a trip to New York, Paris, London or Berlin

Number of players: 2 to 6
Manufacturer’s recommended ages: 8 to 12 years (though we’d put the range at 7 to 14)

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This handy, little lightweight journal features clear plastic sleeves and acid-free paper for protecting your stubs^†. In the margins, a lined writing area is for jotting down notes — keep a list of special memories, scores or playlists, a count of how many beers you drank at each event, etc.

Included with the book are adhesives for keeping your tickets in place inside their sleeves. We also like how the inside back cover has a pocket for storing other related items.

The downside of this format, of course, is that it isn’t as versatile as a general scrapbooking album. But for an easy-to-use memory-keeping diary, the The Ticket Stub Diary is just the ticket.

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^† Ticket stubs, that is. “Protecting your stub” sounds like a really bad euphemism.

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