10 Bad Movies Oscar-Winning Directors Went On To Make

3. Rock The Kasbah - Barry Levinson

Rock the Kasbah Bill Murray
Open Road Films

Barry Levinson's first and only Oscar win came all the way back in 1989 for the Tom Cruise/Dustin Hoffman-starring Rain Man, and though he'd have an incredibly varied career that spanned comedy, horror and plenty of TV work, he was never able to replicate that prior awards success.

And Rock The Kasbah is his latest, most disappointing cinematic effort to date. The film follows music manager Richie Lanz (Bill Murray), who discovers a young teenage girl with a stunning singing voice, eventually becoming her manager as she competes in Afghanistan's version of American Idol.

You'd think that a director who's dabbled in drama and comedy many, many times before would be able to successfully meld the two, but Levinson provides neither a strong dramatic beat or a hearty laugh at any point during the movie. Everything just plods along, things just happen, and the movie just ends. It's the very definition of 'time-waster'.

Even worse, Rock The Kasbah is also mildly offensive, attempting to draw laughs with its stereotypical portrayal of ex-pats and trying to use the distressing reality of its setting for comedic effect, and it fails on both fronts.

It's anger-inducing when talented people make a bad movie, and besides Murray, Rock The Kasbah features Bruce Willis, Zooey Deschanel, Kate Hudson and Danny McBride, making its low quality all the more infuriating.

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Danny has been with WhatCulture for over ten years, and is currently Doctor Who Editor and WhoCulture Channel Manager, overseeing all of WhatCulture's Whoniverse coverage. In 2022, he took charge of WhoCulture and has grown it into the biggest Doctor Who channel on YouTube, and one of the biggest Doctor Who communities on the web full-stop. He has been writing and video editing since his early teens, and first got a taste for content creation after making his own Doctor Who trailers, off the back of a burning obsession with the Matt Smith era of the show. Like many his age, he first got into Doctor Who with the 2005 revival, but has since gone back and fallen in love with the classic years too. If you need someone to recite every Doctor Who episode in order, or to give you a random factoid about the making of Gridlock, Danny is the person to ask!