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Jim Chen, the stalwart dean of the U of Louisville School of Law, has started a bad movie meme over at Jurisdynamics, and he's tagged me first.

Nice try, Jim, nominating Caligula. I think, however, we can reach lower: I nominate a bad movie from an actress whose work I normally like. I loved Melanie Griffith in Working Girl, but something went woefully wrong in A Stranger Among Us.

In this movie, Ms. Griffith plays a detective who has to go undercover in a Hasidic community. I don't know why the mix went wrong: the director's great (Sidney Lumet); the writer's great (Robert J. Avrech); the cast is great. But the movie's glimpse into life inside and outside the Hasidic cluster just fell flat, and Ms. Griffith's delivery of a line something like "stop, or I'll shoot" in her soft voice just didn't work for me. I was originally considering nominating Sheena, which was a very, very, VERY bad movie, although the flamingo-wrangler did a good job.

The difference, though, is that Sheena must have known it was going to be bad from the get-go. My guess is that people hoped for more from A Stranger Among Us.

Ann Bartow, of the wonderful blog Feminist Law Profs: I'd love to hear from you next. Tag, you're it!

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