The Worst Films of 2012

I saw 125 new movies in 2012 and 38 of them were good or great. There were another 20 of them that were horrible, including some of the most incompetent, incoherent filmmaking I've ever seen in my life. 

Here is a list of the worst movies of 2012: 

1 Les Miserables

2 The Intouchables

3 The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel

4 Prometheus

5 The Dark Knight Rises

6 The Hunger Games

7 The Avengers (3D)
8 Flight

9 The Sessions

10 The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey (HFR 3D)

11 Not Fade Away

12 Red Hook Summer

13 For Ellen

14 Friends with Kids

15 Natural Selection

16 The Five-Year Engagement

17 On the Road

18 W.E.

19 Damsels in Distress

20 The Sound of My Voice

The Worst Films of 2010

So 2010 was a very good year in bad movies. There was a lot of garbage released. Most of it was from Hollywood, though there were a bunch of independent movies as well.

One note I want to make is that Birdemic is one of the most sublimely horrible films I've ever seen in my life. It might be worst than Tommy Wiseau's The Room (and possibly worst than Troll 2, though I've never seen that). Every part of it is terrible, the story, acting, direction, music, editing, sound editing and special effects are so bad it seems like it has to be a joke... but if it was a joke, they wouldn't be so convincingly terrible. I gave it its own section of the list because it deserves it. It is the Michael Jordan of bad movies.

Eat Pray Love was totally offensive too, so that gets 1A. In a normal year it would be the worst of the year, but it was unlucky enough to be released the same year as Birdemic - a true masterpiece of shit!

Oh - and Oliver Stone is the big winner with Wall Street 2 and South of the Border both on this list. He had a heckuva year!

The Bottom Ten Films of 2010:

1 Birdemic: Shock and Terror

1A Eat Pray Love
2 The Runaways
3 Black Swan
4 Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps
5 Twilight Saga: Eclipse
6 The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest
7 The Last Airbender
8 Salt
9 Dinner For Schmucks
10 Greenberg

Honorable Mentions:

Middle Men
South of the Border
Alice in Wonderland -3D (I don't know where this blogpost went. Sorry. The movie sucked.)
Enter the Void
Shutter Island
You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger
Hereafter
Fair Game
The Agony and Ecstasy of Phil Spector
Holy Rollers
Somewhere
Valhalla Rising

Salt (Saturday, July 24, 2010) (83)

Salt is a totally ridiculous, recycled and dumb summer action blockbuster. There is absolutely nothing fresh about this film- I've seen it a hundred times before.


Evelyn Salt (Angelina Jolie) is a CIA agent who one day interviews an ex-KGB general who says that she herself is a Russian sleeper agent who is going to kill the Russian president the next day in New York. Surprise, surprise, she escapes her D.C. office and runs up to New York by Bolt Bus (I'm not kidding... I wonder if she used the free wi-fi on board). There she seems to kill the Russian president and triggers a series of events that nearly lead to nuclear war (omigod - yes! Nuclear was with Russia is totally something that is going to happen tomorrow).


Her boss and main buddy in the CIA is Ted Winter (Liev Schreiber) who doesn't believe she is a Russian spy and tries to defend her to all their spy buddies. At some point he has no choice but to admit that she probably is a spook, but then she gets away again and gets into the White House for a meeting with the President because she's dressed like a drag king (again- I'm serious). Now the question is will she start the nuclear war, will she kill the Prez or will she stay loyal to the United States.


It seems to me the only reason you would cast Jolie is because she's hot and gets you that vavavavoom t&a scene where she strips off her clothes or gets nekkid with some hot foreign dude. But for no reason, there is no sex to speak of in this whole film. And the film comes in at under 100 minutes, so it's not like they had to cut the sex scenes. I don't get that. Maybe director Phillip Noyce and writer Kurt Wimmer thought that would have been too cliche to put in. Instead they went with a movie about nuclear war with the Russians... in 2010.


The writing and direction in this film is so terrible it's surprising it was released at all. At one point when there is a gunman shooting at people in the White House (because, of course, you can attack the President inside the White House) a short bald man turns to the assailant and says, "don't kill me, I'm just the National Security Advisor." Really?! That passes for good dialogue in Hollywood these days? That's a joke of a parody of action movie dialogue. If you were making a movie making fun of dumb action movies, that line might be too silly to include.


Beside this, the action scenes are terribly done and totally unbelievable. For a moment I'll forget that one of the big action scenes takes place inside the White House where the secret service agents around the President are basically stuffed suits, no better at fighting than ninja movie bad guys (one karate chop to the neck and they out cold). One of the big chases is in New York, after Salt has apparently killed the Russian president and after she escaped the CIA in D.C. the day before. The NYPD (why they're involved is beyond me) take her in a police cruiser across the 59th Street Bridge for some unknown reason - but then get caught in traffic on the bridge, giving our heroine enough time to break some windows and escape. Again - really?! That would happen? That's even hard to believe in the world of dumb action flicks.


This film gave me nothing. The story is totally unoriginal with a few requisite dumb twists that are not all that surprising. The writing is terrible overall and the directing is laughable at best and horrible at worst. Who gives a crap about the acting? - it was lukewarm throughout (though why Schreiber has a southern accent in the film is bizarre and his execution is horrible). There is no reason to see this movie. It's not even stupid summer fun. It's terrible.


Stars: 0 of 4

The Lovely Bones (Tuesday, December 15, 2009) (195)

One of my most significant and important movie memories was in the fall of 1998, when I went to see the Robin Williams movie What Dreams May Come. I remember it mostly because it was the first time I watched a movie and realized before it was over that it was a piece of garbage. Up until that point I had passively watched movies and not really thought about whether they were good or not - but this one jumped out at me as being particularly bad.

As I watched The Lovely Bones recently, all I could think about was how much it reminded me visually and viscerally of What Dreams May Come. Director Peter Jackson uses similar CGI elements that are so contrived and Thomas Kinkaid-esque that they have no depth to speak of and are simply alienating. It also has a somewhat similar, boring story - one that never really connects to anything I care about and never really comes to a sensible conclusion.

Based on the 2002 Alice Sebold best-selling book, the story is simple, if rather foggy. The film is narrated by Susie Salmon, a 14-year-old girl who tells us in the opening scene that she has was killed in 1973. We see a brief lead-up to how this happened and then a truncated version of the murder itself. Then we see her parents and police in her Pensylvania town look for the murderer.

Through the film, Susie exists in a middle zone between heaven and earth, but it is never clear why she is there. There are elaborate visual sequences showing her discovering this fantasy world where she can be on a sunny beach and look at snowy mountains ten steps away. For reasons that are never clear, she cannot move up to heaven and must stay in this dreamy limbo place.

Unlike the movie Ghost, say, it is not that she's waiting for her murderer to be discovered before she can move along. She seems to just be hanging out - and even she seems to not know where to go or what she's doing there. We also see the lives of her family (especially her father and younger sister) being turned upside-down by the pain they feel at her loss.

I think one of my biggest problems with this story is that there seems to be a beginning, and then there is what appears to be an end - but by the time we get there, it is not totally clear where we are or what we have just seen taking place. I can be sure that I've seen some action and some dialogue, but I don't know how it all connects or why I am supposed to care.

The script is terrible (maybe the book is too - but I haven't read it). Not only is the structure messy, but the dialogue is ridiculous. To make matters worse, the inclusion of a narrator is one of the most unnecessary elements I've ever seen. She tells us almost exactly what we are seeing on screen - so if she wasn't there telling us what we were seeing, we could understand it well just the same. I

n addition, Susan Sarandon, playing Susie's grandmother, comes in at one point after her death, when her parents think they need help keeping the house and looking after her siblings. It is never clear, though why she is there, as neither one of the parent's seems that busy or distracted that they can't keep doing their duties. There's a terrible comic relief sequence of Sarandon vacuuming and sleeping while drunk and smoking cigarettes. It's feels out of place and rather inappropriate tonally. For the most part, Jackson seems to put style over substance concentrating on lavish computer-animated settings in the middle-world and pretending that helps advance the narrative (which it does not do). These sequences are indulgent and pointless.

Throughout the film the acting is pretty terrible. Mark Wahlberg (who I normally like) is much too earnest and feels much more like Dirk Diggler playing Brock Landers in Angels Live in My Town (from Boogie Nights) than a concerned dad. Rachel Weisz doesn't seem to react in any particularly strong way. She gets very sad and then upset with her husband for getting obsessed with finding the killer, then leaves the house to go to California for rest and relaxation. She's not much of an emotional part of the story - and basically as unnecessary as Sarandon.

The worst thing about the acting is that Jackson, a Kiwi, has a ton of non-Americans cast in small roles. Almost every single one of them struggles with their American accent at some point. This is terrible and something that could be easily fixed (I think) in post-production (with ADR dubbing). Stanley Tucci, who plays the creepy neighbor murderer (I'm not giving anything away - this is explained early in the film and in the trailer), has a bizarre creepy affect. Why he couldn't just speak normally is totally a mystery to me. Not only does he have to look and behave like a freak, but he hast to talk like one too. If Jackson is so deaf to American accents, he should not be making movies set here (he can stick to movies in Elvish instead).

After finishing the film, I had to think for awhile to figure out what I had just seen because it basically didn't make sense. Aside from being incredibly boring and much too long (it runs 135 minutes), I don't think much really happened beyond from the initial 'girl-is-murdered-in-a-cornfield' set-up. There is no story arc and no important character development. The direction is horrible and script is choppy and minor-league. The look of the animated parts is terrible, over-done and more nauseating than paradisaical. Overall this is a failure of a movie.

Stars: 0 of 4

Antichrist (Sunday, October 25, 2009) (152)

This is an open letter to Danish filmmaker extraordinaire Lars von Trier. Please note, I do not recommend that anyone see his new film Antichrist. It is shocking and disgusting and terrible. OK - maybe you should see it because it is so wonderfully bad. How von Trier is considered a modern master is beyond me. WARNING: This letter has lots of spoilers and might not be totally SFW. Again: Don't see this movie.

Dear Lars von Trier:

I wish I could say that when in Antichrist a dead fox with its guts spilling out jumps up and says directly to the camera 'chaos reigns' that I knew the picture was a piece of garbage. But sadly, this fact was clear to me way before this sequence. Your movie is totally fatuous, quasi-intellectual sophomorism. And you are a conceited demagogue.

Your film opens with what I think is a very elegant slow-motion sequence with Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg fucking wildly in the shower and their baby falling out an open window to his death, all while a Handel aria plays. This is nice, but is not even a close of anything to come. Once the baby dies, the Gainsbourg goes into a state of extreme shock (she seems to be bi-polar) and gets hospitalized.

When she wakes up (after a month in a coma!) Dafoe, who is some sort of psychiatrist, decides he doesn't like the treatment she's getting, so he flushes her meds down the toilet and resolves to treat her himself. As he treats her, she goes through several stages of 'recovery', with some episodes of crying, self-mutilation and, again, jumping on her husband to fuck him (I mean, why not!?). At a certain point, he decides that they should go to their country house deep in the woods, because he believes part of her problem is that she's afraid of nature (or something like that). Once she gets there, she begins to get better, but ultimately goes fucking bat-shit and attacks her husband.

Your need to show graphic sexuality on screen makes no sense to me. Yes, it's very frank, but I'm not sure it really helps tell the story. I don't need to see vaginal penetration in the opening sequence to understand they are screwing (I think you were trying to make a visual allusion to the stabby violence that would follow, but this was still pretty juvenile). I don't need to see Gainsbourg hit Dafoe in his erect cock with a paving stone and then jerk him off until he spooges blood on her shirt. I don't need to see her drill a hole in Dafoe's leg and then attach a grinding wheel to it with a wrench as a 'man-anchor'. I don't need to see her cut off her clitoris with a rusty scissors. None of these details give me a deeper understanding of anything and are basically all totally fucking gross.

I guess your point in this movie is that men keep women down and hurt them, so it is a woman's right to fight back. Or maybe that men make women into monsters, so we should not be surprised when women fight back. But this argument falls apart once we know that she is bi-polar and is suffering from an extreme depressive episode followed by an extreme manic episode. Also, Dafoe's biggest sin we know about is that he tries to become her shrink (I guess that's something about man's control over women), but this is not the worst sin in the world. Yes, it is very unethical, but it should not lead her to castrating him, or whatever she does. You also show Gainsbourg putting the kid's shoes on the wrong feet to torture him - which means either she's an incredibly negligent mother, or an outright evil one who hurts her child so directly. She is not an easy woman for us to love.

Most of the dialogue in the film is hilariously bad. Several times in the screening I went to, the audience laughed AT the film. At one point, after Gainsbourg has been depressed for several months and unresponsive to Dafoe's treatment, and he says earnestly, 'This is not going to work.' I mean - really, Lars?! That's the best line you could come up with? When the fox said 'chaos reigns', just about everyone in the theater laughed (again) - but aside from the ridiculous line, I don't even understand what the fuck it means. Is the fox a mythological symbol of chaos? Is the woman chaotic? Is there something about the relationship between men and women that is chaotic? Is the fox the Antichrist? I don't know.

Throughout the film, the cinematography is striking, but frustrating. I found that the blue-green, hyper-stylized look of the film made me forget at moments how bad the movie was and enjoy looking at it visually. Maybe it's unfair of me, but I want my bad movie to look really bad too. I think it's cheesy for your turd of a film to look good. (It's also very anti-Dogme 95 of you to have a film look so fancy, bt-dubs.)

I have a few final questions for you: Why is the film set in Seattle? It seems like a totally random place. Is this a criticism of American culture? I don't know how emblematic of America Seattle really is. (I also object to the fact that I don't really associate Seattle with snow, but rather with rain -so I think the snow in the opening sequence is lazy overkill and visual obfuscation). Do you object to psycho-pharmacology and talking therapy? Do you think one is better than the other? At one point it seems like you hate all therapy, but then you let the women who is in bad therapy hurt somebody, so maybe you like therapy. Which parts of the body did Willem DaFoe's body double play? What does this film have to do with Andrei Tarkovsky and why did you dedicate the film to him? Have you considered retirement, and if not, why not?

Most importantly: This film seems to break almost all of the Dogme 95 ten rules. Was this done on purpose? Do you think Dogme is bullshit the way we do? Of all the broken rules, #6 (no murders or weapons) is especially shot to shit - why did you do this? Do you think it makes you an ego-maniac and a hack to write a manifesto and then get sick of it after less than 14 years?

I appreciate that there is a credit at the end for 'research on misogyny' - but I think you are really a misanthrope - at least that's the only explanation I can figure on why you would make this movie - because you fucking hate humanity and want to make us suffer like dogs.

Sincerely,

Aaron

No Stars

Julia (Thursday, October 8, 2009) (141)

Most bad movies have one or two interesting or fun elements in them. It might have a terrible script or horrendous acting, but might look nice or have a good scene. Julia has nothing good at all in it. The script is terrible and unfocused with bad dialogue and a ponderous narrative. The acting is not good, including Tilda Swinton, who has had some good performances in her career, but struggles here with an American accent. The direction is loose and directionless and the visual style is uninspired.

Julia is an active alcoholic who goes to an AA meeting where she meets another drunk, probably schizophrenic woman. That woman has a plan to kidnap her son away from her husband's rich family in order to make some money. She asks Julia for help for the plan and Julia agrees, sensing that she can make an extra buck. She hatches her own plan to kidnap the kid from the mother and extort more money form the rich family. The plan goes pear-shaped and Julia is left with the kid and no cash - so she runs for Mexico with the boy (huh?!).

One of the biggest problems for me is that none of the characters are likable and their behavior is irrational and the story is disgusting. Julia's drunkenness is never really addressed and it's not clear that she has the slightest bit of a goodness in her body. When the boy is crying and soiling himself (more than once) she's oblivious and heartless. But the strange thing is that Julia is not supposed to be an evil character - it seems that director Eric Zonca shows her as a tragic character who has made a string of bad choices. I guess she has an addictive personality, but her decisions are irrational, even for someone who drinks a bottle of vodka before noon.

Overall this is uncomfortable and uninteresting and just plain boring. I don't find kidnapping and drunkenness interesting or enjoyable to watch - and I also don't know why I would want to watch it for 150 minutes. The script could have easily been cut down by 45 minutes at least (structurally, there are four acts - which is sloppy, to say the least). Swinton should be ashamed of her thin, shrill performance here.

Stars: 0 of 4

The Informers (Tuesday, October 6, 2009) (139)

The 1980s in Los Angeles were a time of synthetic fabrics in various shades of brown, pink and light blue, big permed hair (sometimes with blond tips), small, fast cars, the end of modernism, buckets of cocaine, skinny people and new electronics. Such a trite list might sound tedious but it contains the only moderately entertaining aspects of The Informers, a lifeless movie about the end of modern civilization in the Reagan years.

The film follows several different dull stories of people living in LA in 1983. There are several kids in their early 20s who seem to screw, snort lines of coke and screw; there are a few adults who work in Hollywood and screw one another and their kids' friends; there are some lowlifes who deal drugs and kidnap kids for some white slavery ring. Uh - that's about all there is.

This is really a painfully boring movie with a big cast and writers behind it. Billy Bob Thornton, Kim Bassinger, Mickey Rourke, Chris Isaac and Winona Ryder all struggle with Brett Easton Ellis and Nicholas Jarecki's terrible script.

The art direction and production design, not to mention costumes and make up, are all worthy of praise. Each scene is beautifully set up and looks absolutely perfect for the time period. But these technical aspects are the only part of the film that are not totally mind-numbingly banal.

Stars: .5 of 4