Year in Review. Every day a new wrap-up. Tonight, the "worst" of the year...
Since we are absolutely determined to make 2017 the greatest year it could possibly be despite oppressive circumstances, let this post serve as last call for excessive negativity. Get it all out of your system in the comments, mkay? We'll also put a positive spin on these dubious "awards" for ungreat things at the movie theaters this year...
WORST OPENING SCENE(S)
Hacksaw Ridge begins with such overworked hokey cartoonish Americana and Andrew Garfield plays his eventual pacifist hero as such a Forrest Gump style village idiot that it's something of a miracle that the movie becomes a surprisingly watchable war drama thereafter.
Even Garfield manages to turn his initially quite awful (sorry) performance around in the final hour of the film. I personally haven't seen a decent / good movie start so much like it was a terrible movie since Juno, have you?
WORST MIDDLE
Suicide Squad is so inept that it never gets past character introductions. Criticisms that it was just a movie trailer with a real movie running time proved to have deadlier aim than Will Smith's Deadshot.
Best Acting in Bad Movies, and other "Honors" after the jump....
WORST ENDING
The sitcom jokiness of Sully's final shot has to be a strong conten--OH NO WAIT. This prize definitely belongs to Swiss Army Man which squanders nearly all of its fantastical verve and metaphoric potency for a 'the f***?' reality-based shrug. Positivity Twist: They're both pretty good movies otherwise...
WORST PLOT POINT
Batman vs Superman. Both of their mother's names are "Martha" -- this changes everything! Positivity Twist: On the other hand it's always a relief when "boy" genre movies acknowledge that women exist at all aside from "love interest on the sidelines to assure nervous audiences that the heroes are heterosexual"
Guarantee: some little kid somewhere wili come up with more inventive action scenes while playing with these toys than the movie ever does
WORST ACTION SEQUENCES
Battling those crumbling rock hordes of The Enchantress in Suicide Squad. Like the metal armies in Ultron or the character-free aliens of Avengers or Queen Ravenna's glass soldiers in Snow White and The Huntsman or any of those anonymous hordes in blockbusters, only with EVEN LESS personality somehow. Positivity Twist: Suicide Squad is a truly titanic achievement in bad action sequences so points for really committing! Even if we were to cite four other nominees for a category, they'd all be from Suicide Squad in which not one punch, shot, kick, stab, tussle, or swing ever carries any weight or thrill or consequence. The only physical movements that set the heart racing are when Amanda Waller cuts a steak, enters a room, or... um... exists in the frame. This is Viola Davis we're talking about.
MOST PERSISTENT / ANNOYING CLICHE
No matter what decade it is, no matter the quality of the movie otherwise, a good number of filmmakers will always think the audience is dumb enough to need a "recap" in the middle of the movie or before the climax usually involving a super cut editing montage or a voiceover repetition of past dialogue. This recapping urge makes sense on television but why are filmmakers (or even a lot of TV creatives) STILL editing ahead for commercial breaks and constantly interrupted narratives even though most movies and many television shows no longer or will ever play in the increasingly passé network TV format of constant commercial breaks. Netflix, HBO, DVD, and many streaming services let you watch your show or movie from start to finish unless you personally would like to pause it. This is a long way of saying that it was super annoying when The Birth of a Nation recapped all of its atrocities just before Nate Parker picked up his axe, as if you'd already forgotten the horrors you'd been watching for 90 minutes.
WORST USE OF TECHNOLOGY
Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk... all that trouble in frame spreed and "realism" and how it affects cameras and literally every department (if you listen to the filmmakers discuss it) and for what? Why should movies view "reality" as the end goal? Reality has reality covered; Movies are dreams. Positivity Twist: Let Billy Lynn serve as a cautionary tale of 'if it aint broke don't fix it.' Cinema is beautiful and in no need of "fixing" and Billy Lynn reminds us of this because Ang Lee's non "fixed" movies are soooo much better. Come back home to traditional storytelling, Ang Lee, at which you excel. It served you very well for two decades of beautiful human drama. Click your heels together three times...
POTENTIALLY TERRIBLE MOVIE (OR MAYBE IT'S GOOD --WHAT?) WE SKIPPED
The animated jukebox musical Sing sounds atrociously annoying even within the context of its positive reviews so, no, unless it gets Oscar nominated and we're forced into it.
REPORTEDLY BAD MOVIES WE AVOIDED (AND THEIR RT RATINGS)
Alice Through the Looking Glass (30%), The Angry Birds Movie (43%), Assassin's Creed (19%), Ben-Hur (25%), Collateral Beauty (13%) Criminal (30%), Divergent Series: Allegiant (12%), Independence Day: Resurgence (31%), Nine Lives (11%), and Zoolander 2 (23%),
MOST OVERAPPRECIATED MOVIE OF THE YEAR
Deadpool is to 2016 what Shrek was to 2001. People will eventually be embarrassed by the praise they threw its way and the throne room they furiously built for it atop the Pop Culture Tower and how many sequels they were willing to sit through but for now... Positivity Twist: enjoy the hell out of what you enjoy and screw the haters (oops... that's The Film Experience this time.)
MOST OVERAPPRECIATED PERFORMANCE OF THE YEAR
Margot Robbie as "Harley Quinn" in Suicide Squad. Rarely has such a single-faceted star turn won such drooling admiration from seemingly every corner of the universe. This 30 Rock repurposing tweet best sums it up.
LEAKED FOOTAGE OF MARGOT ROBBIE IN SUICIDE SQUAD: pic.twitter.com/dxYbfcjygS
— the raddest roach ™ (@kurtzperson) August 6, 2016
WORST SEXUAL POLITICS
It can be exhausting caring about this -- oh how the world disappoints in this realm, year after year -- but among the more problematic movies this year in this regard were The Birth of a Nation which seems to view women as property even while it rages against the notion of people as property and Passengers which can't ever quite ever get out from under its queasy Stockholm Syndrome romance. But while those movies are very compromised in this regard, we must give this prize to ANY movie that casts an Academy-leve Actress in an insultingly limited "don't worry, honey!" role or its inverse the "judgy-faced soon-to-be-ex-wife/girlfriend". We're talking to you Sully (Laura Linney), The Founder (Laura Dern), and Genius (Nicole Kidman AND Laura Linney)
DUBIOUS ACHIEVEMENT IN PHONING IT IN
Jennifer Lawrence in Passengers. She's not even trying! I mean did anyone watching this believe that her journalist character had ever written a word in her life? Nothing about Aurora felt authentic beyond her unmistakable attractiveness which figures into the plot since her fellow Passenger (Chris Pratt) pines for her before her cryogenic sleep is interrupted. I dunno Jen. Maybe do some character backstory, improv exercizes, dream journalling, picking a secret about the character that you never reveal? There are reams of actorly tricks to choose from to find a way into a character. Try something. Your charisma IS enormous but history is full of faded stars with once giant sized screen presences who were lazy about it.
PEARLS BEFORE SWINE
TIE. In which actors work their asses off for movies that don't remotely deserve them. Positivity twist: These actors will not go down with the ship so better luck next time they book passage
Emily Blunt in The Girl on the The Train
Blunt's eery mimicry perfection -- if you've ever spent time with someone in perpetual states of shifting but always dangerous blood alcohol levels it's ALL there -- and her febrile disorientation are so emphatically delivered that she's practically approaching Isabelle Huppert in Elle realms of co-authorship. The SAG nomination was a surprise but not actually all that undeserved. It's really too bad that the movie can't remotely keep up with her, as sloppy as Emily is precise.
Michael Shannon in Nocturnal Animals
The Globes argued the case for Aaron Taylor Johnson's impossibly and revoltingly sexy literally shitting redneck as the standout in Tom Ford's potboiler, but Michael Shannon is the only actor in this movie that seems to understand that he's playing a fictional scene-stealing conceit within the lurid context of a possibly awful book within a definitely gross movie.
TERRIBLE OR BRILLIANT?
We never answered this question about The Neon Demon so... maybe it's both? It's definitely one to check back in with in five to ten years and see how it's aging.
BEST BAD MOVIE WE MIGHT ONE DAY LOVE ?
TIE. 2016 offered up two bloated ugly beauties that struggled to make a lick of sense or choreograph their setpieces gracefully around their unwiedly premises and maybe the actors were all in different movies tonally but who cares. The truth of it, at least from our experience, is that Gods of Egypt and Warcraft were both somehow endearing despite or maybe because of their 12 foot tall flaws. Like, we'd legit watch a sequel should either of them be dumb enough to make one.
MOST CONFUSED PICTURE OF THE YEAR
Rules Don't Apply. Theoretically long gestation periods can help focus your goals. In the case of this Howard Hughes biopic that's not really a biopic and Young Hollywood romantic comedy that's not really a romantic comedy or "young," and Historical drama that's not really inside its drama or its history, it only seems to have confused whatever originally motivated Warren Beatty to make it. It has its moments (particularly when it focuses on Howard Hughes) but we're watching at least three different movies struggling for dominance.
NINE WORST PICTURES OF THE YEAR
With the obvious disclaimer that this means "of films we watched this year" and surely greater atrocities exist -- Positivity twist: If they exist, we escaped them!
Batman v Superman - toxic masculinity, origin story addiction, and that joyless color palette hamper its chances of doing anything worthwhile. But at least it has a smidgeon of fun with Wonder Woman's debut which makes it our favorite of this Bad Movie Nine.
Desierto - sickeningly violent and even (SPOILER) dog-torturing
Genius - plainly sexist, unremittingly heavy-handed, and dishwater dull
The Huntsman: Winter's War - a joyless cartoon that misses most of what made its predecessor a success
I Saw the Light - totally inert by-the-numbers biopic
Midnight Special -there's mysterious and ambiguous and then there's so vague you barely exist. Thinks of itself as a great movie which somehow makes it worse
Nocturnal Animals - Just... no.
Suicide Squad - it escaped the wrath that greeted Batman v Superman but in virtually every way it's actually an inferior film. (Maybe people like it more because it's less pompous about itself?)
X-Men Apocalypse - we're now sufficiently embarrassed that we ever rooted for Bryan Singer to get his hands back on this series. He only had a few ideas about these great characters to begin with and he used those all up on his first three efforts.
And the "winner" is Nocturnal Animals, the most loathsome movie of the year that also suffers from the biggest case of Emperor's New Clothes syndrome. That said Desierto's snuff-film "action sequences" are just as disgusting and Suicide Squad trumps the whole list if you're concentrating on more objective measures of quality in filmmaking. Squad remains the most ineptly made movie of the year I had the displeasure to watch: shoddy construction, one-note characterizations, and that dread 'what was the point beyond making coin' feeling of soullessness that came up with the lights in the movie theater.
WHICH FILMS AND PERFORMANCES MADE YOUR BLOOD BOIL OR DISAPPOINTED YOU THE MOST? And for something more positive: Who do you think most elevated bad material this year?
Year in Review
Coping Mechanisms Movies Taught Us
25 Female Performances: Stage, Record, Screen
Most Coveted Things
Grief and Letting Go
The Ladies Who Lush
Biggest Foreign Hits of the Year
Highlights of the Blog by Month
Jan | 88th Oscars | March | April | May | June | July | Aug | Sept | Oct | Nov | Dec