Each day a different year in review list. Here's Nathaniel R...
2018 was unpleasant in so many real life ways that grousing about unpleasant things within our favorite escape hatch from reality seems ungrateful. By and large, we love the movies here at TFE and I think I speak for most of the team in saying that we can all pretty much find something to love even in the worst ones. Nevertheless, allow me a quick exorcism of the things I disliked the most this year to get them out of my system. A very important caveat though: As my own boss I can skip whichever films I have no interest in or which receive intense critical drubbings. Therefore my "worsts" are rarely the worsts and sometimes not even terrible just unsatisfying, if you catch the drift. But these films and performances just didn't work for me or actively discouraged benefit of the doubt.
Much kvetching after the jump...
WORST WIDE RELEASE SCREENED
Beautiful Boy - The central duet was lopsided, erring on slight underacting to one side and slight overacting to the other. The framing device -- some sort of mysterious interview format with a nothing payoff later in the film-- made this offputting from the start. It did not improve.
The Darkest Minds -What you get when a book genre (YA Dystopia) and movie genre (people with superpowers) both become so popular that everyone involved in their latest iterations thinks "people will love it because they love this kind of thing". That's the only explanation that makes sense for why this project was so poorly conceived, ultimately generic, too-earnestly acted, tonally tentative, and utterly dull. You still have to tell us a good story, even if we go into it with fondness for the genre. The Darkest Minds ends in that aggravatingly familiar "We're going to be making lots of sequels,' way that our franchise culture encourages even though it becomes an immediate lie if a film flops.
Deadpool 2 - Added nothing to what the first film already accomplished in terms of tonal irreverence, meta commentary and "humor". Worst than redundancy though is the deeply hypocritical messaging. This franchise, yes the very same that is so gleefully enamored by violence and making each murder and gruesome death gut-bustingly hilarious, asks us to unironically invest in the central plot message directed at an angry teenager 'don't become a murderer!'
Ready Player One - 'Not the right audience, for this!' he fully confesses up front. See, I dont play video games much beyond random apps on my phone and vastly prefer human actors to animated avatars of "humans". That said what hurts most is that the film is dated and ugly and undisciplined in its visual clutter. It's like Steven Spielberg set out to make his very own late stage George Lucas picture! It's also soulless in its fealty to pop culture, with a touch of Ralph Breaks the Internet's branding mania without the excusing wit. Remember when movies using familiar brands and characters didn't feel cynical but touching and inventive? It was way back in the Roger Rabbit / Toy Story days.
WORST LIMITED RELEASE OR FESTIVAL FILM SCREENED
Alternate subtitle: How did a talented director make a film this irredeemably bad?
The Death and Life of John F Donovan
Xavier Dolan is well known for having a terrible temperament about people not fawning over his movies. So please imagine this paragraph as a secret concerned whisper amongst friends: I'm worried about Dolan. Everything goes wrong here from the sexist politics (there's actually a scene where a man tells Thandie Newton she should smile and we're meant to take his side and be happy along with her when she finally succumbs to his "charms" instead of being a sullen career-minded bitch) through the full embrace of unexamined self pity of the young, beautiful, and famous set (it's so hard, guys!), and on to the perplexing, nay even unto agonizing, camera and music choices (slo-mo family reunions in the rain, scored with full pop songs! Why not?). This latter complaint is something of a shock given how visually and sonically hypnotic Dolan's best films have been. Let's all hope that Dolan gets back on the road after this detour away from, you know, quality.
Discreet
That I made it all the way through this vapid coy "art" film about closeted gay hookups / self-help tapes /possible serial killing / possible incest or unexamined childhood trauma / and some other suggested-but-never-engaged-with plot points and themes is a miracle because it was painfully withholding and self serious from its first scene. Writer/director Travis Mathews made two joyfully explicit queer things early in his career: the gay profile docuseries In Their Room and the sex positive narrative feature I Want Your Love about a group of diverse and sexy gay friends and acquaintances in San Francisco. Did Mathews time with James Franco after those triumphs, when he codirected that bad and erotically compromised art film riff on 1980's Cruising (Interior. Leather Bar) ruin him? Time will tell. But perhaps he has another I Want Your Love in him?
Kings
This tonally scattershot, questionably acted movie about a romance between a single mother (Halle Berry) and her curmudgeon neighbor (Daniel Craig) during the LA race riots was dropped unceremoniously into theaters and with good reason. We nominated the French-Turkish director Denis Gamze Eguven right here at TFE for her Oscar-loved debut Mustang. But I'm shocked to report that this is the single biggest drop in quality I can personally remember seeing from a first to a second film in ages and ages. Hoping it was a fluke since we all have off days off months.
Mapplethorpe
Identity politics are often a terrible way to judge art (lots of bad faith takes out there on so many movies these days) but this movie made me forgive every such impulse to harshly judge a film for those reasons. Because why on earth did a straight director feel she was the right person to tell this radical queer story? Mapplethorpe is essentially a spiritual "sequel" to the also lame Tom of Finland last year (also, tellingly, from a straight director with zero affinity for homoerotic image making) as its yet another textbook example of how radically queer artists eventually get coopted by the hetero mainstream once they're part of history rather than in the present shaking it up. I really hated this film specifically for its offensive blandness. That's no way to treat an artist who was once widely shocking, even to his own community, and frequently dubbed "obscene". How is it even possible, we want to know, to not make a daring NC-17 movie from this material? If I recall correctly there's just one tame shot of a real penis in this whole entire movie about an artist who was veritably obsessed with shoving big phalluses in your face in provocative ways. (Just about the only daring thing this movie does is posit, briefly and halfheartedly, that Mapplethorpe's fetishizing of black bodies was perhaps a bit racist.)
Somehow this won an award at Tribeca and it comes out in March 2019 but do not be fooled by the kind reviews for Matt Smith's performance as the artist. Smith aside -- he does what he can -- this is a needlessly tame artistically conservative biopic. Wouldn't Mapplethorpe have hated it?
MOST UNSATISFYING PERFORMANCE BY A LEAD ACTRESS
Alicia Vikander, Tomb Raider
I count myself as a fan given her engaging and nuanced early screen performances but on the evidence of this unexciting reboot it was a fool's gamble to take her particularly intimate acting skills into the more stylized realm of the action epic. It was deadly also for the young Oscar winner to invite direct comparisons to the inimitable super-sized screen charisma of Angelina Jolie. What's more, the movie's bizarre urge to offer us a more realistic and gritty take on a wildly unrealistic adventure franchise, did her no favors. And what was with the squealing and general wimpiness of this previously tough character? Her Lara Croft is still determined and resilient but never ever kick-ass cool.
MOST UNSATISFYING PERFORMANCE BY A LEAD ACTOR
Steve Carell, Beautiful Boy
He's given this performance so many times now that it's depreciating in value. Where once his soft spoken minimalist nuance felt like a revelatory even daring dramatic choice (especially given the more outrageous comedy persona that initially defined him), now it's repetitive and limiting. Shake it up, Carell. Surprise us again.
MOST UNSATISFYING PERFORMANCE BY A SUPPORTING ACTRESS
Emilia Clarke, Solo: A Star Wars Story
I've tried with her. I really have, because we're stuck with her after the phenomenal success of Game of Thrones. Sadly to date I've yet to see anything particularly engaging about any of her screen performances. In the latest Star Wars film she's been handed a variation of noir's archetypal bad girl love interest, 'the shady dame working both sides' part. However stock that part might be it's nevertheless given cinema dozens upon dozens of rich performances by inspired actresses. But Clarke comes off more muddled than convincingly duplicitious, her character's hearts being not so shady. Let's just repurpose an exasperated line from Cabaret
You're about as fatale as an after-dinner mint!"
When actors with far less screen time (Thandie Newton, Woody Harrelson, Donald Glover) or even no screen time at all (Phoebe Waller-Bridge) are more watchable, there's a problem somewhere in the character conception, performance, or the writing. Or all three.
MOST UNSATISFYING PERFORMANCE BY A SUPPORTING ACTOR
Mike Myers, Bohemian Rhapsody
SAG had to be trolling us with that Ensemble nomination, right? That's how I've been getting through the days since. Very Lars von Trier of them... not that they would get that reference since they only watch big hit American movies. Even without Myers "performance" Bohemian Rhapsody has trouble with characterizations that are either too broad or too flat and, in either of those cases, visibly influenced by the personal feelings (or vendettas) long-harbored by the surviving members of Queen.
But maybe this is actually performance art and it's Mike Myers who is trolling us? Perhaps the former superstar understands that he's in a hopeless self-aggrandizing movie. Perhaps he realized he was just there to be a punching bag for every chip on every musician's shoulder as the stand-in for all vile and clueless recording industry executives? And maybe he got so into the silliness of the score-settling within his scenes that he was egging the Hair and Makeup team on "NO! NO! DON'T HOLD BACK. MORE WHISKERS. BIG! BIGGER !!. MAKE ME VERITABLY SUB-HUMAN" And then he just couldn't stop once the cameras were rolling.
Let's end on a positive note!
BEST WORK DESPITE THE MOVIE/ROLE
The following artists made terrific contributions to films that arguably didn't deserve them. It's probably not easy to do stellar work with middling material so a big round of applause for these people, elevating their surrounding...
Candice Bergen in Book Club
Listen I enjoy Book Club for what it is, an elaborate and fairly pleasant excuse to spend time with four actresses we don't see enough. None of them had material worthy of their award-winning gifts but nobody had it worse on the page than Bergen who was given a hoary cliche of a character to play and potentially humiliating scenes involving being an unloved old cat lady and an easy lay. Instead she's an absolute hoot, especially on a randy successful date once she puts herself back out there again. Well done.
Claire Foy in Unsane
The kind of movie that gets more distasteful the more time you spend with it but Foy is working her ass off to carry the initially unsettling 'is she or isn't she crazy?' vibe.
Gwendolyn Christie in The Darkest Minds
Is she the only one in this movie that knows how bad it is? Bless her for running so forcefully into her cartoonish interpretation. She's a momentary delight in this dull silly dystopia as a throwaway sidebar villain.
Ol Parker directing Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again
Still in shock that he took this previously inept franchise and made something that's never unintentionally ridiculous out of it with the simple act of being, oh, good at his job.
Maya Rudolph in Life of the Party AND The Happytime Murders
How has this national treasure not had entire films or shows regularly built around her? She's always elevating everything whether its cameos in TV sitcoms or limited parts in otherwise less funny movies. And she's been giving this thankless greatness for years now. Wake up storytellers! She keeps giving it better than she gets or we deserve. The only project she's had recently that's on her level is Big Mouth and we can't even see her in that since it's voice work (albeit Emmy statue-worthy vice work). REWARD HER WITH GREAT MATERIAL.
Julian Day costuming Bohemian Rhapsody
One might argue that this was an easy job given the wealth of already vivid source material for flashy fun and memorable rock star looks. But the costumes Day is serving us to conjure the ghost of Freddie, are surely the best part of this movie outside of the actual soundtrack provided by this deservedly legendary rock band.
MISERY LOVES COMPANY SO GET IT OUT OF YOUR SYSTEM. WHICH FILMS AND PERFORMANCES ANNOYED YOU THE MOST THIS YEAR? After we purge we can feel nothing but joy for the next couple of weeks as we celebrate all that was delicious about the cinema of 2018.