10. LONE SURVIVOR (d. Peter Berg)
The opening of Peter Berg’s supposed passion project (he volunteered
for “Battleship” to get this off the ground – pound of flesh) is actual
footage of Navy SEAL training. And as the heroic Explosions In The Sky
score suggests, this is the origin of heroes, of men who will shape the
world through brawn and attitude. And then the footage continues, and it
begins to get a bit frightening. Suddenly, these troops are being
cursed at, deprived of oxygen, tied up and brutalized. This montage ends
in these soldiers graduating from the academy and meeting with friends
and family, smiles on their faces. And then the next segment of footage,
befitting the title, features a helicopter returning to base with one
soldier, bleeding to death, punctured and annihilated. That’s the
philosophy of modern war films, where we show the sacrifices the troops
make without ever extolling the virtues of what we’re fighting for in
the first place. The rest of “Lone Survivor,” believe it or not, is even
more punishing, as a team of SEALS end up in an unwinnable situation
and proceed to get torn up in some of the most visceral gun violence
ever on the big screen. I’m not sure what this movie is really about,
but it was a lot like getting shot at for two hours.
9. DRACULA 3D (d. Dario Argento)
What is this contemporary anti-art that is Dario Argento’s “Dracula
3D”? This retro retelling of the legendary saga pretends that there’s
never been a Dracula movie made before, framing the action against a
green screen background that wouldn’t pass muster on a PBS show and
stranding poor, possibly sick Rutger Hauer with prose that no actor can
sell. It’s bad in a post-modern way, where you find it hard to imagine
that it’s being acted out by the likes of Hauer and Asia Argento, and
not a couple of castoffs from the “Tim And Eric” world. At the very
least, there is a sequence with a CGI praying mantis that ranks as one
of the few moments this year where I honestly believed I was
hallucinating in the theater.
8. BLACK ROCK (d. Kate Aselton)/YOU’RE NEXT (d. Adam Wingard)
I want this to be about the movies. I do. I want to talk about how
these two films are byproducts of the horrid mumblecore era, one that
has produced some strong films and a couple of great filmmakers, but has
also resulted in a bunch of inorganically inarticulate films about
people suffering from arrested development. I want to talk about how
both films are joyless, pointlessly brutal, idiotic horror films that,
befitting the mumblecore ethos, look like absolute shit. “You’re Next”
peppers in some amusing humor, but it’s loaded with so much more
shaky-cam bullshit than “Black Rock” that it’s basically a dead heat.
But again, and I am really not a trooper for this sort of thing, but
both films feature disillusioned, psychopathic army vets as the
villains. And there’s not one iota of believable character development
to illustrate the mindsets of these rapey assholes. In “Black Rock”
they’re dumbass blunt instruments, howling at the sky and firing wildly
after three innocent girls. And in “You’re Next,” they’re killers for
hire, mercenaries who walk into a Kevin McCallister trap because they
were paid by someone to take out a miserable family of rich assholes. I
have no qualms with negative depictions of the armed forces provided
they’re interesting, three-dimensional portrayals. But when you just
throw in some Fallujah, some racism, sexism, and general friendly-fire
hate, you just look exactly what Aselton and Wingard are: a couple of
attractive white filmmakers who hated every day they had to punch a
clock, and who openly scoff when someone says “Support The Troops.”
Maybe next time make a competent, good-looking, interesting film, and we
can talk about your hatred for the armed forces and your feeble,
de-politicized critique of the military-industrialized complex.
7. CBGB (d. Randall Miller)
Do you really have to know about CBGB’s to take issue with “CBGB”? To
note that Iggy Pop (played here, cheaply, by non-actor Taylor Hawkins
of the Foo Fighters) never actually played there? To assess that owner
Hilly Kristal (Alan Rickman, awful) was not the brain-dead slacker who
accidentally stumbled upon some of the greatest bands of all time? To
know New York so well as to realize that the picture was actually shot
in Canada? Not really, no. From the early moments of comic book pop-ups
on the screen informing the action, we can tell something’s really off.
The flop-sweat pours off this film as every d-lister shows up to
announce themselves (“Hi, we’re The Police!”) before unconvincingly
lip-synching another classic. It makes every time you hear “Life During
Wartime” feel like a squirm-fest, considering it’s only here because
David Byrne name-checks CBGB’s in the song, and as each legend shows up,
almost all of them depicted as dimbulb assholes, you start to actively
wonder if CBGB’s was that great a place to begin with. If this movie was
made to actively slander one of the greatest musical institutions of
the 20th century, congratulations guys.
6. STAR TREK INTO DARKNESS (d. JJ Abrams)
What hath “Save The Cat” wrought?
This is what Hollywood thinks of us. If we don’t watch our asses,
this is what every blockbuster will be like. Plots that don’t mean
anything. Ineffectual villains that waver between good and bad guys not
because of moral ambiguity, but because of shoddy characterization.
Endless fake conflicts. Plot threads picked up and dropped at a moment’s
notice. Logic purposely pretzeled so that viewers won’t realize the
plot is a tangle of coincidences and happenstance. Empty echoes of 9/11,
not because it’s horrible, but because it’s the vocabulary people
recognize. Ethnic white-washing. And fan-service, gleeful fan-service,
one that allows a character to almost literally poke himself into
another film to ask what the rest of the plot entails. This is some
end-of-cinema shit, people.
5. ARTHUR NEWMAN (d. Dante Ariola)
I sat through the entirety of “Arthur Newman,” a melting vanilla ice
cream of a movie, wondering exactly who it was for. The idea of Colin
Firth as a disillusioned middle-age burnout is re-enacted in a manner so
politely that it seems all participants didn’t want to break any glass.
But then there’s Firth’s golf pro alter ego going doggystyle on Emily
Blunt’s Manic Pixie Dreamgirl and you realize this this script was
probably at one point some incisive observation of an spoiled older
white man at a crossroads, greenlit because it hit home to some graying
financier, then smoothed down to a generic sheen when said financier
realized it was too incisive, too combative. You almost feel bad,
because the film is terrible in several boring, familiar ways (there’s
nothing less relatable than both Firth and Blunt using affected, clearly
fake American accents) that you’re certain anyone who hated it likely
forgot about it immediately. Indeed, I had to consult my notes to
realize I saw this earlier in the year, and not in spring 2008 or
December ’10. Rail on the blockbusters all you want, with their endless
orgies of CGI and violence, but this was probably the single most boring
film of 2013.
4. THE SECRET LIFE OF WALTER MITTY (d. Ben Stiller)
A remake in name only to the original Don Knotts movie, this comic
fantasia aims for the sort of emotional immediacy found in credit card
commercials, where bank accounts are an imagined limit, and any working
stiff white guy can blast the doldrums away with a little high
adventure. But you wouldn’t want the comforts of home too far behind –
billed below director/star Ben Stiller (vanity project) and participants
Kristen Wiig (paid handsomely), Sean Penn (thought he was in different
movie), Shirley McClaine (wanted to get out of the house), Adam Scott
(embarrassed) and Patton Oswalt (shameless) should be Papa John’s and
Cinnabon, among the various intrusive brand names that decorate this ode
to capitalism and greeting card reality, the product of a millionaire
who has long such lost his interest in telling plausible stories about
real people. “Carpe diem” has never been so insincere.
3. GROWN UPS 2 (d. Dennis Dugan)
Congratulations to the $247 million (!) worth of people globally who
watched Adam Sandler and his cohorts defecate onscreen for almost two
hours in “Grown Ups” and said, “Hey, maybe this one won’t be wookie
rape.” You clearly have second chances in your heart that I can’t
muster, forgiveness that blossoms inside you in a place where surely I
am dead inside. I assume you are all active community members and
charity contributors, and not inhuman assholes who think farting on
Salma Hayek is a killer punchline. Bless your hearts, for surely you
aren’t murdering cinema, but actually giving your heart to the rest of
us, showing us the way to forgive when multi-millionaires sleepwalk
through expensive vanity projects flaunting their own flagrant bad
taste.
2. R.I.P.D. (D. Robert Schwentke)
Bad movies used to be like found objects, accidental low budget
curiosities soon forgotten because of an openly dismissive attitude from
its principals, all of whom wish they could be someone else. In the
modern era, they can’t be hidden, because most of the time studios spend
hundreds of millions on them, stranding big stars in front of
gratuitous special effects that are overused to the point of
pornography. In that respect, “R.I.P.D.” is something of a perfect found
object, an item so wrong that, for a minute, you forget at one point it
was meant as a multimedia phenomenon, and not something to be
thoughtlessly tossed into the wilds of a summer marketplace in a way
that everyone wished they could forget. Jeff Bridges looks not only
annoyed to be doing his umpteenth angry cowboy routine, but determined
to will this desperately Looney Tunes-ish premise to life by sheer
obnoxiousness, even if “broad idiot comedy” isn’t in his wheelhouse. And
poor, pretty, dumb Ryan Reynolds is somehow playing his resurrected
lawman as if someone told him it was a “Lethal Weapon” reboot, full of
misplaced angst and outright rage. Both of them look pained to spend
time with each other, and fully aware they’re in the midst of a disaster
of a film that doesn’t work in any single way.
1. THE PURGE (d. James DeMonaco)
Man, Platinum Dunes is nothing if not consistent. Every year, these
guys put out a serious contender for worst of the year (2014’s “Teenage
Mutant Ninja Turtles” is an early frontrunner) and they may have topped
themselves with this ugly, stupid stabfest that fails on almost every
conceivable level. The premise - involving one day of unmonitored crime -
is spectacular in how quickly the logic dissolves. The violence is
poorly shot, dreadfully lit and neither enjoyable nor incriminating. The
idea of these crimes being thinly-veiled class warfare for rich whites
against under-equipped poor minorities is also fairly ripe - except that
this is the type of movie that wants to indulge in the violence it
scolds you for enjoying, while showing a racist side to its characters
despite only one black character who nobly sacrifices himself for a
white family and doesn’t even have a name. In other words, just another
jackass movie made to critique the same shitty cheap-thrill ugliness of
people while not-so-secretly loving every minute of it. Motherfuck
Platinum Dunes to the high heavens, now and forever.
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