Ten Worst Movies of 2010
#1
01-10-2011, 06:19 PM
Ten Worst Movies of 2010
Ten Worst Films of 2010
by Mary Pols
MSN Movies
No one is completely qualified to put together this list, because no critic sees every awful movie, but based on the fact that my editor at MSN sent me to "Cop Out," "The Tooth Fairy" and "Jonah Hex" this year, I more than familiar with the genre of total stinkers. But you may quibble with my list. You may say, what of "The A-Team," "MacGruber," "Marmaduke," "The Prince of Persia," "The Human Centipede" or the "The Expendables"? You may have suffered through them, but I did not. Speaking of, I left two movies at the halfway point this year -- which obviously I can't do if I'm reviewing, and I try not to bolt from more than one a year, just so it doesn't become a habit -- which means that I can't include them on this list. (Pssst -- "Machete" and "The Tempest.") But I feel pretty good about feeling pretty bad about the following movies.
10. 'Sex and the City 2'
In real life, vacations abroad can be friendship killers. But we thought our pretend relationship with Carrie, Samantha, Charlotte and Miranda was sacred. We were psyched to check in on Charlotte's new baby, see who Samantha was screwing, maybe hear about the fertility treatments we assumed Carrie might have started and enjoy Miranda's customary tartness. Instead we got dragged off to Abu Dhabi with the shallow sisters. The ladies cooed over the tacky and the tawdry, enjoyed their own entitlements (all expenses paid!) and had the gall to recoil at the restrictions Arab culture places on women, as if they'd never given a thought to the lives of female others anywhere. The entire plot was constructed on vague dissatisfactions: Carrie wasn't sure about her marriage, Samantha was worried about her aging vagina, Miranda was pondering the price of career (working late since 1998, darling, and you just noticed?) and Charlotte was stressed out by motherhood (send over your nanny and then we can talk). All of these are legitimate female concerns, but they felt like thin excuses to get us into the theater. Just treading water, the ladies seemed done with growing. We felt done with them.
9. 'For Colored Girls' Ntozake Shange's 1970s play/poem "For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf" was such great source material. The movie had many, many talented black actresses you'd like to see in something better, from Thandie Newton and Kerry Washington to Phylicia Rashad and Kimberly Elise (especially her). But consider the person sewing it all together: Tyler Perry. His love of the material doesn't give him an understanding of why it worked originally. And apparently, Shange's Tony Award-winning emotional connection between the characters and what they experienced in the world as black women wasn't enough; he had to connect them with a narrative and location that turned them into contemporary Tyler Perry characters. But it was the long intercut scene of operatic foolishness that landed this one on the list: Macy Gray, cigarette hanging out of her mouth, drunkenly performing a back-alley surgery on a teenager while Janet Jackson sits grim-faced through an opera next to her low-life husband. While yet another character is being victimized. Too much, Tyler Perry! Too much!
8. 'Jonah Hex'
I respect Josh Brolin's right to push himself in new directions as an actor, to challenge his own status quo. Maybe he thought this garish comic book adaptation, which called for him to play the horribly scarred Jonah Hex, a Civil War vet seeking revenge against the general (John Malkovich) who murdered his wife and son in front of him and burned off half his face, was his Charlize Theron "Monster" moment. But while monstrous -- Jonah can talk to the dead, opening the door to many special-effects corpses chattering their teeth at us -- "Jonah Hex" was no "Monster." Incomprehensible and reprehensible, this fake folksy tale of homegrown terrorism was the emptiest movie of the year, cinematic space occupied primarily by flying axes, kegs of dynamite and suspiciously powerful firearms. It was obviously an ode to brutality, but those weenies at the Motion Picture Association of America rated it PG-13, which is nearly as obscene as them giving "Blue Valentine" an NC-17 (at least they backed down on that one). The cast includes Megan Fox playing a prostitute. That seems like honest work compared to the things Malkovich does to get his paycheck.
7. 'The Last Song'
I don't care how many "herbal" bong hits Miley Cyrus takes, I just want her to take some acting lessons. Sticky sweet sentimentality is the manner of all Nicholas Sparks stories -- somebody falls in love, somebody dies, usually with tragic overlap -- but young Cyrus made it extra bad. She plays Ronnie, a rebellious New York teenager sent to spend the summer on the Georgia shore with her estranged father (Greg Kinnear). He's dying -- wouldn't you know it? The one good actor in the cast -- but Ronnie doesn't know about his impending demise. So she's super bratty to him, pouty, snarling, refusing to eat whatever he cooks, stomping off down the beach in a huff on a daily, if not hourly, basis. She'll be damned if she'll have a good time at Daddy's house, until a rich hottie (Liam Hemsworth) comes along and softens her heart by helping her save a nest of fragile sea turtles. On the plus side, since Sparks wrote the role just for her, Ronnie is a promising musician, but she doesn't sing. And she stopped playing piano to spite her father after he divorced her mom and moved away. Daddy's loss is our gain.
6. 'Kick-***'
I love Chloe Moretz. I think she was actually quite good in this movie, as good as she could be in a vile piece of dreck. A movie that yanks one's moral chain can be a good thing, because let's face it, some of us are awfully close-minded. Movies can give you that little shove that makes you consider another point of view. However, I feel absolutely, 100-percent solid with my position that there is no entertainment value in depicting a child on-screen using the kind of language that barely befits the likes of Chelsea Handler or killing dozens of people with knives and swords. It's a gross party trick, a joke designed to tickle the funny bones of snickering louts everywhere. And other than the goofy pleasures of Nicolas Cage, this kind of nasty stunt was the only card this gratuitously violent comedy had up its sleeve. But the scene that plagued me the most was the one where Hit-Girl dresses up in the schoolgirl outfit to get into Frank D'Amico's (Mark Strong) building. She's styled for provocation, like an older girl pretending to be a sexy schoolgirl (a la Britney Spears). Except, she is a schoolgirl. Director Matthew Vaughn took advantage of the unique beauty of his child star, 12 when the movie was made, to push a button so uncomfortable that I think most critics just ignored it.
5. 'The Tourist'
I actually had a terrible little Canadian movie where Julianne Moore and Amanda Seyfried share a steamy sex scene on this list (directed by Atom Egoyan, it's called "Chloe" and is less fun that it sounds), but then Angelina Jolie strutted by my aisle seat in her Audrey Hepburn getup, followed by a shuffling Johnny Depp in his PJs, and bent to whisper in my ear, "At least they had chemistry. What about us? Don't we rate on your list?" Angie, yes, you do! With a list like this, you have to include the disappointments, the movies you thought had a shot at being good. "The Tourist" had the world's biggest movie stars, Venice location, a talented director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck ("The Lives of Others"), but it was shockingly lame. The tone wavered between subdued thriller and limp comedy, as if no one was sure what they wanted the movie to be. Jolie at her haughtiest seemed like someone who wouldn't give a disheveled dullard like Depp's character the time of day. But "The Tourist" lands on this list because of its final twist. And now that it's been out a bit and people don't seem to be flocking to it, I'll address that with a (spoiler alert) note to filmmakers: Be careful with your cases of mistaken identity that turn out to have not been mistaken, because you might end up making the rest of the film seem pointless and silly.
4. 'The Back-up Plan'
Jennifer Lopez plays a New York pet store owner who is so sick of waiting for the right man that she gets artificially inseminated. You go girl! Except her character, Zoe, doesn't actually seem like she'd willingly take on that kind of a complicated scenario. She's squeamish, silly and kind of shallow. In real life, she'd be trotting off to a sample sale, not shopping the sperm banks. We wonder, how is the little lady going to make it on her own? Wait, just as Zoe is leaving the doctor's office, she bumps into a guy who turns out to be the man of her dreams (Alex O'Loughlin). They bicker, of course, but the fates conspire to bring them together again repeatedly until they finally consummate their attraction in a barn full of the cheeses Stan has made. That's fitting, since the movie is cheesy. But it's also offensive, making pregnancy itself seem woefully appealing, painting a picture of single mothers as man-hating witches and sending the message that female empowerment is cute and all, but the only happy ending is one that includes "I do." Also, on behalf of the Society to Promote True Depiction of the Female Orgasm on Film, I would like to point out that no woman, not even a highly hormonal pregnant one, ever reached climax from having her neck kissed.
3. 'I'm Still Here' If it had been a real portrait of a celebrity meltdown, it would have been tragic on multiple levels. Joaquin Phoenix really would be a lost soul, a diva indulging in his rap fantasy while treating everyone around him with paranoia, cruelty, rudeness and stupidity. He appeared to do drugs on camera, got it on with a hooker, fired a member of his entourage and went from Oscar nominee to horrifying bore. Had it been real, director Casey Affleck, who is married to Phoenix's sister, would have sold out his messed-up brother-in-law in the name of a film that appealed to the baser instincts of human beings, namely that desire to witness failure, not just professional failure, but failure of character. Instead "I'm Still Here" was a silly prank, a test of how gullible our celebrity-obsessed society really is, hiding under the umbrella of performance art. Most people had doubts going in -- the Letterman business always smelled like a hoax – and the film itself offered clues within the credits: Phoenix's father was "played" by Affleck's father, and Hawaii had stood in for Guatemala. But Affleck kept up the lie through the Venice Film Festival, and then the truth started to slip out in the following days, probably when they decided it wasn't so fun to have everyone thinking they were creeps. Guess what? We still think you're creeps!
2. 'Inception' What a lot of pretentious hooey. I admit a bias against one-last-job movies, namely because I feel as though I see at least a dozen of them every year, but it was "auteur" Christopher Nolan's deliberate obfuscation that set my teeth on edge. Leonardo and his gang of architects, thieves and drug experts build dreams in order to implant ideas (or steal them, which might have made for a more interesting film). For some unclear reason, the entire gang (including miscast Ellen Page, the under-used Joseph Gordon Levitt and Tom Hardy, the only reason to see the film) have to traipse along every step of the way. We've got to endure three levels of Cillian Murphy's character's consciousness just to prolong the movie, spice up the locales and keep us confused enough to not notice that Nolan's Very Important Film has no actual source of urgency. Who cares if Cillian's dad's company gets broken up and sold off in parcels? The only aspect of the film that does have some emotional freight, the matter of Gloomy Gus Leo being reunited with the kids he had with that nutjob Marion Cotillard, is something Nolan doesn't deign to officially resolve. That would be too simplistic for him. He wants to keep us hanging, tantalized, so he leaves the top spinning. Whatever. Any movie that owes as much to the adventures of James Bond as this one does is just not that deep.
1. 'The Last Airbender'
Oh my God, my eyes. My ears. My brain. Did I really endure this unredeemable movie? Now what was it about? There was a sulky kid named Aang (Noah Ringer), an Avatar and Buddha type who supposedly had the capacity to throw air around. Plenty of people could move fire or water or earth with their minds, but this kid was special. With training, he'd be able to do all those plus push air around, which would mean there'd be balance in the universe again. Or something. Hard to stay focused with the endless moves to new locations and nonsensical babbling on about Kingdoms of this Hemisphere and that Southern Iceberg. Aang trains by doing a lot of meditating, an act that never transfers well to the screen (see "Eat Pray Love," a contender for this list), as well as some pouting and foot stamping (again, not that fun to watch). There were good guys (Jackson Rathbone and Nicola Peltz) and bad guys (Aasif Mandvi and Dev Patel), and they were unified by the fact that they were all actors led into the lion's den by their director, M. Night Shyamalan, who presumably must have praised them for their wooden delivery and/or ferocious overacting. At least we can finally move on from the hope that Shyamalan will someday make a good movie again.
What were the worst movies you saw last year?
by Mary Pols
MSN Movies
No one is completely qualified to put together this list, because no critic sees every awful movie, but based on the fact that my editor at MSN sent me to "Cop Out," "The Tooth Fairy" and "Jonah Hex" this year, I more than familiar with the genre of total stinkers. But you may quibble with my list. You may say, what of "The A-Team," "MacGruber," "Marmaduke," "The Prince of Persia," "The Human Centipede" or the "The Expendables"? You may have suffered through them, but I did not. Speaking of, I left two movies at the halfway point this year -- which obviously I can't do if I'm reviewing, and I try not to bolt from more than one a year, just so it doesn't become a habit -- which means that I can't include them on this list. (Pssst -- "Machete" and "The Tempest.") But I feel pretty good about feeling pretty bad about the following movies.
10. 'Sex and the City 2'
In real life, vacations abroad can be friendship killers. But we thought our pretend relationship with Carrie, Samantha, Charlotte and Miranda was sacred. We were psyched to check in on Charlotte's new baby, see who Samantha was screwing, maybe hear about the fertility treatments we assumed Carrie might have started and enjoy Miranda's customary tartness. Instead we got dragged off to Abu Dhabi with the shallow sisters. The ladies cooed over the tacky and the tawdry, enjoyed their own entitlements (all expenses paid!) and had the gall to recoil at the restrictions Arab culture places on women, as if they'd never given a thought to the lives of female others anywhere. The entire plot was constructed on vague dissatisfactions: Carrie wasn't sure about her marriage, Samantha was worried about her aging vagina, Miranda was pondering the price of career (working late since 1998, darling, and you just noticed?) and Charlotte was stressed out by motherhood (send over your nanny and then we can talk). All of these are legitimate female concerns, but they felt like thin excuses to get us into the theater. Just treading water, the ladies seemed done with growing. We felt done with them.
9. 'For Colored Girls' Ntozake Shange's 1970s play/poem "For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf" was such great source material. The movie had many, many talented black actresses you'd like to see in something better, from Thandie Newton and Kerry Washington to Phylicia Rashad and Kimberly Elise (especially her). But consider the person sewing it all together: Tyler Perry. His love of the material doesn't give him an understanding of why it worked originally. And apparently, Shange's Tony Award-winning emotional connection between the characters and what they experienced in the world as black women wasn't enough; he had to connect them with a narrative and location that turned them into contemporary Tyler Perry characters. But it was the long intercut scene of operatic foolishness that landed this one on the list: Macy Gray, cigarette hanging out of her mouth, drunkenly performing a back-alley surgery on a teenager while Janet Jackson sits grim-faced through an opera next to her low-life husband. While yet another character is being victimized. Too much, Tyler Perry! Too much!
8. 'Jonah Hex'
I respect Josh Brolin's right to push himself in new directions as an actor, to challenge his own status quo. Maybe he thought this garish comic book adaptation, which called for him to play the horribly scarred Jonah Hex, a Civil War vet seeking revenge against the general (John Malkovich) who murdered his wife and son in front of him and burned off half his face, was his Charlize Theron "Monster" moment. But while monstrous -- Jonah can talk to the dead, opening the door to many special-effects corpses chattering their teeth at us -- "Jonah Hex" was no "Monster." Incomprehensible and reprehensible, this fake folksy tale of homegrown terrorism was the emptiest movie of the year, cinematic space occupied primarily by flying axes, kegs of dynamite and suspiciously powerful firearms. It was obviously an ode to brutality, but those weenies at the Motion Picture Association of America rated it PG-13, which is nearly as obscene as them giving "Blue Valentine" an NC-17 (at least they backed down on that one). The cast includes Megan Fox playing a prostitute. That seems like honest work compared to the things Malkovich does to get his paycheck.
7. 'The Last Song'
I don't care how many "herbal" bong hits Miley Cyrus takes, I just want her to take some acting lessons. Sticky sweet sentimentality is the manner of all Nicholas Sparks stories -- somebody falls in love, somebody dies, usually with tragic overlap -- but young Cyrus made it extra bad. She plays Ronnie, a rebellious New York teenager sent to spend the summer on the Georgia shore with her estranged father (Greg Kinnear). He's dying -- wouldn't you know it? The one good actor in the cast -- but Ronnie doesn't know about his impending demise. So she's super bratty to him, pouty, snarling, refusing to eat whatever he cooks, stomping off down the beach in a huff on a daily, if not hourly, basis. She'll be damned if she'll have a good time at Daddy's house, until a rich hottie (Liam Hemsworth) comes along and softens her heart by helping her save a nest of fragile sea turtles. On the plus side, since Sparks wrote the role just for her, Ronnie is a promising musician, but she doesn't sing. And she stopped playing piano to spite her father after he divorced her mom and moved away. Daddy's loss is our gain.
6. 'Kick-***'
I love Chloe Moretz. I think she was actually quite good in this movie, as good as she could be in a vile piece of dreck. A movie that yanks one's moral chain can be a good thing, because let's face it, some of us are awfully close-minded. Movies can give you that little shove that makes you consider another point of view. However, I feel absolutely, 100-percent solid with my position that there is no entertainment value in depicting a child on-screen using the kind of language that barely befits the likes of Chelsea Handler or killing dozens of people with knives and swords. It's a gross party trick, a joke designed to tickle the funny bones of snickering louts everywhere. And other than the goofy pleasures of Nicolas Cage, this kind of nasty stunt was the only card this gratuitously violent comedy had up its sleeve. But the scene that plagued me the most was the one where Hit-Girl dresses up in the schoolgirl outfit to get into Frank D'Amico's (Mark Strong) building. She's styled for provocation, like an older girl pretending to be a sexy schoolgirl (a la Britney Spears). Except, she is a schoolgirl. Director Matthew Vaughn took advantage of the unique beauty of his child star, 12 when the movie was made, to push a button so uncomfortable that I think most critics just ignored it.
5. 'The Tourist'
I actually had a terrible little Canadian movie where Julianne Moore and Amanda Seyfried share a steamy sex scene on this list (directed by Atom Egoyan, it's called "Chloe" and is less fun that it sounds), but then Angelina Jolie strutted by my aisle seat in her Audrey Hepburn getup, followed by a shuffling Johnny Depp in his PJs, and bent to whisper in my ear, "At least they had chemistry. What about us? Don't we rate on your list?" Angie, yes, you do! With a list like this, you have to include the disappointments, the movies you thought had a shot at being good. "The Tourist" had the world's biggest movie stars, Venice location, a talented director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck ("The Lives of Others"), but it was shockingly lame. The tone wavered between subdued thriller and limp comedy, as if no one was sure what they wanted the movie to be. Jolie at her haughtiest seemed like someone who wouldn't give a disheveled dullard like Depp's character the time of day. But "The Tourist" lands on this list because of its final twist. And now that it's been out a bit and people don't seem to be flocking to it, I'll address that with a (spoiler alert) note to filmmakers: Be careful with your cases of mistaken identity that turn out to have not been mistaken, because you might end up making the rest of the film seem pointless and silly.
4. 'The Back-up Plan'
Jennifer Lopez plays a New York pet store owner who is so sick of waiting for the right man that she gets artificially inseminated. You go girl! Except her character, Zoe, doesn't actually seem like she'd willingly take on that kind of a complicated scenario. She's squeamish, silly and kind of shallow. In real life, she'd be trotting off to a sample sale, not shopping the sperm banks. We wonder, how is the little lady going to make it on her own? Wait, just as Zoe is leaving the doctor's office, she bumps into a guy who turns out to be the man of her dreams (Alex O'Loughlin). They bicker, of course, but the fates conspire to bring them together again repeatedly until they finally consummate their attraction in a barn full of the cheeses Stan has made. That's fitting, since the movie is cheesy. But it's also offensive, making pregnancy itself seem woefully appealing, painting a picture of single mothers as man-hating witches and sending the message that female empowerment is cute and all, but the only happy ending is one that includes "I do." Also, on behalf of the Society to Promote True Depiction of the Female Orgasm on Film, I would like to point out that no woman, not even a highly hormonal pregnant one, ever reached climax from having her neck kissed.
3. 'I'm Still Here' If it had been a real portrait of a celebrity meltdown, it would have been tragic on multiple levels. Joaquin Phoenix really would be a lost soul, a diva indulging in his rap fantasy while treating everyone around him with paranoia, cruelty, rudeness and stupidity. He appeared to do drugs on camera, got it on with a hooker, fired a member of his entourage and went from Oscar nominee to horrifying bore. Had it been real, director Casey Affleck, who is married to Phoenix's sister, would have sold out his messed-up brother-in-law in the name of a film that appealed to the baser instincts of human beings, namely that desire to witness failure, not just professional failure, but failure of character. Instead "I'm Still Here" was a silly prank, a test of how gullible our celebrity-obsessed society really is, hiding under the umbrella of performance art. Most people had doubts going in -- the Letterman business always smelled like a hoax – and the film itself offered clues within the credits: Phoenix's father was "played" by Affleck's father, and Hawaii had stood in for Guatemala. But Affleck kept up the lie through the Venice Film Festival, and then the truth started to slip out in the following days, probably when they decided it wasn't so fun to have everyone thinking they were creeps. Guess what? We still think you're creeps!
2. 'Inception' What a lot of pretentious hooey. I admit a bias against one-last-job movies, namely because I feel as though I see at least a dozen of them every year, but it was "auteur" Christopher Nolan's deliberate obfuscation that set my teeth on edge. Leonardo and his gang of architects, thieves and drug experts build dreams in order to implant ideas (or steal them, which might have made for a more interesting film). For some unclear reason, the entire gang (including miscast Ellen Page, the under-used Joseph Gordon Levitt and Tom Hardy, the only reason to see the film) have to traipse along every step of the way. We've got to endure three levels of Cillian Murphy's character's consciousness just to prolong the movie, spice up the locales and keep us confused enough to not notice that Nolan's Very Important Film has no actual source of urgency. Who cares if Cillian's dad's company gets broken up and sold off in parcels? The only aspect of the film that does have some emotional freight, the matter of Gloomy Gus Leo being reunited with the kids he had with that nutjob Marion Cotillard, is something Nolan doesn't deign to officially resolve. That would be too simplistic for him. He wants to keep us hanging, tantalized, so he leaves the top spinning. Whatever. Any movie that owes as much to the adventures of James Bond as this one does is just not that deep.
1. 'The Last Airbender'
Oh my God, my eyes. My ears. My brain. Did I really endure this unredeemable movie? Now what was it about? There was a sulky kid named Aang (Noah Ringer), an Avatar and Buddha type who supposedly had the capacity to throw air around. Plenty of people could move fire or water or earth with their minds, but this kid was special. With training, he'd be able to do all those plus push air around, which would mean there'd be balance in the universe again. Or something. Hard to stay focused with the endless moves to new locations and nonsensical babbling on about Kingdoms of this Hemisphere and that Southern Iceberg. Aang trains by doing a lot of meditating, an act that never transfers well to the screen (see "Eat Pray Love," a contender for this list), as well as some pouting and foot stamping (again, not that fun to watch). There were good guys (Jackson Rathbone and Nicola Peltz) and bad guys (Aasif Mandvi and Dev Patel), and they were unified by the fact that they were all actors led into the lion's den by their director, M. Night Shyamalan, who presumably must have praised them for their wooden delivery and/or ferocious overacting. At least we can finally move on from the hope that Shyamalan will someday make a good movie again.
What were the worst movies you saw last year?
#2
01-10-2011, 06:53 PM
I guess I never saw any of these movies for a reason. By the way, 'Space posts more positive spam, like the 10 best movies 
#3
01-10-2011, 06:58 PM
Monte Of The Month -- June 2010
Join Date: Jul 2009
Location: Wentzville, Missouri
Posts: 4,528
Omg! I don't like this list...I loveeeeeeee the Last Airbender. I thought it was amazing!!! I also loved The Last Song, made me cry like a baby but still. I heard Inception was good but haven't been able to see it yet. & I really liked the Back-up Plan so idk about this list
#4
01-10-2011, 07:48 PM
As I said in the other thread...
You're welcome to post the top 10 movies of the year if you like.
#10
01-10-2011, 11:51 PM
I'll have to start looking at the redbox more, $1 rental maybe i'll watch it! i havn't seen any on the list i think i went to one movie in 2010 and that was umm...ummm... shet what was that movie.... O The Blind Side... was that last year, i think valintines day ish we went idk somthing!