Post by Neverending on Dec 16, 2015 14:39:36 GMT -5
www.avclub.com/article/20-worst-films-2015-229158
10. Everything Will Be Fine
There’s something particularly depressing about a fiasco made by a former master, which is why Wim Wenders’ Every Thing Will Be Fine is so miserably disappointing. Boasting none of the lyricism, grace or psychological incisiveness of his prior masterworks (Paris, Texas; Wings Of Desire), Wenders’ latest is a misbegotten stew of turgid drama and look-at-me 3-D gimmickry, with the director using his signature special effects to highlight foreground-background dynamics in the most unnecessarily self-conscious manner possible. That said, at least his imagery is moderately appealing, which is more than can be said about his lead performances from a one-frown-fits-all James Franco, a hilariously Euro-accented Rachel McAdams, and a weepy Charlotte Gainsbourg. The film chugs along with mannered lethargy that, when coupled with monotonous, on-the-nose dialogue, turns the proceedings into a parody of an ’80s arthouse effort.
9. The Gallows
Found-footage horror reaches a possible nadir with this ridiculously silly, ostensibly handheld record of a high school play haunted by the ghosts of previous productions. The idea of students trapped in an auditorium after dark and chased by vengeful spirits isn’t without promise, but rookie directors Travis Cluff and Chris Lofing show no facility for the kind of plausibly claustrophobic camera setups that make Paranormal Activity (or its sequels) so visually compelling; it also doesn’t help that their cast of fresh-faced young actors (all playing characters under their real names) never quite inhabit the supposedly pants-wetting terror of their situation. At least the hilariously misjudged final sequence elicits a strong reaction—the rest is so dull that it’s easy to forget you’re watching it while it’s still on.
8. Hitman: Agent 47
“Reboot” has been a depressing and meaningless buzzword for a while now, but there’s something particularly dispiriting about a reboot that resets a lousy movie (in this case, 2007’s Timothy Olyphant-wasting Hitman) into an equally lousy (if ever so slightly less dull) movie. Here, once again, is the bald, barcoded, and entirely conspicuous video game protagonist who shoots his way through a nonsense plot, his near-invincibility inciting surprisingly chintzy special effects along the way, in between the ample time this movie spends on scenes of people staring at computer screens as face-recognition programs run. It shouldn’t be hard to make an entertaining B-movie about a genetically engineered assassin, but it may be time for the Hitman franchise to quit while it’s behind. Presumably an even lower-rent version of Max Payne will appear in a year or two to take its place.
7. Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2
A bipedal cornhole bag affixed with a mustache, Paul Blart exists only to be tossed for the amusement of people with remarkably low standards of entertainment. In this follow-up to the 2009’s Paul Blart: Mall Cop, Blart (Kevin James) returns to suffer physically and emotionally for the reflexive chuckles of a packed theater lit by phone screens—though this time he must endure his Stations Of The Mall at the Wynn resort in Las Vegas, its very name a mockery of his perpetual loserdom. Paul Blart face-plants for our sins, enduring the full range of human indifference—be it fat jokes, product placements, or a third-rate Die Hard riff basically recycled from the first movie—like the donkey in Au Hasard Balthazar. Perhaps, in Paul Blart: Mall Cop 3, Part 2, he will find peace and grace, a martyr for the cause of Happy Madison.
6. Home Sweet Hell
Making a valiant effort to shed her benign rom-com image, Katherine Heigl plays Mona Champagne, the sort of cartoonishly shrewish housewife who schedules sex days in advance, allowing a 15-minute window. When her correspondingly ineffectual husband (Patrick Wilson, who apparently now must take all such roles, by federal law) has an affair with the hot new employee (Jordana Brewster) at the furniture store he owns, falling victim to a highly improbable blackmail scheme, Mona turns into a killing machine, gleefully stabbing, skewering, and dismembering various low-rent thugs. Heigl’s goofily vicious performance is the sole redeeming factor in what’s otherwise a cavalcade of sexism, racism, and homophobia—ostensibly meant to demonstrate what an awful person Mona is, but clearly intended to generate mean-spirited yuks on their own. A final fade-out “gag” even strongly implies that Mona’s two slightly obnoxious but innocent young kids are being raped, because child sexual abuse is always a laugh riot.
5. Enter The Dangerous Mind
Part portrait of a madman, part dubstep rave, Enter The Dangerous Mind (note the cutesy initials: EDM) stars Dustin Hoffman’s son Jake as Jim, an aspiring musician—his “sick beats” have a significant online audience—who’s also a semi-functioning schizophrenic. His illness is represented on screen by an imaginary best friend, Jake (Thomas Dekker), who serves as an avatar of the primary voice in Jim’s head. That voice virtually never shuts up, making Dangerous Mind a serious endurance test long before it predictably turns violent. Worse, when Jim suddenly starts shooting people in the face, the film takes pains to make sure the victims are all gratuitously cruel to him, allowing him to remain sympathetic. And all of this nonsense is set to a relentless SCREECH-THUMP-DITDITDITDITDITDIT-SCREECH-THUMP-DITDITDITDITDITDIT. Neither the beats nor the characters are remotely as sick as the movie is.
4. Entourage
Before tagging Entourage as one of the worst movies of the year, it bears investigation: Is this actually a movie? Most of its characters that aren’t from a pre-existing TV series are actors (or non-actors) listlessly playing themselves. It has conflicts, but they’re resolved so easily, amicably, and anticlimactically that they might as well never have existed. It runs 104 minutes, but could just as easily have lasted 12 minutes, or forever. Even if the big-screen revival of the HBO series about a movie star (Adrian Grenier) and his posse does technically qualify as a film, it’s still questionable whether writer-director Doug Ellin has ever seen any other movies, given the Mortal Instruments-level movie-within-the-sorta-movie that he presents not as a goof on Hollywood hubris but as an uncompromising masterpiece that eventually makes half a billion dollars at the box office. Built largely on a series of lackluster setups without discernible payoffs, Entourage even fails as wish fulfillment; on those terms, guest-starring love interest Ronda Rousey would have extended her merciless beating of Turtle to everyone else in the movie.
3. Hellions
It’s no fun to rip a genre flick by Canadian maverick Bruce McDonald, who makes movies with real zeal and, as recently as 2008, riffed smartly on horror movie tropes in his quasi-zombie drama Pontypool. But this Sundance-ratified thriller about a pregnant girl menaced by lurking, bag-headed little monsters is shockingly shoddy work—less auteur experiment than for-hire hackwork. Its erratic editing and vaguely arty, screensaver-ish imagery feel like an attempt to enliven desperately familiar and derivative material. Even if you take its unfathomable action as a metaphor for maternal anxiety—which is surely the point of the exercise—it’s dismally obvious stuff.
2. The Human Centipede III (Final Sequence)
A quandary for anyone who’s choked down the filmic fecal matter of this improbable franchise: Doesn’t going public with your hatred for The Human Centipede just play right into the turd-splattered hands of its creator? Isn’t the series all but designed to be included on lists just like this one? Writer-director Tom Six lives for disapproval, and he’s finally made a movie that basically no one—not even those amused or unnerved by the past two installments—could possibly enjoy. Shot in a bright shade of toilet-bowl orange, part three spends its entire interminable runtime desperately attempting to offend, but the orgy of mutilation, sexual abuse, racial slurs, bellowing cartoon overacting, and down-with-Texas “satire” grows more tedious with each passing minute. Intentionally terrible, this blessedly final Sequence succeeds only in making parts one and two look elegant by comparison—and maybe, in punishing anyone who feasted on those films with a shit-eating grin.
1. The Cobbler
Say what you will about Jack And Jill or Just Go With It, but at least no one could ever mistake them for real movies. The Cobbler, though, is just professional enough for the schmaltz and ugliness coursing through it to seem worse than anything in the slapped-together paid-vacations star Adam Sandler produces under his Happy Madison banner. A deeply wrongheaded fantasy about a Jewish shoe repairman who uses a magical stitching machine to commit manslaughter, creep his way into women’s homes, and enact Oedipal scenarios with his dying mother, The Cobbler is a movie that has absolutely no idea what it’s doing, but puts real effort into doing it anyway. Imagine if the monkey-faced Ecce Homo were instead a halfway decent portrait of a macaque, and you’ll have some sense of what makes this mystifyingly competent grab-bag of lame ’80s comedy plot points, terrible gags, racist fears, and disturbing sexual subtexts unique. The consensus winner (or is that loser?) of this year’s bad movie crop, The Cobbler was the kind of commercial and critical failure that would stall even a well-regarded filmmaker’s career. Surprisingly, director and co-writer Tom McCarthy bounced back just half a year later with what’s arguably his best work, Spotlight; it seems to come from a different universe from this film, which features a maudlin twist ending that would make Nicholas Sparks shit himself.
10. Everything Will Be Fine
There’s something particularly depressing about a fiasco made by a former master, which is why Wim Wenders’ Every Thing Will Be Fine is so miserably disappointing. Boasting none of the lyricism, grace or psychological incisiveness of his prior masterworks (Paris, Texas; Wings Of Desire), Wenders’ latest is a misbegotten stew of turgid drama and look-at-me 3-D gimmickry, with the director using his signature special effects to highlight foreground-background dynamics in the most unnecessarily self-conscious manner possible. That said, at least his imagery is moderately appealing, which is more than can be said about his lead performances from a one-frown-fits-all James Franco, a hilariously Euro-accented Rachel McAdams, and a weepy Charlotte Gainsbourg. The film chugs along with mannered lethargy that, when coupled with monotonous, on-the-nose dialogue, turns the proceedings into a parody of an ’80s arthouse effort.
9. The Gallows
Found-footage horror reaches a possible nadir with this ridiculously silly, ostensibly handheld record of a high school play haunted by the ghosts of previous productions. The idea of students trapped in an auditorium after dark and chased by vengeful spirits isn’t without promise, but rookie directors Travis Cluff and Chris Lofing show no facility for the kind of plausibly claustrophobic camera setups that make Paranormal Activity (or its sequels) so visually compelling; it also doesn’t help that their cast of fresh-faced young actors (all playing characters under their real names) never quite inhabit the supposedly pants-wetting terror of their situation. At least the hilariously misjudged final sequence elicits a strong reaction—the rest is so dull that it’s easy to forget you’re watching it while it’s still on.
8. Hitman: Agent 47
“Reboot” has been a depressing and meaningless buzzword for a while now, but there’s something particularly dispiriting about a reboot that resets a lousy movie (in this case, 2007’s Timothy Olyphant-wasting Hitman) into an equally lousy (if ever so slightly less dull) movie. Here, once again, is the bald, barcoded, and entirely conspicuous video game protagonist who shoots his way through a nonsense plot, his near-invincibility inciting surprisingly chintzy special effects along the way, in between the ample time this movie spends on scenes of people staring at computer screens as face-recognition programs run. It shouldn’t be hard to make an entertaining B-movie about a genetically engineered assassin, but it may be time for the Hitman franchise to quit while it’s behind. Presumably an even lower-rent version of Max Payne will appear in a year or two to take its place.
7. Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2
A bipedal cornhole bag affixed with a mustache, Paul Blart exists only to be tossed for the amusement of people with remarkably low standards of entertainment. In this follow-up to the 2009’s Paul Blart: Mall Cop, Blart (Kevin James) returns to suffer physically and emotionally for the reflexive chuckles of a packed theater lit by phone screens—though this time he must endure his Stations Of The Mall at the Wynn resort in Las Vegas, its very name a mockery of his perpetual loserdom. Paul Blart face-plants for our sins, enduring the full range of human indifference—be it fat jokes, product placements, or a third-rate Die Hard riff basically recycled from the first movie—like the donkey in Au Hasard Balthazar. Perhaps, in Paul Blart: Mall Cop 3, Part 2, he will find peace and grace, a martyr for the cause of Happy Madison.
6. Home Sweet Hell
Making a valiant effort to shed her benign rom-com image, Katherine Heigl plays Mona Champagne, the sort of cartoonishly shrewish housewife who schedules sex days in advance, allowing a 15-minute window. When her correspondingly ineffectual husband (Patrick Wilson, who apparently now must take all such roles, by federal law) has an affair with the hot new employee (Jordana Brewster) at the furniture store he owns, falling victim to a highly improbable blackmail scheme, Mona turns into a killing machine, gleefully stabbing, skewering, and dismembering various low-rent thugs. Heigl’s goofily vicious performance is the sole redeeming factor in what’s otherwise a cavalcade of sexism, racism, and homophobia—ostensibly meant to demonstrate what an awful person Mona is, but clearly intended to generate mean-spirited yuks on their own. A final fade-out “gag” even strongly implies that Mona’s two slightly obnoxious but innocent young kids are being raped, because child sexual abuse is always a laugh riot.
5. Enter The Dangerous Mind
Part portrait of a madman, part dubstep rave, Enter The Dangerous Mind (note the cutesy initials: EDM) stars Dustin Hoffman’s son Jake as Jim, an aspiring musician—his “sick beats” have a significant online audience—who’s also a semi-functioning schizophrenic. His illness is represented on screen by an imaginary best friend, Jake (Thomas Dekker), who serves as an avatar of the primary voice in Jim’s head. That voice virtually never shuts up, making Dangerous Mind a serious endurance test long before it predictably turns violent. Worse, when Jim suddenly starts shooting people in the face, the film takes pains to make sure the victims are all gratuitously cruel to him, allowing him to remain sympathetic. And all of this nonsense is set to a relentless SCREECH-THUMP-DITDITDITDITDITDIT-SCREECH-THUMP-DITDITDITDITDITDIT. Neither the beats nor the characters are remotely as sick as the movie is.
4. Entourage
Before tagging Entourage as one of the worst movies of the year, it bears investigation: Is this actually a movie? Most of its characters that aren’t from a pre-existing TV series are actors (or non-actors) listlessly playing themselves. It has conflicts, but they’re resolved so easily, amicably, and anticlimactically that they might as well never have existed. It runs 104 minutes, but could just as easily have lasted 12 minutes, or forever. Even if the big-screen revival of the HBO series about a movie star (Adrian Grenier) and his posse does technically qualify as a film, it’s still questionable whether writer-director Doug Ellin has ever seen any other movies, given the Mortal Instruments-level movie-within-the-sorta-movie that he presents not as a goof on Hollywood hubris but as an uncompromising masterpiece that eventually makes half a billion dollars at the box office. Built largely on a series of lackluster setups without discernible payoffs, Entourage even fails as wish fulfillment; on those terms, guest-starring love interest Ronda Rousey would have extended her merciless beating of Turtle to everyone else in the movie.
3. Hellions
It’s no fun to rip a genre flick by Canadian maverick Bruce McDonald, who makes movies with real zeal and, as recently as 2008, riffed smartly on horror movie tropes in his quasi-zombie drama Pontypool. But this Sundance-ratified thriller about a pregnant girl menaced by lurking, bag-headed little monsters is shockingly shoddy work—less auteur experiment than for-hire hackwork. Its erratic editing and vaguely arty, screensaver-ish imagery feel like an attempt to enliven desperately familiar and derivative material. Even if you take its unfathomable action as a metaphor for maternal anxiety—which is surely the point of the exercise—it’s dismally obvious stuff.
2. The Human Centipede III (Final Sequence)
A quandary for anyone who’s choked down the filmic fecal matter of this improbable franchise: Doesn’t going public with your hatred for The Human Centipede just play right into the turd-splattered hands of its creator? Isn’t the series all but designed to be included on lists just like this one? Writer-director Tom Six lives for disapproval, and he’s finally made a movie that basically no one—not even those amused or unnerved by the past two installments—could possibly enjoy. Shot in a bright shade of toilet-bowl orange, part three spends its entire interminable runtime desperately attempting to offend, but the orgy of mutilation, sexual abuse, racial slurs, bellowing cartoon overacting, and down-with-Texas “satire” grows more tedious with each passing minute. Intentionally terrible, this blessedly final Sequence succeeds only in making parts one and two look elegant by comparison—and maybe, in punishing anyone who feasted on those films with a shit-eating grin.
1. The Cobbler
Say what you will about Jack And Jill or Just Go With It, but at least no one could ever mistake them for real movies. The Cobbler, though, is just professional enough for the schmaltz and ugliness coursing through it to seem worse than anything in the slapped-together paid-vacations star Adam Sandler produces under his Happy Madison banner. A deeply wrongheaded fantasy about a Jewish shoe repairman who uses a magical stitching machine to commit manslaughter, creep his way into women’s homes, and enact Oedipal scenarios with his dying mother, The Cobbler is a movie that has absolutely no idea what it’s doing, but puts real effort into doing it anyway. Imagine if the monkey-faced Ecce Homo were instead a halfway decent portrait of a macaque, and you’ll have some sense of what makes this mystifyingly competent grab-bag of lame ’80s comedy plot points, terrible gags, racist fears, and disturbing sexual subtexts unique. The consensus winner (or is that loser?) of this year’s bad movie crop, The Cobbler was the kind of commercial and critical failure that would stall even a well-regarded filmmaker’s career. Surprisingly, director and co-writer Tom McCarthy bounced back just half a year later with what’s arguably his best work, Spotlight; it seems to come from a different universe from this film, which features a maudlin twist ending that would make Nicholas Sparks shit himself.
