My 10 Worst Films of 2011

Whoops, I had actually forgotten I was writing this but this is the last of my 2011 wrapup pieces, promise. I think it’s a common misnomer that critics enjoy trashing bad movies. It can be painful to sit through a bad film so - with the exception of “Season of the Witch” which I saw during a Nic Cage-a-thon - it’s not something I would subject myself to intentionally. I skip most things that seem like a complete waste of time so you wont find “Jack & Jill” or “Chipwrecked” or “The Zookeeper” on my list because I haven’t seen them and have no plans to. Below are the films that, despite their best intentions, just did not work for me in 2011.

1. This Must Be The Place (Paolo Sorrentino)
A complete disaster. Sorrentino’s last film “Il Divo” was a crazy rock ‘n roll mashup of Fellini and Scorsese. I was excited for his follow-up, an English language film starring Sean Penn as a Robert Smith-type aging rock star who goes on a road trip across America to find an ex-Nazi war criminal who imprisoned his father. At the time I thought, “this is so crazy it just might work!” but now I know that it’s the synopsis for one of the worst movies of all time. This makes it’s U.S. premiere at Sundance in a few days so consider this a warning.

2. Cars 2 (John Lasseter, Brad Lewis)
Painful. This film is everything Pixar had previously stood against - cash grab sequels, cheap pop culture gags, nonstop action in place of character development - which makes it like a knife in the back from your best friend. It’s all the more upsetting to see Pixar head and co-director Lasseter continuing to defend the film instead of just admitting he made a mistake. Critics don’t have it out for you, John. We’re just not going to tell you that you’ve made a great film unless it’s true.

3. Sucker Punch (Zach Snyder)
A confession that may get me kicked out of the movie nerd community: I actually like Zach Snyder! At the very least he’s one of the most distinctive genre filmmakers working today and I have a soft spot for his “Dawn Of The Dead” remake, “300” and (most of) “Watchmen.” But “Sucker Punch” is a different story all together. Poorly written, ugly, and uninvolving, Snyder is totally lost and mostly incompetent without existing source material to guide him. There are no stakes, no consequences and nothing invested. It’s worse than bad, it’s boring.

4. The Green Lantern (Martin Campbell)
Marvel has had a real resurgence in the last decade but I’ve always been a DC kid at heart. So it’s unfortunate that both DC and Warner Bros. (who’ve done such a great job with the Batman franchise) had a bomb this big on their hands. It was definitely risky material: a cocky lead character, an otherworldly setting and yet another clunky love story but somehow Marvel made all those obstacles work with “Thor.” But “Green Lantern,” with its cartoonish CG, bad acting and an overstuffed plot was not so lucky.

5. I Saw The Devil (Jee-woon Kim)
I’d heard quite a bit of good buzz about this Korean revenge thriller before I went to see it this time last year. But my hopes dissapated almost instantly as I watched this relentlessly stupid film. As I said in my review, imagine the (perfect) ending of “Se7en” stretched out for 2 1/2 hours and you’re somewhere close to the tedium of “I Saw The Devil.” I’m convinced that people assume that because they’re reading subtitles the film is somehow smarter than it is because if this had been made in English it would have been laughed out of theatres.

6. Season of the Witch (Dominic Sena)
Okay, this is cheating a bit since I knew this would be horrible. January release? Silly action/horror plot about hunting down witches? Check. Nic Cage? Check. Yes, this was going to be bad. But unfortunately it was - with the exception of Stephen Graham’s hilarious New Yawk accent - pretty blandly bad. Cage was very subdued here which is not why you go to see a bad Nic Cage film. Thankfully “Drive Angry 3D” a month later was pretty awesome.

7. Scream 4 (Wes Craven)
I loved the “Scream” films when they were released. The first one still stands up as a genre classic even if the sequels are a product of diminishing returns. But this was something else entirely. Original cast members are dragged back and given nothing to do while the new castmembers are an even greater waste of space. I found myself squirming through the film, not because of the violence, but because I felt bad for everyone involved.

8. Circumstance (Maryam Keshavarz)
The first and worst film I saw at Sundance last year, this Iranian drama actually took home the Audience Award at the fest. Though I suspect that had more to do with the films sympathetic backstory (the filmmakers had to escape Iran to make the film) than the film itself, where story threads disappear, slo-mo happens all too frequently and the film really just runs out of steam. “Circumstance” was marketed as some kind of steamy lesbian drama which, probably would have been more interesting.

9. The Hangover: Part 2 (Todd Phillips)
Take the first film, Find And Replace “Vegas” with “Thailand” and Delete all the jokes. (Sorry Zach.)

10. Twixt (Francis Ford Coppola)
I was at the world premiere at TIFF and did my best to be fair in my review of the film because I do like everyone involved but it was an extremely amateurish production. How the same filmmaker who made “The Godfather,” “Apocalypse Now” and even “Bram Stoker’s Dracula” was responsible for this I will never know.

Dishonorable Mention: Fright Night, The Sitter, Take This Waltz, Detachment, Hobo With A Shotgun.

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Cars 2 review

This is probably the worst movie I have seen all year* and you have no idea how much it pains me to say that. I. Love. Pixar. They’re as close to a sure thing as you can get as far as studios are concerned and they have been on a streak of unimpeachable greatness. “Toy Story 3” made that series one of the only perfect trilogies in existence, “Up” was my absolute favorite film of that year (and still demolishes me when I rewatch it), “Wall•E” was incredibly ambitious (though I greatly prefer the first half) and “Ratatouille” was a film that should not have worked (“The Incredibles” director Brad Bird replaced former director Jan Pinkava who reworked the entire film a year before release) and yet it’s one of my all-time favorites. Which brings us to 2006’s “Cars,” the first disappointment in Pixar’s history. Not a terrible film by any means but just not one that reaches the impossible standards set by other other work. The worst thing I can say about it is that it’s an average film, and with it’s pop culture references, celebrity voices and pop songs, one that seems like it would have been more at home at Dreamworks.

Because I wasn’t a fan of the first film (it’s the only Pixar film I’ve seen once and do not own), I had not been anticipating “Cars 2.” At the same time I thought, “if anyone can pull off making an incredible film sequel to an original film that was only so-so, Pixar can.” So I tried to remain optimistic even as the film earned the worst reviews in the studio’s history. But unfortunately, as it pains me to say this, the film is absolutely terrible from just about every conceivable angle except visuals, which are striking as usual. The first film tells the story of Owen Wilson’s cocky racecar Lighning McQueen who learns to slow down and enjoy life after he gets waylaid in small town Radiator Springs. He meets a cast of “colorful characters” who unfortunately are mostly one-note stereotypes with the exception of Bonnie Hunt as love interest Sally and Paul Newman (in his last credited role) as Doc Hudson.

“Cars 2” ditches Hudson (after Newman’s passing), reduces Sally to about a half dozen  lines of dialogue and even puts Wilson’s McQueen in the passenger seat (as his character has almost no impact on the plot of the film) all so we can make way for Larry The Cable Guy as dimwitted tow-truck Mater, who is the film’s hero. Let that sink in for a minute. Additionally the small town is ditched in favor of some convoluted spy plot. And it does not work in the slightest. The film moves quickly, shoving lots of colorful action onscreen but the jokes are horrible and the story is completely broken. I spent 90 minutes wondering “How did this happen? How could Pixar let this happen? How could director and head of Pixar, director of the original “Toy Story,” a modern classic, let this happen? I’m still not sure of the answer but the film seems the very antithesis of everything Pixar has led us to believe they are about.

Firstly, it’s a sequel to a film that did not need a sequel which is something the studio has said repeatedly they would never do. Many have pointed to the billions of dollars in revenue the “Cars” series has brought in for the studio and its shareholders but it just depresses me to think that could have motivated them. It’s further compounded by being the 2nd sequel released by the studio in a row, with next year’s “Brave” proving the first original since 2009 for them, only to be followed by a 2nd “Monsters Inc.” If the studio had failed making something as ambitious as “Up” or “Wall•E” I could understand. The first “Cars” film, even if it didn’t entirely work, was at least something different for the studio and celebrated Lasseter’s obession with cars.

But what I cannot understand is how no one on the crew saw this coming. How these incredibly talented artists and producers could work for years on this film and at no point did anyone realize “This film is broken at the story level and it needs to be fixed badly.” This is the same studio who completely retooled “Toy Story 2,” “Ratatouille” and next years “Brave” replacing director’s on two of those films when they simply could not get the job done. They also cancelled an entire film, “Newt” because of its similarity to another animated film, “Rio.” So how did this happen? I can only hope it’s a mistake the studio can learn from and not the beginning of a downward slide. It’ll be a full year until we get a chance to see the answer as I’m sure Pixar knows how much of their reputation is riding on their next effort. As a huge fan, I really hope they can pull it off.

*If anyone at Pixar is reading this, I was totally kidding. This film was great. Can I have a job now?

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My Favorite Pixar Films

After rewatching a few Pixar films I hadn’t seen in years I thought it was time to re-rank my favorite Pixar films.  Here we go, from the gut…

1. The Incredibles
2. Ratatouille
3. Toy Story/Toy Story 2
5. Up
6. WALL•E
7. Finding Nemo
8. Monsters Inc.
9. A Bugs Life
10. Cars

Brad Bird, you win.

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