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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Fright Night review

Remakes don’t always have to be a terrible idea. Outside of certain unimpeachable classics there isn’t anything inherently wrong with taking the premise from a film a few decades old and giving it a new spin that might even enhance the original material. This has been especially true of genre films where budgetary or technological effects might have been a constraint on the native production and in fact, two of the best horror films of the ’80s are remakes: John Carpenter’s “The Thing” and David Cronenberg’s “The Fly.” Each film came about 30 years after its predecessor and managed to improve upon the originals. I didn’t have especially high hopes for the update of the 1985 vampire-lives-next-door tale “Fright Night” but thought there was certainly potential to make something worthwhile out of this redo and reviews were surprisingly strong.

Written by Marti Noxon (a vet of “Mad Men” and “Buffy The Vampire Slayer”) and directed by “Lars & The Real Girl” helmer Craig Gillespie making his first foray into Hollywood (he’s slated to direct the adaptation of “Pride & Prejudice & Zombies” next), “Fright Night” unfortunately does not stack up to the original. The remake updates Charley Brewster from an every-teen to a kind of brooding social ladder climber as played by Anton Yelchin. Likewise his girlfriend Amy (Imogen Poots, my God) here is improbably hot and way out of his league. Toni Colette steps in as the single mother, Christopher Mintz-Plasse is his former best friend “Evil” Ed and Colin Farrell subs in for the vampire who moves next door, Jerry Dandridge.

The opening credits are stylish and first scene holds promise but it’s all downhill from there. The original really hinges on the boy who cried wolf scenario and after all, who would really believe a teenager that vampires exist, he can hardly believe it himself. The new version dispenses with all of that “story” nonsense and gets right into it. Within the opening minutes of the film Ed is telling Charley that vampires exist, he’s tracking one and that’s why their friend is missing. Charley more or less goes along with this right away and so do the rest of the characters in the film. As much as we might be sick of characters onscreen wrestling with the improbability of a fantastic situation (“vampires don’t exist!”) it’s sort of necessary if you’re trying to approximate characters that live on Earth.

Farrell is totally miscast and miscalculates his role. In addition to prowling around sniffing at the air trying to act menacing (and keeping his American accent in tact) we’re not really sure what his character wants. He kills his neighbors in broad daylight in the middle of the street, isn’t he the least concerned with it being traced back to him? Also not clear why he would go out of his way to terrorize Charley in particular when he seems content to eat just about anybody, why go through the effort? It’s hard to watch the film without spending half the time talking back to the screen with these kinds of logic issues. (Why isn’t Charley telling his girlfriend, mom, anyone about what’s going on? We’re never really given a slightly plausible reason.) The use of CG on the vampire faces is really distracting and drains any possible suspense that might have been taking shape.

The original, dated as it may be, was funny and scary and cool (at the time, anyway). The 2011 version is none of those things. Director Gillespie just doesn’t seem to get how to build the tension in any of the scenes and the script is devoid of the wit that made the original a low-key genre classic. Moved from the suburbs to the desolate outskirts of Las Vegas, the remake is unnecessary and only makes the original look even more accomplished in retrospect. It’s not the worst movie in the world, recent remakes of more established classics “Nightmare on Elm Street,” “Friday The 13th,” “Texas Chainsaw Massacre,” and “Halloween” were all far, far worse but it’s underwhelming and a botched opportunity.

Also worth noting is that the film, which I saw in 2D, has a handful of ridiculous “stuff flying at the camera” shots clearly intended for 3D but distract from the flat version.

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