Okay, it’s that time of year again where I spill out all of the movies from my mental pail and try to make some sense of my addiction to movies. This part is usually my comedic recounting of terrible garbage worth musing back and forth about and someone usually goes “Why do you even see these movies?” and I silently go “BECAUSE I OBVIOUSLY HAVE A PROBLEM”. Let’s continue the vicious cycle before I need medication. I present to you:
The Top Ten Worst Movies Of 2012
10. THE DARK KNIGHT RISES
The tragic irony is that the previous two movies both made the “Best Of” list. One even topped it. I learned a lot about movies this year. Back in 08’ I was in severe denial about INDIANA JONES AND THE KINGDOM OF THE CRYSTAL SKULL. I needed to love it. It was so ingrained in me that if you took a microscope and looked at a sample of my blood, you’d see my red blood cells were actually wearing little tiny fedoras in anticipation. It took a year for me to finally get over such an aura as powerful as that. The first Batman film from 1989 is my first movie theater memory and kicked off a lifetime of anti-social behavior and obsessive compulsive collecting of merchandise and meaningless trivia. When THE DARK KNIGHT came out, I was fully obsessed and reached levels of hype that were impossible to satisfy. But satisfied they were! It’s still pretty watchable too. And made BATMAN BEGINS better in how the two films complimented each other. They made for a great double feature but deep in my heart I knew that they were so satisfying that any new addition to the saga would just be icing on the cake. I already got the ultimate Batman movie. I’m not greedy. But I remained super enthused and excited for this. There’s a three-point disappointment factor to THE DARK KNIGHT RISES. The warning. The threat. And the point of no return.
The Warning: There’s many problems at the giddy up that THE DARK
KNIGHT glow of happiness, even years later, helps you ignore. But when Anne
Hathaway disguised as a maid attempts to burgle Martha Wayne’s pearls right
from under Bruce’s nose, when she is discovered, Catwoman trips him up and
escapes. Bruce does nothing. It’s even too much for me that Bruce even has a
cane to trip up. Bruce literally does nothing. Bruce is Batman. Batman does
things? Okay, we can get past this.
The Threat: The movie tries to recapture the magic of The Joker bank
robbery by having Bane heist up the Gotham Stock Exchange. He shows up and
using Bruce’s fingerprints (stolen by Catwoman from cracking his safe),
bankrupts Wayne Enterprises. Did this really need to be a grand gesture? It
seems like something a hacker could do from his bedroom. Then Batman reveals
himself after 8 years of absence, to give chase and he shows up with a big EMP
gun that just happens to be handy and then a big police chase happens because
Batman is blamed for the death of Harvey Dent. It gets really dramatic really
quickly and it feels like something that should be going on later in the movie.
But the movie has other boring plans for us and for no real reason Batman whips
out his flying car way too early in a situation that doesn’t really warrant it.
The movie is starting to misuse its grand gestures for moments that don’t mean
anything. It’s also showing us it’s hand way to early. At this point, it’s time
to start worrying.
9. A THOUSAND WORDS
The writer, Steve Koren was kind of the biggest believers in the 90’s
staple “Huge comedian in huge circumstances” genre of comedy. Making Jim Carrey
a God. Giving Adam Sandler a remote that controls life. This time, he scrapes
the bottom of the barrel and takes away Eddie Murphy’s inability to talk. Look,
Eddie Murphy is in a major downward slump. But trying to make him Buster Keaton
isn’t going to help him at all. Also, these movies always kind of position the
main character to be kind of a jerk or blind to the blessings of life. But all
this character did was not publish a guru’s 12 page book. Eddie plays an
alright guy with a family who just didn’t want to move out of his nice house.
And the guru wasn’t even exacting revenge, like in THINNER. This curse was an
accident. So even if Eddie did publish his book, this still would have happened
to him. The guru made it so a tree grew in Murphy’s backyard. For every word he
said, a leaf fell off of it. And when the tree ran out of leaves, Murphy would
die. What lesson does one learn from this? Don’t talk? Not speaking to your
family would probably garner resentment? He wasn’t even a fast talking salesman
or liar or bad guy at all. It was filmed in 2008 and released this year. They
should have kept it in a vault.
8. BATTLESHIP
I gave BATTLESHIP every benefit of the doubt. I don’t want to live
in a world where overblown movies aren’t made out of board games and starring
Rihanna. The year 2012 was the year of making Taylor Kitsch a star, and he made
sure at every turn to remind us why he doesn’t deserve it. If you do anything,
at least see the first 20 minutes of this movie because it has the phrase “chicken
burrito” in it about 5 million times and features about 5 different beginnings
for the same characters that seemed to be deleted scenes left in. I do
appreciate things like the navy getting their radar blinded and randomly
guessing the quadrants that the aliens are in and randomly firing to miss or
hit. I appreciate that Turtle from ENTOURAGE is in the movie. But Kitsch is
awful and the aliens look like the lead guy from Anthrax and Liam Neeson is
hardly in it and they are so scared of repeating other invasion movies that
they never get the balls to do their own thing. I can’t wait for people to
shadow cast this movie in 10 years as a double feature with CLUE.
7. TED
I understand that TED is like the highest grossing comedy of all
time. It’s because you people are fucking retarded. We live in a generation
where everyone is rewarded and everybody is so busy clamoring to tell each
other how special they are but what you people really need to be told how
stupid you are in the hopes that you will be shamed into having a lick of
sense. Shame can be a powerful tool. My parents used a good amount of shame in
my upbringing and look at the confident young gentleman you see before you. You
need to be embarrassed that you liked or laughed or enjoyed this movie in
anyway or recommended it to a single human being or for one second publically
let it be known that you harbor positive thoughts toward a derivative, lazy,
offensively patronizing mess from the most powerful force against comedy of the
last 20 years. Hosting the Oscars doesn’t legitimize the dark one. It just
shows you how desperate the once glamorous Oscars are to have internet ‘loids
retweet and .gif about their tired award show. Stop poisoning yourselves. You
want dark and edgy? Watch OBSERVE AND REPORT. And why are people so excited
when characters smoke or reference weed in movies and television? Like the
mentions validate the lives they decided to devote to it to create some sort of
identity for themselves. What do they care? I stopped getting excited at the
Ninja Turtles mentioning pizza when I was 7. And is a bear smoking weed really
that outrageous or hilarious? Have people gotten their fill of old people
smoking weed and rapping because I don’t think I’m ready to give that up.
6. TOTAL RECALL
A rich testament to how the 80’s was the greatest decade of
entertainment and how we don’t understand it well enough to replicate it. So
much of entertainment these days is regurgitated 80’s fare because we have not
come up with anything better in the last 20 years and refuse to try. When we
try to remake things like TOTAL RECALL we realize how yellow bellied we are and
take out anything interesting because the interesting stuff is batshit insane
in the best possible way. The original was about a man who had dreams of Mars
when trying to use the new fangled tech of engineered memories, his past came
back to claim him. The new one is about a man who dreams of the other side of
Earth and uses the new fangled tech of engineered memories to try to remember.
It takes out Mars. Space. Aliens. Quattos. Heads blowing up. Big fat head
disguises. It keeps the three boobs because studios think we’re stupid and
that’s all we remember but it doesn’t make any sense in this new version
because there aren’t any other mutants or aliens in the movie. There’s just a
lot of platform jumping. A LOT of platform jumping. They boil it down to a
bleak silver and black looking FROGGER and Kate Beckinsale and Jessica Biel are
the prettiest lilypads in the pond. Fuck this movie. Don’t bother remaking
Verhoven unless you’ve had at least a weeklong psychiatric lockdown in your
lifetime or unless you’ve seen at least three family members murdered by being
punched into a vat of machine guns that shoot knives.
5. THE OOGIELOVES IN THE BIG BALLOON ADVENTURE
From the marketing visionary that brought you The Teletubbies,
brings three colorful blobs on a mission. The real story of Oogieloves isn’t
the man vs. nature tale of people in search of lost treasures, but that this
NINETY minute film, the likes of which should really only be played at 5am on
TLC or some other cable channel high in the 500s where nobody can see it,
played in 3000 theaters across this nation. With billboards and bus ads and
mall banners papered town and town over. Someone threw an extraordinary amount
of money into this endeavor under the sole theory that if something is in movie
theaters, people will see it regardless of what it is. I’ve seen countless
people go to the movie theater and not decide on what they are seeing until
they are in line. This probably fueled the producers’ thinking. But with a
title like that, who knows what they were thinking. The movie is about three
kids celebrating a pillow’s birthday and when the absent minded vacuum loses
the balloons for the party, they use their magic window lady to tell them where
all the balloons flew off to. Along the way, they encounter a Cloris Leachman
who lives in a tree, a Chazz Palmenteri who runs a milkshake shop. A Toni
Braxton who can’t get her private plane to take off because there is a balloon
in the tail. A Carey Elwes obsessed with bubbles and a Christopher Lloyd/Jamie
Pressley duo who live in a flying sombrero. Pixar, you’re on notice.
4. THE TWILIGHT SAGA: BREAKING DAWN – PART 2
Here’s where I would have complained about the fact that we got 4
Twilight movies in the time it took us to get one Batman movie, but we all saw
how that turned out. This is the end. The perfect streak. Twilight has made
every worst list for every year one came out. My main problem with the series
always was that the rest of the movies were never as entertainingly bad as the
first. They all got serious and the directors actually tried to do something
with them. That was no fun. This is the closest it’s come to being a bit of fun
since the first one. With lines like “You nicknamed my daughter after the Loch
Ness MONSTER?!” and a cgi baby that is the creepiest thing I’ve ever seen. The
whole movie ends with a battle where Dakota Fanning gets her head ripped clean
off her body and who doesn’t want to see that at Thanksgiving? Twlight’s reign
on stupid shitty movies that tingle the females of our lives, young and old,
may be over. But do not despair. 50 SHADES OF GREY has a home on this list in
2014.
3. HIT & RUN
Why is Dax Shepard a thing? Is he really riding PUNK’D fame this
far? Maybe it’s that he’s one of those pseudo celebrities that has stayed in
enough guest houses and smarmed his way to warrant his actual famous friends
helping him out by putting him in movies and making vanity projects? HIT &
RUN is written and directed by Dax Shepard, Dax plays a ne’er do well who is
dating Kristen Bell (His real life girlfriend. What?) and he ratted out Bradley
Cooper bad guy who is out of jail now and wants to kill him. And there are big
muscle cars and chases involved. This was all just a reason for Dax Shepard to
race cars and do his own stunts. And Kristen Bell is in the car a lot for these
stunts. What the fuck is she doing? If she wants to date an idiot I am right
here. I will pretend to eat vegan and like puppies, just don’t leave me. DON’T
LEAVE ME. Tom Arnold is a sidekick in this movie, who mastered the art of
parlaying a rubbing elbows relationship with stars into a career in the 90’s.
So in a way, Dax Shepard pays tribute to him. And himself. Never watch
this ever.
2. GHOST RIDER: SPIRIT OF VENGEANCE
I am pretty sure the first
one made my list years ago. Remember the first one? It’s the kind of movies
that make you long for the subtle nuance of the original GHOST RIDER that this
list is made for. People know the Ghost Rider movies are bad and amount to as
much stimulation as your average 9 year old’s rub on tattoo. At first you’re
like “What the fuck?” and then you’re like “Oh. Who let’s that happen?” The
first movie is a ridiculous farce the likes of which Nicolas Cage has made a
rather infamous name for himself doing but this one is a snoozer. It takes
place in Europe and there’s bad guys and then GHOST RIDER! And then he
befriends a mom and her son, and then he pees fire and the whole time Nicolas
Cage is reciting lines from what seems to be other movies completely, because
nothing he says is coherent. The irony is that they pretty much made this movie
for that one lonely, long haired fat dude who runs the one remaining Magic: The
Gathering game in his town and is obsessed with objects that remain in constant flame and
they fire piss all over his dreams. This isn’t the movie that even he wants to
see, and as my pal Sean Richardson once said about SPEED RACER, “I love it when
they make movies for nobody”.
1. CASA DE MI PADRE
ANCHORMAN was a revelation to a young bushy
haired youth who loved comedy. Gone were the days of TOMCATS and WHIPPED as the
only kind of adult humor oriented movies marketed to youths. No longer did we
have to stomach another slice of AMERICAN PIE whenever we wanted yuck it up
with absurd and raunchy situations. The dawning of Apatow commenced and we have
it pretty fucking lucky nowadays in terms of laffs. If it wasn’t for him, all
your THIS IS 40 people that whine about the arguing and bickering would be
enduring whatever Jake Busey/Sass Talking Puppet Beaver private eye strip club
mystery Hollywood would be churning out right now. You are all spoiled brats
and need to learn how to laugh at good things. Will Ferrell seemed to be a gift
from the heavens but lo, mega success does not come without it’s array of
failed ideas. Now when your remake of LAND OF THE LOST tanks, I don’t think you’ve
spurned too many die hard fans who were really earnestly waiting for someone to
finally do that story justice. I don’t think you’ve pissed too many people off
by that point. But when a risky idea goes horribly wrong, the money in charge
is most likely not going to want to take chances on any more risky ideas. That
is the true tragedy of CASA DE MI PADRE, an idea from the guys who made
ANCHORMAN for Will Ferrell to star in a feature length movie about. Honestly,
this sketch has been done about a thousand times and I don’t think any of them
were that great to begin with. What Will Ferrell wanted to do here is star in a
Spanish soap opera type Western completely speaking Spanish with subtitles.
People don’t want to read anything for starters. But we make exceptions for
those foreigners who were not as blessed as we were to be taught English and
brave it to experience the story in the most natural way possible. CASA DE MI
PADRE does it just for fun. I don’t know where these guys come from, but
listening to Spanish is not fun or funny. In fact, when my grandparents started
speaking it, it meant someone was about to receive a life changing beating.
They try to play it as straight as possible, thinking that just the idea that
they are in a Spanish soap opera is enough to tickle your funny bone for 90
minutes. It is shot super grainy and all washed out so it gives you a headache
on top of trying to be able to READ funny. I made this comment to people I saw
the movie KLOWN with. The idea of comedy with subtitles is fundamentally flawed
because so much of comedy is timing. And when you’re throwing it to the
audience to read at their own pace, a lot gets lost in translation. Being that
there was no funny to begin with, this movie STARTS out running on fumes. The
inclusion of such prestigious Spanish speaking actors like Gael Garcia Bernal
and Diego Luna are too nothing too late and add nothing towards the proceedings.
This movie didn’t get a wide release. It really should have never been written
or even thought up. I still think of the headache I had watching the bright tan
of the color palate. I normally don’t like discouraging people from making
their own choices, but life really is too short for movies like this.
Now that I’ve told you what the worst is, we
can finally get to the BEST. But we’ve run out of time. Tune in next week for
some of the Best Movie Type Things of 2012!
- D
