The biggest frustration for amateur
film critics like me is that, since doing reviews is just a side project for us
as opposed to an actual paying job, we lack the access or means to see many of
a given year's releases quickly enough to write about them. We don't get
invitations or special access to film festivals, and even with general
releases, most of us don't have the income or time to afford to go out and see
EVERY movie.
As a result, I have to be pretty
ruthless in choosing which films to see or not see. Much of the time, this is extremely
aggravating. However, over the years I've come to appreciate a hidden side
benefit from this; unlike most professional critics, who are obligated by
either their affiliated publication/website or financial necessity to see every
(or nearly every) major film that comes out each year and review them, be it
good, bad, or ugly, I have the luxury of saving my time and money for the films
that I am at least reasonably sure I will like.
This means that, no matter how many
movies I see before making my year-end lists, most movies I've seen I find good,
or at least not offensively bad. Sure, a few stinkers always sneak by my
sensors, and every so often I'll join in watching a particular bomb for the fun
of it (like, say, every David Russell movie since The Fighter), but there have never been enough red marks on my film
lists to justify making a whole "Worst of" listicle like a lot of
other critics. If it’s getting panned, I
just won’t bother to go see it.
Until this year, that is.
Yes, it's finally happened. This
was the year I happened to see enough that bothered me to actually make a list,
and here it is. Keep in mind, though,
that the overwhelming majority of what I saw this year was still fine, and at
least most of the consensus "worst" of the year stuff I was still
able to avoid, so this list carries the qualifier of being the worst movies of
2018....that I just happened to see. Have one not on this list?
Well, too bad, because I assure you I will never see it. Life's too
short, even if these movies aren't.
5. Happy
as Lazzaro (Alice Rohrwacher)
Yes, I know this film got rave
reviews out of Cannes, and has continued to garner rave reviews as it’s made
the festival circuit. And you know
what? I don’t get it. I really don’t.
I found this film insufferably
boring. Its premise is solid and the
first half was properly atmospheric; there is certainly nothing to be said
against the film’s cinematography.
Sadly, the further and further the film receded into itself after its
big halfway twist, the more and more frustrated I grew with how satisfied the
film was to wave its “Symboliiiiiiiiiiiiiism” in my face in lieu of actually
doing something with its premise, or to develop its “message” beyond
“Inequality Bad, Innocence Good, Fuck the Banks.” There were a solid half-dozen points where
the film could have ended with at least some of my goodwill intact, but instead
it just. Kept. Going.
And. Going. And by the time it finally, mercifully ended,
I wished I, too, could turn into a wolf and disappear into the Italian
hillside.
4. Hold
the Dark (Jeremy Saulnier)
Why, hello there, Alexander
Skarsgard. Fancy seeing you here.
While the latest from Saulnier is
certainly a nice-looking film, set within the backdrop of stunning Alaskan
wilderness, the characters and screenplay just don’t measure up. If anything, the gorgeous scenery just
hammers in all the harder how far the story falls in justifying the setting. What is supposed to be a tense, psychological
thriller about a way-out-of-his-depth wilderness expert pulled into the drama
of a rural, desperately poor native community turns into a drag run though how the
town’s (apparently) lone white dude butchers natives and cops alike. The absolute nadir of the entire process is a
massive shootout sequence in the second act that, cinematically, is certainly
well-made, but narratively serves no purpose and is such a massively jarring
experience that the film never really recovers.
There are some well-enough performances
around the edges- Jeffrey Wright as the wilderness expert and James Dale as the
local police chief deserve mention- but Skarsgard is just plain terrible in the
leading role, staring and skulking and daring anyone nearby to try and make him
emote, and then horribly murdering those who do, all without breaking a
sweat. He’s proven himself to be a
perfectly charismatic actor in other roles, so I can’t begin to imagine what
sort of drugs he took to so completely repress it here. I literally couldn’t believe that the film
ended when it did, because I did not want to think it was going to stop on such
an obviously contrived note, but given how padded the run time was already, it’s
probably better that it did.
**for a more complete
version of my thoughts on this movie, check out our Cinema Joes episode on
it**
3. Mute
(Duncan Jones)
Why, hello there, Alexander,
Skarsgard. Fancy seeing you here. Again.
Yes, sadly, it was not the best of
years for the son of one of Sweden’s finest. Yet another Netflix original starring
Skarsgard, this one was directed by Duncan Jones, whose 2009 film Moon is (rightfully) considered one of
the best original sci-fi films to come out in the past decade. Alas, this movie is not Moon, not even close; if Roma was Netflix’s Citizen Kane of
2018, Mute was its Batman v Superman, a project so poorly
conceived and executed that it may never have been salvageable in the first
place.
Again, much like with Hold the Dark, a lot of what doesn’t
work centers around our Scandinavian lead.
Here, though, instead of playing a silent, stone-faced Alaskan wandering
aimlessly through the film as the body count behind him piles up, he plays….a
silent, stone-faced German Amish man wandering aimlessly through the film as
the body count behind him piles up.
Huh. Type-cast, much,
Netflix?
I must be fair, though; Skarsgard
bears a far lower proportion of the burden for this film failing, because so
much else going on around him is just as bad.
There are reasons, after all- many, many reasons- why this film is
higher up on this list than Hold the Dark. Paul Rudd and Justin Theroux team up as a duo
of villains clearly modeled on Hawkeye and Trapper from M.A.S.H., but with none
of the wit and charm that made that show one of the staples of my
childhood. Given how Paul Rudd has done
such a good job of establishing himself as a solidly funny and charismatic lead
in the Ant-Man movies, it almost
feels like Jones made it his personal goal to roll every bit of that back
within the span of one movie. Rudd’s
trying so hard to be a big, scary, violent criminal, but oh baby, does it not
work.
The film is riddled with terrible
CGI, and of all the Blade Runner
wannabes that have been made so far, this one is one of the most naked in its
desire and the most depressing in its failure to live to up to its obvious
inspiration. The world-building is terrible,
and the story has more loose threads than a rotting carpet, with character and
narrative leads that are picked up and dropped seemingly at random. All of this culminates in a climax so
bewilderingly nonsensical, it would
take home my condemnation as the year’s worst finale if it weren’t for a
certain other film on this list.
Speaking of which….
**for a more complete
version of my thoughts on this movie, check out our Cinema Joes episode on it**
2. Bamy (Jun Tanaka)
It's been over half a year, and I'm
still not convinced I didn't dream this sucker up in the midst of a massive
mental fit. Nor have I made any progress in determining whether or not
this "horror" flick is, in fact, supposed to be satire. As it
stands, this remains one of the most baffling film experiences I have had in a
long time, but at least, while viewing it, my sense of rage eventually morphed
into a perverse determination to have fun with...whatever it was I was
watching. And thank God too, because the film's big third-act,
supernatural bonanza actually managed to top Mute in being the most terrible
and wholly unintelligible series of events I saw in a film this year, bar
none. If I hadn't found my spiritual Zen state by then, I would have hurt
one of the people sitting next to me, and simply I can't go back to jail.
While nearly every choice in the
casting, acting, writing, and effects departments are comically bad, the one
that still stands out in my head is a scene where the main couple is arguing
with each other from across a road. That in and itself was bizarre, and
the fight made no sense; for a couple ostensibly so in love they are
ready to marry, there is not one second in the entire film where they
create any sort of chemistry. But on top of that, for some reason the
entire color scheme is completely washed out, as if a hapless intern had
spilled a cup of bleach on the screen. All the details blur, and I almost
started rubbing my eyes to see if it was me. But no, it wasn't; the color
was just totally drained from the shot, until it suddenly all comes pouring
back at the very end.
Why? WHY? It was by no
means the most grating of the film's many flaws, but it may have been the most
senseless of them in a film filled with utter nonsense, and for my sins I shall
never be allowed to forget it.
1. Charming
(Ross Venokur)
You could be forgiven for assuming
that the tired genre of the Disney Princess knock-off ended over a
decade ago with the combined release of Shrek
2, the absolute peak of the Disney-knockoff-as-parody, and Enchanted, Disney's own dip into the
pool. Once the object of parody has started parodying the parodies of
itself, there's nowhere left to go. We've done the 360, and are back
where we started. Right? Right.
Well, turns out you’d be wrong!
For lo and behold, in the year of our Lord 2018, Netflix started distributing Charming, a Canadian-American production
that is, without a doubt, the cheapest, laziest, most paint-by-numbers Shrek wannabe I have ever seen.
Every single thing about the film- the songs, the characters, the dialogue, the
droll plodding of the story from each painfully obvious beat to the next- is
done in a manner so cold, calculating, and utterly without passion that I could
almost feel my apartment lights dim as the film dragged on. The only
point I could ever give in the film's favor is that it cares so little, it
doesn't even bother padding itself out; the whole affair barely scrapes over
the hour-and-a-quarter mark. It is one of the worst-looking animated
films I've seen in ages; it's as if like very, very, VERY early test
animation for the first Shrek film
became sentient after sitting in the Dreamwork vaults for two decades, and
resolved to haunt my nightmares forevermore. Not one punch line lands,
not one word uttered or sung is believable, and not one design has anything
remotely approaching original, human thought in it.
It's bad enough that the film is a
failed knock-off of knocked-off Disney knock-offs, but my horrified fascination
with the film got kicked up a notch when I double-checked the cast, unsettled
by how familiar some of the voices were....and promptly had to pick the pieces
of my shattered jaw off the floor. I mean, calling this burnt gumbo pot
of a cast list bizarre is putting it mildly. The three
"classic" princesses are collectively voiced by G.E.M., Avril
Lavigne, and Ashley Tisdale from High
School Musical. Demi Lovato is the female lead. The male lead
is...hang on, Wilder Valderrama?? FEZ AS PRINCE CHARMING???? You
gotta be kidding me.
Oh, but it doesn't stop there!
The villain is voiced by Nia Vardalos, last seen in *checks IMDB*, um, My Big Fat
Greek Wedding. Sia cameos as a minor side antagonist. Let's
see, and then there's....wait, John Cleese? JOHN? How does That 70's Show, High School Musical, My Big
Fat Greek Wedding, Sia, Monty Python, and the last remnants of early-2000 teen
pop end up in the same movie? Well, I guess we know now what happens to
Disney actors after the Mouse has decided it’s done weith them. And by
God, is it ugly. Which means...quick!
Someone grab Lin-Manuel Miranda while there’s still time!
-Noah Franc
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