by Timothy Morrise Different people have different qualifications for what makes bad movie one of “the worst.” I’ve heard all kinds of metrics of badness: crassness, how poorly it’s made, how funny it is in its ineptitude. But for this annual tradition of airing grievances in year-end good/bad movie lists (good comes in a few days) my The Bad List is determined a little differently than most people’s. See, I don’t quantify “worst” as just bad filmmaking. Even when a piece of art is poorly made, I often will still find myself interested in some kernel deep within its flawed matrix. No, lack of quality notwithstanding, my quantifier of “worst” is “what caused me pain whether physical or emotional in the act of watching it”. I only single out things or the bottom when it gets personal. And while I am loathed to rank my good lists because I don’t think it’s fair to rank apples and oranges, I do feel compelled to order the levels of indigestion each of the following films gave me. Three brief diversions:
Now for the list: 12 Women He’s Undressed This is the odd man out on the list, given it’s the only thing I saw at a festival, the only documentary, and the only thing with an ounce of integrity to its production. But despite being paved with good intentions, this otherwise useful and well compiled collection of footage about famed costume designer Orry-Kelly is marred by jarring reenactment cutaways. Here a confusing performance of Kelly interrupts compelling information about the real Kelly’s fascinating life, often hamming to camera about what Kelly might have thought or said, not what he did. That is mixed with bizarre editing and a clamoring to fill out its segments of talking heads only remotely qualified to be there. The experience is a movie made for a queer audience resting on the self congratulating laurels of its own queerness, eschewing the needed self reflection needed to monitor its own composure. 11. April and The Extraordinary World This one can be summarized in 4 words: “John Galt Lizard People.” In the twilight of the nerd obsession with all things Steampunk here’s a movie that fell prey to the worst impulses of that trend. Namely we forget any semblance of substance in exchange for hotglueing gears onto every thing. It relies too much on its aesthetic but what really kills this thing is the (spoilers I guess) John Galt Lizard People. To me, this is worse than the last half of any given episode of the "Beastmaster" TV show in its pulpiness. 10. Storks So there’s a moment in "Storks" where a bunch of wolves form a suspension bridge and AndySandburg!Stork asks “what is happening?” And if you pay attention the curtains of space-time peel back, you can see the very fabric of the universe as all existential queries humans have ever had intersect on the very question “what is happening?” Storks is an endless query, as it never fully conjures the missing half to its half-idea of a premise. In a fit of overcompensation it smiles through gritted teeth for its agonizing runtime. Andy Sandburg is doing his best with a character that has no aims beyond escaping his own aimlessness. I give it some passes because as agonizing as the worst of this was, there were a peppering of funny scenes and good animation. But watching "Storks" is like waiting in a holding pattern: when will it end? 9. The Legend of Tarzan When I first heard that there’s be a Tarzan movie, I was excited to see it on the empty promise that I’d get to see 2 hours of model turned actor Alexander Skarsgaard grunting and bounding around the forest in a layer of sweat and nothing else. What instead I got was a bland concrete colored slab that sucks the fun out of Tarzan. In a year where "The Jungle Book" showed us that synthetically rendered creatures can manifest with moving life and color, Tarzan spends half his movie out of the jungle, and those bits in the jungle shrouded in underlit moonbeams and poorly composited action set pieces in a washed out stucco. The absolute bewildering thing to me is why this story was told in a format of “Tarzan does his taxes” opening on an ostensible legend of Tarzan after the fact rather than just a goofy, straightup silly Tarzan movie. Also this movie suffers much from the need of opening itself to a world-building universe/franchise that nobody asked for. 8. Nine Lives (Starring Kevin Spacey) Somehow there’s a more embarrassing Kevin Spacey project now than Beyond the Sea, which is almost impossible but 2016 set a new bar for how awful life could be. Flaccid satirist Barry Sonenfeld gets there in a "The Shaggy Dog" knockoff "Nine Lives." This movie, about a talking cat absolutely LOATHEs cats. Nine Lives thinks felines are dumb, clumsy, needy outlines of fur. And that wouldn’t be SO bad on its own, but combine that with a monstrously uncanny computer generated Spacey!Cat and the movie leaps right into an unsettling tickle. "Nine Lives" was almost guaranteed to be awful from the pitch, but it exceeds expectations in magnitude of bad. 7. Neon Demon I already wrote a piece on this turd, but to be clear, this movie has some merit in the fact it is at least taking artistic risks. I’ve heard friends put forward some good cases for Neon Demon. But at the end of the day, for me, it’s just too frustrating watching a movie clamor for ideas that it has no grasp of. “Pretentious” is a word overused by consumer critics, often for failing to engage the work they are riding off, and despite hesitance to appear pretentious myself for using it I’m gonna go ahead and say "Neon Demon" reeks of Pretension. Here’s a story that wants to be about fame and beauty and femininity and all these radical aesthetics and has nothing to say about any of them. I would pass this every time to watch "Showgirls" again which tackles all those themes better despite failing worse. 6. Max Steel Man, this thing was booooooooooooooooooooorrrrrrriiiiiiiiinnnnnnnnnngggggggg. 5. Alice Through The Looking Glass I didn’t hate Tim Burton's 2010 "Alice In Wonderland." I’d give it a firm “you tried.” But the sequel suffers deeply without Burton’s fetish for the macabre balancing out it’s WHIMSY. ATtLG has none of the aesthetic markers you’d expect from a Burton movie, rather it pushes an expectation of of what a Burton movie might look like through a Jolly Rancher kaleidoscope, all the while overdosing on uppers. We get Daddy Issues, a world revolving around a pale misunderstood loner and a lack of any moral grounding, but never Burton’s cushioning black sense of humor. This movie also has some of the worst CG renderings in modern history. In fact it seems fitting that in the time travel sequences in the movie, Alice would hop on a gyroscopic skiff and literally sail across the garish CG waste. 4. Warcraft "Warcraft" is probably the biggest disappointment of the year. I think everyone *wanted* this movie to be succeed, wanted it to be the breakthrough for video game adaptations, wanted a fun fantasy romp. And there is so much passion here from director Duncan Jones, but sadly, in the words of Ned Flanders, you can’t live in good intentions. It’s almost hard to place what went wrong here, because there are technical failings in "Warcraft" in almost every tier of production. It suffers from slurry of poor decisions in adaptation. The story is unfocused. the casting is strange. everything is overdesigned from here to Hartford. The editing is bizarre and the shot choice is remarkably uninspired. We are a long way from Peter Jackson’s influence in the "Lord of the Rings" trilogy, and even given the ways in which "The Hobbit" series went astray, "Warcraft" by some improbable feat manages to outdo it in sheer number of bad decisions. 3. God's Not Dead 2 Movies that are lazy or spiteful cause me pain, but the worst, deeps undercrust of lazy bad filmmaking goes beyond just laziness and reveals something repugnant about its creators. "God’s Not Dead 2" is ugly in that way. It reveals its creators are hypocrites in shameless, cynical way they exploit faith. The American Midwest clamors for being a poor wilting flower in their own The Crucible, casting the evil non-Christians as their ACLU strawman with a literal Satan (in this CW show nobody saw or remembers but STILL). There are so many ludicrous conceits: that proving Jesus existed is an uphill climb for modern history, that the ACLU would be representing prosecution against, not for the teacher, even that Melissa Jone Hart’s character did anything out of the ordinary at all? Faith is a beautiful complex experience but here it is distilled to a slurry that makes me wretch 2. Yoga Hosers Kevin Smith wrote and produced The Worst Movie I’ve Ever Seen and I’ve never quite forgiven him for it, but like, at the end of the day, I want to retain the skill of seeing just what people (used to) see in this guy even if it requires tilting my head and squinting pretty hard. But… But "Yoga Hosers" is a boring, lazy nonmedy that wastes every ounce of fun and effort it could have had on tired Kevin Smith injokes. Oh Injokes. They’re funny to someone i suppose. To the rest of us tho, the navel gazing is like watching the movie eat itself. Here’s a movie that can’t be bothered to even maintain the basic decency of editing and shooting without looking sloppy. In a year where a labor of love proved genre kitsch homage is not only doable but can be a monument, someone with the time and energy of Smith has no excuse for this. Even the people I know who got stoned to watch this couldn’t find it funny. 1. Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice By all metrics of filmmaking "Yoga Hosers" is worse than this, but of all the movies I saw this year, this one most drove me to exhaustion and questioning all my life choices leading up until now. If the worst films (to me) reveal something ugly about their creators, "Batman v. Superman" is an exercise in nonempathy that repulses me to my core. People are not human beings but cattle, to be herded out of harm’s way while the Ubermenchen have their pissing contest. And what will they be contesting over? Vacuous quasi-objectivist ideals of authority, neither one of which holds a deserving claim. But claim it they shall, all the while punching and kicking and shouting under the guise of “Action” for its own sake. And not only does BvS. (pron. beevis) lack basic human decency, I think this hurt me more just because a part of me wishes the DCCU would yield even a little fruit. Confessions: I love love love the late 2000s era Bruce Timm "Justice League" cartoon, that is the right mix of goofy fun and practical world building to make a highly entertaining superhero drama. But there will probably never be a superhero movie in the DC spectrum like that in our lifetime, not under of the shadow of Batman and Superman punching each other beneath the desaturated sky. Timothy Morrise is a half cyborg/half simian working as an editor for Cashiers of Cinema. In his past life he was an Economics Major from Southern Utah University, but now he mostly has too much to say about Star Wars, in between going to church as a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (MOrmon) working at The Salt Lake Film Society and practicing as a filmmaker with King Ubu Prod. His number one goal in life is to teach a robot to love. He will settle for an alien or a libertarian.
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by Tim Morrise_>“Bad-ass” comes to mind when thinking of words to describe recent popular antiheroes of film and television. Daniel Plainview, Walter White, any Lannister: we are living in a golden age of morally solvent characters, who ain’t afraid to draw blood.
_>Consider that of the lot, Cersei Lannister is the only character who gets to be a woman, and even her most striking choices revolve around mass murder. In interviews, Lena Headey has said several times she thinks Cersei is jealous of Jamie and shei wishes she was born a man so she could kill people with swords. It seems orchestrating terrorist acts of mass murder for her constitutes “settling.” _>I bring this up not to say there’s any umbrage to be had with Cersei-as-violent (Cersei in her own right is novel) but in most of these anti-hero cases, we have characters taking matters into their own hands, righteousness be damned, and usually doing so in emulation of traditionally masculine ideals, the pinnacle of which is violence. This even applies to someone like Cersei, who even if she is a vengeful Matriarch, is played like someone who kills in emulation of men. _>What I find fascinating is the way anti-heros and violence become interchangeable, to the point of stagnation in terms of what we call an “anti-hero.” There isn’t much variation in the types of actions anti-heroes tend to take; most primarily engage in physical violence , while emotional violence is sparse. Here is where we get into why I think *the most* interesting and revolutionary television character on TV right now is Rebecca Bunch. by Israel Lawton
by Israel Lawton
by Timothy Morrise_> I feel like with “The Neon Demon,” there’s a prevalent urge to default to “style over substance” as a means of accounting the film’s value. And that’s not just because of Refn’s unbashed love of halogens or throbbing electronica, it’s really because that’s the most memorable part. How can you ignore the prevelance of style over substance when “The Neon Demon’s” dialogue is so vapid and unsubstantive? Style screams while any pretense of substance recedes into the background
by Aric HarrisonIn 1943 Maya Deren, a Russian born dancer/choreographer bought a second hand camera and with it she became the mother of Avant-Garde filmmaking. With the help of her cinematographer husband, Alexander Hammid, she gave life to one of the most inspired avant-garde films of all time, and one of the first feminists themed films, Meshes of the Afternoon. In this sixteen-minute nightmare we become part of Deren’s dark and oppressive reality. We watch as time gradually breaks her apart, fragmenting her into multiple dreamlike existences. She is forced to confront herself, her subconscious, and the patriarchal system that she exists in. What we discover is that her personal freedom derives from the separation of herself in life, through death, from the man who has taken her individual liberty away. He has brought her into a home that feels distant to her. She cannot cope. Deren’s contempt for the restrictiveness of her relationship quickly leads her away from sanity. She must reflect herself in order to understand herself.
by Jack Brown
Welcome home Guwap. Harmony Korine explores the raw, hyperbolic extent to which partially clothed, amoral, hot-and-ready college girls are willing to go in order to achieve their god-given right of Spring Break. Korine curates a tailored critique of a less-than-niche demographic of depraved, college aged dudes and bitchez in the form of a hyper stylized liquid narrative.
By Israel Lawton The opening of Noah Baumbach's Kicking and Screaming is agonizing. It is 12 minutes of pure torture; cruelty for the sake of comedy, a callus scab of wit covering a puss filled bourgeoise wound. And all the while, you are sickened by a terrifying realization: "I am loving this", you think. "I know these people, or I Knew them, and I hated them and supported them and I miss them". This is the strange, tragic magic of Baumbach's debut film, and a notable technique he would employ in later films with different goals and aesthetics. The plot of Kicking and Screaming is lose but sharp: it meanders from apartment to classroom to bar then back to apartments, with the camera alternating between forlorn trailing shots and voyeuristic framings of the character's most personal moments. All of this laced with the occasional flashback centering around the broken love story between Grover and Jane, which serves as the heart wrenching lynchpin for how our apathetic anti heroes got into this situation in the first place. In the first scene we are largely repulsed by our character's actions and mannerisms: we see them tear each other down, complain about the luxury of their parents money, and aimlessly discuss philosophy that they have had no point of reference to understand or truly care about. However, as the film progresses in the months after their graduation, we come to know these pampered sages, we come to see their actions in a broader context that lights them in lush sadness and desperation. Every line of the opening 12 minutes, from Chet's self absorbed monologue about being in college for 10 years to the cruel banter of of Jane and Grover slowly becomes clear. We come to understand that what we perceived as an empty parroting of philosophy for the sake of one upping each other is exactly that; but is also an honest attempt to come to terms with grand issues that, in a variety of trivial ways, are impacting their lives and future. This is the real charm and power of Baumbach's writing: that the distasteful quirks and mannerisms that we are initially introduced to become the things we prize in the characters. We see these people at their moments of most humiliating weakness, as well as their most abusive, but also at their most supportive and forgiving. In many ways, this gives the film something of a cyclical tone: with every new situation we see their behavior loop back around to our initial perception of them, and as they never seem to move on they seem stuck in their own self immolating feedback loops. For this reason, Kicking and Screaming (as well as most other Baumbach films) take on a world of their own: a world of broken dreams, limp ambition and wails of anger turning into soft sarcastic whimpers. Without ever breaking the film into surrealist metaphor, a fantastic quest or melodramatic camp, Baumbach's films become immersive experiences; realist nightmares that viewers often find lingering long after the film ends. This is connected to a broader concept of film theory I have been bouncing around for a while: that all film is fundamentally surreal, that through the process of creating a film, editing it together and viewing it the work becomes something beyond reality, regardless of any artistic intent otherwise. Even the most painstakingly realist film is an exploration of an artists perception of reality, designed to simulate their experiences and beliefs in the topic at hand. Baumbach's films are the perfect example of this: films that strive to show the real, day to day lives of the characters, that quickly become manifestations of Baumbach's own anxieties and desires. Every time I watch a Noah Baumbach film, I squirm. Sometimes I squirm with delight, others with embarrassment, but most of the time with pain. His films are painful, not because they are real; but because they are the opposite: they are personal, and fiercely unforgiving. And from this brutality comes a raw, gaping catharsis. by Israel Lawton Horror is a genre built on tropes. Where as science fiction looks eternally to the future, to exploration, horror looks to our ancient, primal fears. Good horror, therefore, strives to reinterpret symbols of these fears in new and uncanny ways that both reinvigorate our terror but also tap into something we understand as far older and larger then ourselves; something we are petrified to realize we already recognize. Film has elaborated on the mythology of horror expansively, over the last 70 years arguably becoming the tradition's most prolific and widespread medium. Many of our earliest understanding of horror symbols and creatures comes from film; the entire holiday of Halloween in the United States is dominated by portrayals of characters or interpretation of characters not from literature or theatre but from film. Film is, of corse, not an ancient medium, but it's synthesis of literature, music, photography and theatre have created a mythology all to itself. Film's that have been released only 90 years ago have become imitated, referenced and alluded to so often that they have become legend; instantly recognized by millions who perhaps will never see the original films or know of their existence. These tropes: the vampire, the haunted house, the mummy, the wolf man, the deranged serial killer, the exorcism, Satan, and so on, were not created by film. Many of them are ancient; occult even. But cinema has given them new life, new forms, that have come to dominate our perception of them. Though many viewers will never see these tropes first appearance in film, few will feel like they are missing information; horror cinema has become the new campfire stories, a collection of myths that many people can recite or parody without ever knowing how. Some of these myths are strikingly new: the myth of the "slasher" killer, (originating almost to the day as a clear response to the Charles Manson murders and other such serial killers of the 60s and 70s) have taken on a life of their own far beyond their role as screen villains. Most middle schoolers can tell you about Jason and Freddy and Micheal Myers; and even if they can't get all the original details right, neither can the production teams that readapt the films every couple of years. These characters have taken on a life of their own in the way only urban legends can. And the power of this comes from the trope. There is an urban legend of a babysitter who receives stomach churning calls from a man, only to discover that the man is calling from inside the house she is in. In 1979 this familiar tale was adapted into the tragically forgotten horror classic When A Stranger Calls, which despite having one the most referenced and infamous opening scenes in the history of the genre is often overlooked by fans of the genre. However, the legend was reworked, not in the tragically awful 2006 remake that even fewer people have seen, but in Wes Craven's epic 1996 meditation on horror, Scream. The parallels between the films move far beyond the trope of the caller inside the house; much like the opening 12 minutes of When A Stranger Calls the opening moments of Scream are the most iconic and beloved parts of the film. By masterfully retelling this legend though cinema, the myth is given new life and new power, surviving into future generations. It is this desire that leads to so many remakes and reinterpretations of classics; because the horror genre strives to shock; old films that were once sited as terrifying run the risk of being viewed as camp, and to the dismay of horror fans everywhere clueless studios remake classic films with no flair. However, the other drive to remake these films is far less cynical then the first: the desire to give new breath to a legend. Often this fails, but there are key and notable exceptions; most acclaimed being John Carpenter's 1982 version of The Thing, which so outshines the original source material The Thing From Another World that many do not even suspect it is a remake. Few genres, with perhaps the exception of Fantasy, rely so heavily on the usage of tropes, not as a crutch but a defined and essential aspect of the aesthetic. When dealing with an ancient evil in a Christian subculture, its power as part of a visual language comes from utilizing christian symbols and legends. Cinema is now our primary resource for the occult world of horror, and thus it's classics become grimoires, strange and ancient tomes from the forgotten days of Hollywood. by Jack Brown“What is good? All that enhances the feeling of power,
The Will to Power, and the power itself in man. What is bad? All that proceeds from weakness. What is happiness? The feeling that power is growing, That residence is overcome.” -Friedrich Nietzsche The pursuit of power and to fulfill the ambition of the will is intrinsic in human motivation, the soul guides the body to create and change as it sees fit. Arrogance is the disillusionment to accomplish the task the soul wishes to have fulfilled. Only the temporal results of the will ambition merit any gravity. Idealism is in a constant state of cheap flux (e.g. Tom’s ideals as a philosopher). Failure to comply to an individual’s Will to Power or become subservient to another’s is the fault of the individual and no one else. The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must. The body of Grace suffers the schadenfreude of Dogville’s extortion, the soul of Grace now hangs from it’s hands on perpendicular slabs of wood; a martyr to the notion of innate altruism. The earthly implications of Grace’s humanitarian will are utterly antithetical to the goals of her will due to her naive arrogance. Grace believes in the inherent good in humanity and seeks to belong inside of an intimate dynamic since her family dynamic is too egregious for her taste. Whereas, Tom believes good becomes corrupted because of seclusion and from others' neglect. Grace is at fault due to her ill utilized autonomy. She chooses to work the jobs set before her by the township then allows herself to degregated to the point of slave labor and casual rape. Grace puts her soul at stake for the possibility of makeshift harmony. To say that it’s the Dogville’s nature to exploit and rape is as true as it is ludicrous to say that Dogville’s nature is permissible because it’s their nature. Grace identifies neither of these. Grace’s Will to Power is that Dogville becomes a carrying and interconnected community, but her arrogance leads to believe that she is a turn-the-other-cheek moral savior while her noble cause and desire to belong becomes lost in a harsh and predatory reality. STRAY THOUGHT -- (Production owners take advantage of Grace’s demand within their market by shaping it to their full benefit. A single woman cannot unionize when in need of a place to stay and figurines to buy.) Although Grace is a naive runaway who hasn’t worked a day in her life, she still stands as an individual with the responsibility of autonomy as well as her Will to Power. Grace abjects herself to Tom’s will, (Grace’s will and Tom’s will are distinct from one and other, no matter how much their idealism may coalesce and no matter how thought out Tom’s idealism may be) and the only catharsis Grace can find for all the bad she has arrogantly put upon herself is Tom’s brains exiting his skull. Jack Brown is a former Portland Barista and current fashion and film boy genius working as a model and for The Salt Lake Film Society. He is also a student of Graphic Design at The University of Utah. He hails the only worthy deity, Lord Kubrick, thus spoke Zarathustra. |
ContributorsThe contributors for Cashiers of Cinema are a menagerie of creators devoted to Radical Aesthetics. Meetings are held at the dumpster behind Winkie's. Archives
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