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 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
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