I note that the Razzies for 2010 were announced a couple of days ago. They're kind of interesting, but I never go to see the movies that make their list. They're obviously bad. Why would I want to see an obviously bad movie? The fact is, though, that I do manage to see a good number of awful movies every year.
You know how it is. You go to the effort to be a careful consumer. You read the reviews. You consult rottentomatoes.com. And even then more often than not you sit in a theater and end up thinking about a half hour through a flick, huh? This turkey was widely praised? Why?
What should we call these movies that critics laud for reasons you can't fathom. The name Razzy has, of course, been taken. So has, of course, Oscar. I have to come up with another name and I know just what, too. I'm going to call my "dewards" the Bruces because ever since I was a little boy, I've hated people named Bruce. I am an unrepentant anti-Bruceite. And here are my nominees for The Bruce, the worst critically praised movie for 2010. I'm including both DVDs and stuff I saw in a cinema.
Easy A
A John Hughes kind of teen age comedy that's completely unbelievable. There are no American high schools like the one depicted here. There are no teenage girls - a kind of Juno except smarter and even more resilient and willful - like the main character, Olive. No parents are like Olive's parents either. Every once in a while, something funny does happen, but generally, the laughs just aren't there. Easy A does have a standout cast. Unfortunately their talent is wasted. Then there are the holes - huge ones - in the plot, such as it is. Maybe if you're a teen this movie will work as a light piece of comic fantasy. But if you're over 25, I think you'll be as bored as I was.
Black Swan
The best I can possibly say is that the Black Swan is a beautiful mess. The beauty comes from Natalie Portman who really does a magnificent job playing the role of a psychotic ballerina. The mess is the movie itself, which is often incomprehensible and just plain puerile in its depiction of what is necessary to pursue art. Every aspect of the movie aside from Portman's performance is very clumsy. There's a tremendous amount of handheld camera work and the end result is that the viewer (me) gets more than a little nauseated from the resulting shaky images. The score - aside from Swan Lake - is so loud and over the top in its orchestration that it takes you away from the film. The dialogue is something out of a high school made play. Sometimes the scenes were so ridiculous that I found myself laughing out loud. Did I say Portman was good? She's the only possible reason to see this disaster.
Babies
OK, there are a bunch of babies that a troupe of filmmakers take tons of footage of from pre-birth to the point where they start walking. The babies are cute, sure. The filmmakers have culled 80 minutes of the cutest footage. At about the 30 minute mark - which is when they show a baby obviously having a bowel movement - I thought, this is enough. I've seen enough cute baby footage for the day if not the month. All in all, this would make a great Youtube video. But a movie? Nope. This one is strictly for those who are baby crazy.
Inception
If I were 12 years old I'd think this movie was boffo. But I'm not. I'm an adult. And as an adult, I thought this movie was dopey and about as exciting - despite all the crashes, bullets, blood and mayhem - as listening to someone recite the phone book. The dialogue is so wooden that it's unintentionally hilarious. The soundtrack borrows so much from Beethoven (7th symphony), Mahler (Das Lied von der Erde), and Wagner (Die Walkure) that Hans Zimmer should be arrested for grand musical theft. If I had known you could do this, I'd have become a film composer myself! Then there are the holes in the plot, those major flaws that Hollywood never seems to think anyone notices (but we do!). For example, the lead character, DiCaprio, will do anything for a chance to go home to the US to see his kids, who live with his parents. But the guy is wealthy. Why doesn't he just fly them to whatever country he lives in? He has a gazillion airline miles undoubtedly. What's he saving them for? Mix a little bit of The Matrix with that old chestnut of a movie Fantastic Voyage, and you get this sci-fi hokum minus Raquel Welch's boobs and curves. On the plus side the acting is leagues above The Matrix. DiCaprio does a good job with what he's given as does Gordon-Levitt in his trusty sidekick role. Just like in almost all sci-fi, the women are silly caricatures of real people. Christopher Nolan started out with Memento, a clever low budget psychological thriller. With Inception, he spent 200 million dollars. The result is an overblown mess that seemed far, far longer than two and a half hours in length.
It's Complicated
It's not that complicated. The movie is silly, chick flick fluff, a superficial look at relationships with a couple of nice sight gags. One of those sight gags, at about the 90 minute mark, is so good that I'm giving this movie two stars. The flip side is that you have to wait 90 minutes to get to it. It's Complicated is too long by 30 minutes and everyone is so cleaned up and shiny that the movie is wholly unbelievable. Yes, Meryl Streep is wonderful and Alec Baldwin is surprisingly good at doing physical comedy. Without those two quality performances, this movie would have been a true snooze. Imagine Kathryn Hepburn and Cary Grant trying to carry a screwball comedy with cringeworthy dialogue and you'd get something close to this. The score by Hans Zimmer is painfully bad and repetitious; it's pure elevator music. I can only guess that the writer/director wanted the music to be painfully bad and so that's what Zimmer delivered. They paid a fortune, as well, for some of the songs in the background (Beach Boys, Tom Petty, etc.). I'm guessing the music licensing budget was well over a million dollars; the money would have been better spent hiring a script doctor.
500 Days of Summer
The script is painfully trite. The cinematography is painfully predictable. It's almost as if they gave a bunch of precocious eighth graders a few million dollars and said make a romantic comedy involving twenty somethings. I kept watching - the two leads are in love and wow they go through a tunnel of love; they're not in love and wow it's raining - and thinking oh my this is one long cliche. What saves this movie from complete boredom is the acting. The lines they have to recite are complete bathos, but these actors are excellent at finding some way to change the rhythms of speech to make it watchable. The leads obviously know what they are doing. But the creators of this movie don't understand the human heart worth beans. To be fair, it's very hard to do romantic comedy. Usually it's forced and unbelievable. This one is forced, unbelievable and just plain infantile.
A Serious Man
Beevis and Butthead do Job. This is a very non-serious movie, a sophomoric look at a story that has been examined by many serious people for many, many years. Right from the start, something is very wrong. It opens with a non-sequitur, a pseudo-Yiddish fable set somewhere in the Polish-Ukrainian Jewish Pale. The lead has no command of the Yiddish; he's just mouthing a transliteration. The Chassidic rabbi speaks with a Lithuanian accent. The tale is something out of Zombieland. The movie then fast-forwards to the American Midwest, circa 1967. This is a territory I know well. I lived this life. In an episodic way, the Coen Brothers try to create a dream-like, modern, satiric look at Job. Ignoring all the Jewish self-loathing in this movie, making a satire of Job is a lousy idea. It isn't funny. Neither is this movie. The Coen Brothers are very hit and miss type of film makers. They do best when they keep it light. This one is a definite miss.
Big Fan
I don't know what to make of this movie. It's certainly not a comedy. The cinematography is very rudimentary and the plot and writing have a very 1960s feel. The question I have is why should I care about the lead character? He's emotionally stunted, living a bleak life. You can feel sorry for him, but aside from pity what am I as an observer supposed to feel? There was a book from the 1960's with a similar vibe, A Fan's Notes by Frederick Exley. In that book, the main character - like the main character in this movie, he's a sports nut obsessed with a football player - had a working brain and insights. Here the main character is just a dope. I kept thinking that this movie was a remake of the old Ernest Borgnine shmaltzfest, Marty, with every possible positive aspect tossed out on purpose. This movie is depressing for depression's sake.
And the winner for this year's highly praised turkey, The Bruce, is...Inception. Rarely has so much money been spent on something so ridiculous.
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