The Top Ten Worst Films of 2011

10 Tree of Life

That a Terrence Malick film comes with mumbling voice-overs and a hard-to-follow plot we all knew. That it could come with added dinosaurs was something we didn’t see coming. And Sean Penn had every right to be pissed off…

9 The Three Musketeers

You also don’t expect much from any Paul W. Anderson film. But that it would be so outrageous and stupid even I could not predict. Orlando Bloom’s hair is the only reason that it is slightly better than:

8 Conan the Barbarian

You don’t expect much going into Conan the Barbarian. But that it would be so vile and stupid even I could not predict.

7 Nova Zembla

Everyone who was paid to see it liked it. Everyone who had paid to see it hated it. Overhyped and overmarketed stinker with terrible 3D effects.

6 Paul

Shockingly non-funny for a film with Simon Pegg and Nick Frost. Plus it insults Ellen Ripley rather than that it pays hommage to her. Must have to do with the direction of non-talent Greg Mottola.

5 Pirates of the Carribean: On Stranger Tides

A terrible let down of the fans of the original three films. Lazy writing, directing and acting infuriated me. It says quite a few things about the terrible blockbuster year that was 2011 that this pile of crap is only the fifth worst film of the year.

4 Sucker Punch

Ouch. Proof that Zack Snyder should stick with putting a glamorous veneer over the smarter writings of more talented people. Directing the Nolan-penned Man of Steel will be the Litmus test for the rest of his career. Awesome soundtrack though, thanks to Emily Browning’s “Sweet Dreams…” cover.

3 The Change Up

Morally bankrupt. Together with The Hangover 2 and every single Kevin James film of this year the ultimate proof that American comedy is stone dead. Everyone involved should be banned for ever from any movie set.

2 Transformers: Dark of the Moon

Morally bankrupt. The worst thing about the Transformers movies is that they now spawn a whole new generation of toy based stupid battle movies, like the upcoming Battleship and the GI Joe films.

1 Green Lantern

If films were food than everything else in this list would come from McDonalds, but I described Green Lantern as “a cold hash of unidentifiable meat still dripping with the fat of an unclean frying pan.” Subsequently I suggested that it should be dumped in the deepest depths of the Mariana Trench. We shall never ever mention it again.

Dumas for Dummy’s – the The Three Musketeers review

The new version of The Three Musketeers is by far the Dumbest Film of 2011. And I don’t mean dumb as in ‘incoherent’ (Pirates of the Carribean: On Stranger Tides) ‘ridiculous’ (Sucker Punch) or ‘non-sensical’ (The Green Lantern). I mean dumb as in: not smart enough for special education. It is the mentally handicapped nephew of such fare as The Man in the Iron Mask or The Musketeer. Or better still: it treats its audiences as a bunch of Simple Jack’s.

This is Dumas-for-Dummy’s, or for very young kids. Director Paul W.S. Anderson (from Resident Evil and Alien vs. Predator, and absolutely not to be confused with Paul Thomas Anderson, the director of Magnolia) offers 110 minutes of show-and-tell: everything is shown, explained and repeated, so as to make sure that four-year old children will understand the plot. Fine. If this were a kids film. But it is not. It’s got a PG13 rating in America, and a 12 in The Netherlands. There is an amount of nasty violence and low necklines that is most certainly not appropriate for toddlers.

So if Anderson tried to do a ‘Robert Rodriguez’ (successfully switching from ultra-violent to kids films) he clearly failed. If he wants to make an ultra-light, breezy and entertaining blockbuster, then he partially succeeded. For when you’re not bugged out by the film’s simple-mindedness, there are still some things to enjoy. Machine gun equipped airships, for instance. And stunt casting.

Anderson has hired a whole bunch of talented actors to do relatively little, relatively good. Christoph Waltz for instance, as cardinal Richelieu. Milla Jovovich – the director’s wife – as a ninja version of Milady de Winter. Mads Mikkelsen as the one-eyed baddy Rochefort. But the best joke is a cheeky reference to the film that The Three Musketeers wants to be: Pirates of the Carribean. Whereas Gore Verbinski’s Pirates films were hindered by the bland wetness of their protagonist Orlando Bloom, Anderson’s movie benefits from that same Bloom’s wondrously bizarre turn-out as the Duke of Buckingham. The actor certainly has a field-day playing a bad guy, and if he’d been given more screen time he could have been to this flick what Johnny Depp’s Jack Sparrow was to Pirates.

There is also too little screen time for the actual musketeers, Athos, Aramis and Porthos, who are decently cast (Matthew MacFadyen, Luke Evans and Ray Stevenson). The kid playing D’Artagnan (Logan Lerman) is a disaster. Unsympathetic is a euphemism. Creep gives him too much credit. Compared to the thespically-challenged Lerman, Bloom’s performance in Pirates was Oscar-worthy. But he has Justin Bieber hair, so he’s probably there to draw in that part of the target audience that consists of thirteen year old girls.

There is one thing Anderson did do very good. He has understood that 3D is not (yet) a story-telling device. It is for pointing and throwing things at the audience, and nothing more.

Paul W.S. Anderson’s The Three Musketeers. You know what? Despite being incredibly dumb, and an insult to Dumas, and in 3D, I moderately enjoyed myself for the length of its running time.

Where We Stand: Nine Months in the Multiplex

It is September. We’ve had the Oscars, Cannes and the blockbuster season, and this weekend saw the end of the Venice film festival.  So, most of what was to happen in film this year has already happened. Time for a little overview then.

Last year I kept lists of the best ten and the worst ten films of the year. I’ve done the same thing for this year so far. And to start off on a good note: this year’s worst films aren’t that much worse than last year’s worst films. 2011’s Clash of the Titans was Conan the Barbarian, in terms of noisy nonsense, but Conan still offered some fun. Last year we had a Sex and the City sequel, this year we had the third Transformers movie. Those two cancel each other out. The same goes for Sucker Punch and Prince of Persia, and for Get Low and Fair Game. The ‘worst films of 2011’ list, for all the dreadful terrors that are on it, is not my main concern.

I have two main concerns. The first one is the list of films that should have been on the ‘worst film’ list, but aren’t there, because the list is already filled. I’m thinking of Clint Eastwood’s Hereafter, of the superfluous The Eagle, of the failed Horrible Bosses and the incoherent The Rite (review forthcoming). That these films are now in the large bulk of ‘mediocre’ films is a problem.

My second concern is the ‘best films of 2011’ list. There are films on there that really don’t deserve to be there. Mainly because I am still to stumble upon anything resembling A Serious Man, or The Hurt Locker. True Grit, though good, was nowhere near the Coen’s best work, and Oscar grabber The King’s Speech felt strangely tame and artificial, despite outstanding performances.

So on this year’s ‘best of’ list, so far, we find such films as Rise of the Planet of the Apes and Rango. For a film to be simply exciting (Rise…) or simply funny (Rango), and for it to showcase impressive technological advances (both) is now good enough. Just compare: In 2010 the one animated movie on the list was Toy Story 3. Now it is Rango.

Of course The Fighter was excellent, and so was Black Swan. And Bridesmaids was fantastically funny, despite the excessive vomiting and diarrhea. Source Code is the closest we’ll get to an Inception this year. But it is the closest to it, not a match. Furthermore Bridesmaids doesn’t hold up to Four Lions or Kick Ass. And I am yet to find anything as emotionally charged as Winter’s Bone or El Secreto de Sus Ojos. Harry Potter 7.2 was satisfying, but not much more than that…

Nothing to feel really good about then? Well, Thor and Captain America: The First Avenger were not as bad as I expected them to be. They were surprisingly entertaining actually, apart from the action scenes. X-Men: First Class lived up to its expectations, and Fast Five was an outrageous guilty pleasure. These films kinda make up for the big let down of Pirates of the Carribean: On Stranger Tides.

But in conclusion, all in all? Quite too many films did not live up to potential or expectations or the sheer common decency of meeting the lowest level of quality you can still get away with. 2011 is just not good enough. Yet.

What’s left to look forward then? Well, the award films will start pouring in, with strong contenders in We Need To Talk About Kevin, Martha Marcy May Marlene, War Horse, The Help, The Iron Lady, We Bought a Zoo and The Ides of March. And perhaps the The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo remake. But I’m looking forward most to Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, which really should see Gary Oldman pick up a long overdue little gold statue.

Best of 2011 so far: Black Swan, The Fighter, The King’s Speech, True Grit, Rango, Source Code, Bridesmaids, Harry Potter 7.2, Rise of the Planet of the Apes and The Tree of Life.

Worst of 2011, so far: The Green Hornet, The Green Lantern, Paul, Pirates of the Carribean: On Stranger Tides, Transformers: Dark of the Moon, Unknown, Sucker Punch, Get Low, Conan the Barbarian and The Tree of Life.

Yes. Malick’s is in both categories. Everyone who has seen it will understand.

Bonkers and Bad and With Too Little John Hamm In It – the Sucker Punch review

There is no need for averting the issue. Zack Snyder’s new film Sucker Punch is really bad. Like, properly bad; a bad bad film (as opposed to a good bad film as Machete or a bad good film like Hereafter). The man who remade Dawn of the Dead and adapted the graphic novels 300 and Watchmen for the big screen utterly fails now that he is presenting a film based on his own ideas and writing. Amongst those who did not ‘digg’ the stories of 300 and Watchmen there were still some who gave Snyder the thumbs up for his explosive and extremely violent action scenes. But now even those cannot save the film.

So, there is a plot. It is not that this is an ‘empty’. But the plot is completely bonkers. Not ‘a bit unlikely’, or ‘hardly believable’ but entirely nonsensical. And you know, even that need not be a problem (see A Hitchhikers’s Guide to the Galaxy). But this film takes itself very, very seriously, as an allegory for, well, Life, the Universe and Everything I guess. This is an attempt at a summary of Sucker Punch’ story: Young woman ‘Baby Doll’ (Emily Browning) is locked up in a gothic asylum for psychiatric patients after accidentally shooting her little sister when their step father threatened to rape said sister. To psychologically survive the asylum she imagines it to be a bordello in which she and the other girls are enslaved hookers (‘cause that is so much better) and to escape with four fellow inmates she must retreat in an even deeper level of fantasies. These videogame like ‘missions’ are themselves allegories for the bordello-level-of-reality attempts to gather four artefacts that are needed to escape the asylum. Thus Baby Doll and her friends get to massacre giant samurai trolls, steam-powered German World War I zombies, orcs and fire-breathing dragons and futuristic robot soldiers.

As I said: Bonkers. But this is just the start of the awfulness. The soundtrack is a mess. Snyder did surprising things with the eclectic Watchmen soundtrack, but the same strategy backfires terribly in Sucker Punch. It goes wrong from the start, with a totally inappropriate cover by Emily Browning of The Eurythmics’ Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This) over the opening credits.

The action scenes are disappointing. The worlds Snyder creates, especially a Paris battlefield in the WWI section, look great, but the violence, so brutal in his previous films, is not felt. It is directed at monsters, not people, and takes place on fantasy levels, where all real threat or danger is absent. The film has a 12 certificate and perhaps Snyder aimed to entertain teenage boys rather than adults. This can also be seen in the whorish outfits of the girls. These outfits show plenty skin, but there is nothing sexy, erotic or arousing about them.

Everything and everyone in this film is a stereotype. Dirty fat old men, a polish Matriarch, a weasel-like director of the facility, an old wise man and also the girls themselves. Add obligatory rain and thunder claps, images of hard, degrading work and finally the title of the film itself. I was going to write a remark about the total randomness of the title Sucker Punch, but as the entire film is a mash-up of random clichés taking themselves seriously, the title may be the most appropriate thing about the whole affair.

And then there is the last act, in which the film returns, first to the bordello and then to the level that resembles any type of reality most; the psychiatric institution. Suddenly the story becomes exciting, the characters become real, the danger is tangible and there is even a real, proper twist. And there are two minutes of Jon Hamm showing how much better he is than anything else in the film. And then you see that Zack Snyder knows how to make movies. He just should stop writing them himself.

Action Franchises: Resurrected!

Three film franchises have been “officially rebooted” this week. To quite some enthusiasm on my behalf I must say.

Christopher Nolan officially admitted that he will direct his third Batman film (after Batman Begins and The Dark Knight). The fact that he is very pleased with the material and the script (which he penned down with his brother Jonathan) suggests that the screenplay is nearly done. Nolan refuses to go into details, although his commitment to the project makes it likely that Christian Bale, Michael Caine, Gary Oldman and possibly Morgan Freeman will return for the third film.

Meanwhile, Warner Brothers have a second super hero franchise to boast about: Superman. Bryan Singer’s Superman Returns (2006) was a tad of a disappointment, so for the reboot they have now hired Zack Snyder as a director. Snyder already made Dawn of the Dead, 300 and Watchmen for Warners. His Legends of Guardians premiered this week and his forthcoming Sucker Punch is highly anticipated. He is regarded a visionary director on the level of the visuals, but his films are sometimes criticized for lacking in content. However, with a story written by David Goyer (Batman Begins) and Christopher Nolan (him again), and with Nolan as a producer overlooking the project, the quality of the project’s content seems safeguarded.

A third franchise rebooted this week (and let’s just say it is saved from the graveyard) is the Jason Bourne series. After Paul Greengrass quitted the series due to financial disputes with studio Universal, lead actor Matt Damon pulled out to. Now that Universal have signed Tony Gilroy to direct The Bourne Legacy, they hope to persuade Damon to come back. Gilroy did writing work on the previous Bourne films, and directed such thrillers as Michael Clayton and Duplicity. Gilroy allegedly wasn’t happy about the way the former three Bourne films worked out, so this time he’ll have the chance to do things his way (as he also wrote the script for Legacy). I’m not as thrilled by the news as I was about the other two franchises. I remain one of the few people who consider Matt Damon completely unconvincing as an action hero, and I thought the third film (The Bourne Supremacy) was uninspired, with the car chase being a complete copy of the Moscow set chase from the second film. However, if Damon decides not to return, Gilroy and producer Frank Marshall will be forced to find a new original take on the material that may even please me (considering that I really liked Robert Ludlum’s novels).

Together with the recent confirmation that the as of yet untitled ‘Bond 23′, directed by Sam Mendes and starring Daniel Craig, is back online after the financial misadventures of studio MGM, these news flashes confirm that very little will really change in action film land. Thankfully.