17. Smart
People
Here's another indie that's been workshopped into
inertness, featuring a cast of famous faces who seem to be quietly
congratulating themselves for appearing in a movie that "really says something,"
even though it's only speaking to a rarified circle of Hollywood types who
confuse clichés with meaning. Dennis Quaid plays a literature professor and
Ellen Page plays his young Republican daughter; both are dealing with the death
of a wife and mother reportedly loved by all. It's a measure of how miserable
they are that it takes two disruptive characters to snap them to life: Quaid's
layabout adopted brother, played by Thomas Haden Church, gets Page to smoke
pot, drink beer, and let go of the past, while Sarah Jessica Parker plays a
former Quaid student (now an ER doctor) who convinces him that it's okay to
listen to other people once in a while. But since everyone in the movie is a
caricature to begin with, their transitions to human warmth are hardly moving,
any more than it's inspiring to watch an accountant fill out a ledger.
16. Indiana Jones And The Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull
George
Lucas, Steven Spielberg, and Harrison Ford's fourth go-around with the
archeologist/adventurer starts well enough, but quickly gets lost in the wilds
of dumb gags, questionable CGI, lazy performances, and a grand finale that's
anything but. Watching it is like watching a lovely balloon slowly deflate into
a sad lump of hackery. "Knowledge was their treasure," huh? Go away now.
15. The Eye
The
Jessica Alba remake of the Pang brothers' stylish horror hit was excruciatingly
unnecessary, but also just plain lousy. Alba has all the acting chops of a
really attractive mannequin decked out in a clingy sweater. The "scary" scenes
where she experiences creepy visions courtesy of her, um, haunted donated
retinas go on way too long, past the point of fear and well into tedium; some
of them stretch out as though directors David Moreau and Xavier Palud are just
presenting a reel of unedited dailies. And the whole thing is poorly conceived:
If her eyes are haunted, why are so many of her hallucinations auditory? But
the obvious problem is that the film is so draggy that it gives viewers
downtime to wonder about such things.
14. Soul Men
Under
most circumstances, an ugly, hateful aggregation of Viagra jokes, broad
stereotypes, and gross-out sex gags would merely be depressing. But the
unexpected deaths of Soul Men star Bernie Mac and co-star Isaac Hayes rendered
the film's inability to score a single laugh or moment of genuine warmth
something closer to tragic, especially given the enormous squandered potential
of the film's terrific premise and amazing cast. In a plot that owes a heavy
unacknowledged debt to The Sunshine Boys, Soul Men casts Mac and Samuel
Jackson as squabbling, washed-up soul stars who reluctantly reunite to play at
a memorial for ex-bandmate John Legend, who lucks into playing a role with no
dialogue. The film accomplishes the formidable feat of draining all the joy
from soul music. Shameful, shameful, shameful.
13. Nobel Son
An
enjoyably scenery-chewing turn by Alan Rickman as a horndog, utterly unethical
Nobel Prize laureate is all that stands between the headache-inducingly awful
thriller Nobel Son and complete worthlessness. Rickman leads a random cast in the
pointlessly transgressive tale of a kidnapping gone awry. Mary Steenburgen, Ted
Danson, Bill Pullman, Danny DeVito, and Eliza Dushku are among the cast's big
names, but director Randall Miller inexplicably hands most of the dramatic
heavy lifting to the low-wattage, charisma-impaired duo of Bryan Greenberg and
Shawn Hatosy. The less said about Dushku's turn as a mysterious open-mic poet
who calls herself City Hall, the better.
12. The Life Before Her Eyes
Note
to director Vadim Perelman: It isn't a big twist if you telegraph it in the
title, in the heavy-handed, portentous tone, in "arty" shots of rotting animal
corpses, in slow-motion flashbacks, in overwhelmingly dire music, and in
nonstop hints that are meant to feel sadly ironic once the big reveal finally
rolls around. The Life Before Her Eyes' one saving grace is Evan Rachel Wood's
performance as a spunky high-schooler who wants out of her small town and her
oppressive small-town image, but who grows up to be the dour Uma Thurman, still
living in her hometown and endlessly reliving an old confrontation with a
deranged kid who shot up her school. What's meant to be a mystery—the
question of how one became the other—is drowned under syrupy repetition
and seemingly endless chunks of clumsy foreshadowing, which feels like Perelman
is sitting behind each and every viewer, poking them every 30 seconds and
asking "Have you figured it out yet? Huh? Huh? Huh?"
11. Chapter 27
Jared
Leto gives a performance of great quantity and nonexistent quality in this
laughably overwrought fact-based drama about Mark David Chapman, the J.D.
Salinger super-fan who blasted his way into the history books when he murdered
John Lennon in 1980. Aided in his crimes against subtlety and nuance by the
purple prose of a heinously overwritten script, Leto plays the infamous
assassin as a lisping, melodramatic Southern belle who's half Blanche Dubois,
half creepy stalker. It's never an encouraging sign when Lindsey Lohan out-acts
a guy nakedly angling for an Oscar, or at least an Independent Spirit award.
[pagebreak]
10. Religulous
You
know what Bill Maher thinks is stupid? Religion. No exceptions. Don't agree
with him? Well, you're stupid too. He repeats this message for 90 minutes, via
successively cheaper gags and easier targets, before ending the film with a
sermon as filled with windy piety as any of his targets. Maher can be a sharp
observer, but here he brought a club instead of a scalpel.
9. Good
Dick
In Marianna Palka's quirked-out romantic comedy,
homeless video-store employee Jason Ritter becomes smitten with a mousy,
porn-obsessed customer played by Palka. Ritter is the kind of cutesy emo-boy
who sleeps on Palka's couch, then wakes up early so he can tie a string to her
foot, attached to a thank-you note in the other room. And she's the kind of
impenetrably offbeat gal who doesn't think it's strange when he insists on
washing her hair before he'll let her wear a piece of jewelry he wants to
share. Not a single line or gesture in Good Dick has anything to do with
the world in which real people live, but it's just another day in increasingly
irrelevant Indieville.
8. In The Name Of The King: A Dungeon Siege
Tale
What would a worst-of list be without Uwe Boll,
the maestro of schlocky videogame-to-movie adaptations made possible by a
loophole in German tax law? Boll's In The Name Of The King is his naked attempt to
do the Lord Of The Rings trilogy on the cheap, though duped moviegoers had to pay just
as much to see it as to watch one of Peter Jackson's sprawling epics. The
budget-cutting measures are evident across the board—beware the clumsily
patched-in CGI backdrops—but as usual, Boll's cast of slummers and
has-beens really elevates the film to high camp. There's the king, played by a
beard-stroking Burt Reynolds, and listless turns by former it-girls Claire
Forlani and Leelee Sobieski, but no one can top Matthew Lillard for sheer
bug-eyed insanity. The more his fey, sniveling villain drinks, the more unhinged
his scenery-chewing improvisation becomes.
7. Where In The World Is Osama Bin Laden?
Hand it to Morgan Spurlock: The man has a talent
for gimmicky documentary hooks. After gorging on McDonald's for a month to
prove that fast food isn't good for you in Super Size Me, Spurlock goes on to
chronicle his efforts to track down the elusive Osama bin Laden, in an
adventure that takes him all around the Muslim world. On its face, the title
question isn't bad: Why hasn't America done more to capture the 9/11 mastermind
instead of getting bogged down in an unrelated war in Iraq? But what might have
been a probing look at the distractions and failures of the war on terror
becomes a lowest-common-denominator primer on Muslim culture. The bottom line
seems to be, "Hey, not all people in the Middle East are terrorists looking to
destroy America. Most of them are just like you and me!" Are there really
people out there who don't know that already? If so, they definitely aren't the
audience for a Morgan Spurlock movie.
6. Fireproof
Thanks to the stalwart support of church groups
and evangelical Christians, Kirk Cameron's metaphor-choked melodrama become one
of the year's biggest sleeper hits, parlaying a tiny half-million-dollar budget
into over $32 million and counting. But has there ever been a blander depiction
of marital conflict than the one between Cameron and wife Erin Bethea in this
movie? As his marriage flounders and divorce seems imminent, Cameron turns to "The
Love Dare," a 40-day, faith-driven guide to patching up his relationship and returning
to the godly fold. The guide doesn't cover the obvious: If Cameron would stop
acting like a petulant jerk and wash a dish every once in a while, the
relationship problems would end. Still, his many temper tantrums lead to
moments of unintended hilarity, including the scene where he wallops his
computer monitor—the source of his obsession with boats and Internet
pornography—with a baseball bat. Take that, machine!
5. Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed
There
are terrible movies, and then there are terrible movies that cause harm to
society by feeding into its ignorance. Nathan Frankowski's odious
anti-evolution documentary belongs in the latter category. Even those who buy
the thesis that star Ben Stein puts forward—that creationists are being
unfairly locked out of the scientific establishment—should be
disappointed by how Expelled spends almost no time explaining the specifics of
intelligent-design theory, or presenting well-researched data to establish it
as a legitimate challenger to evolution science. Instead, Frankowski and Stein
rely on the same old Michael Moore-style cheap shots to prop up their
pathetically shallow case. Few moments in cinema in 2008 were as shameless and disgusting
as the Expelled sequence
where Stein solemnly visits a Nazi death camp and unsubtly links "survival of
the fittest" theory to the Holocaust. Don't worry, Darwinists: If the "bad as
Hitler" argument is the best that ID pushers can muster, you have nothing to
worry about.
4. Meet
Dave
From Eddie Murphy's painfully broad performance as
a human-sized spaceship stranded on Earth to juvenile body-function jokes like "There's
been a small gas leak… silent, but not deadly," Meet Dave is as obvious and
unsightly as a pimple. The presence of occasionally funny people like Ed Helms
and Judah Friedlander in this movie only proves that there's a glut of middling
TV comedians now making their way into film, and that without a captain to
guide them, they inevitably crash.
[pagebreak]
3. The Hottie And The Nottie
Paris
Hilton's "acting" was once limited to bit parts and direct-to-DVD comedies, but
this little monster wandered into theaters briefly. Behind hooded, uncaring
eyes, Hilton helps her hirsute, mole-ridden best friend through an
ugly-duckling-to-swan transformation. Hilton's negative charisma proves a
bigger turn-off than some of the grossest latex appliqués outside of the Saw series,
which says everything you need to know about the movie.
2. The Happening
M. Night Shyamalan's breakout movie The Sixth
Sense was
a massive box-office and critical success, heralded as the arrival of a
terrific new talent. But as the years drag on, Shyamalan has proved unwilling
to step away from all the hallmarks of that first hit—spooky twists,
surreal interludes, a chokingly portentous mood, and meek characters who
deliver every wheedling line with strained intensity. The tone that was perfect
for a ghost story and was at least novel in the superhero tale Unbreakable was only fitfully apt in
the pseudo-fairy tale The Village, and downright out of place in Signs' science-fiction world.
And it was awful and laughable in the pulpy horror story The Happening, in which (spoiler!)
plants start releasing a toxin that makes people kill themselves, such that
stars Mark Wahlberg and Zooey Deschanel can only survive by speaking to each
other in pained, placating, bug-eyed whines. Their performances are so
idiosyncratic to Shyamalan movies that he had to have coached and crafted them,
but why? In what way does a castrated, fatally insincere Wahlberg and a
self-important tone enhance what's already ludicrous, overwrought, poorly
scripted material? Shyamalan once looked like a brilliantly innovative stylist,
but these days he's starting to look like an incompetent craftsman with only
one tool, which he keeps twisting to increasingly inappropriate tasks.
1. Witless Protection
Larry
The Cable Guy normally gets a pass for the incredible shittiness of his movies
because he's an unfunny, obnoxious bore, and no one expects any better from
him. But special attention must be paid to Witless Protection, if only because this
shabbily assembled turd represents an era in this country's history that we're
(hopefully) about to leave behind. Larry The Cable Guy's redneck minstrel act
was a perfect fit for George W. Bush's America, a place where reason, empathy,
and basic decency were derided as elitist qualities by a loudmouth extremist
minority that pretended to represent Middle American values. But as 2008 draws
to a close, a mainstream comedy that includes a scene where the "hero" refers
to an Arab-American as "Pamperhead" without an immediate comeuppance seems to
belong to another, hopefully distant era. The next time you want to be reminded
of the good old days of illegal wiretapping, torture, widespread economic
hardship, and environmental neglect, Witless Protection will be there waiting for
you.
Tomorrow: The A.V.
Club film
staff selects the best films of 2008.