2008 Movies Roundtable Spectacular

Part IV: In the Poor House

I didn’t see many movies this year and unfortunately the ones I did see were mainly mediocre. This was partly due to not going to see movies but also to what was available to me as I spent three months of year in Ethiopia. (Ethiopia doesn’t get too much arthouse fare.) But a couple of flicks stood out as really rotten.

The worst movie of the year was The Happening, which I reviewed while in Ethiopia. I’ll preface my bashing of the next two terrible movies by mentioning that I watched them during a long plane ride. So watching crappy movies during a long (sometimes crappy) plane trip isn’t the best way to gauge quality. Alternatively, I think that a halfway decent movie would actually seem better during a long trip just as a crappy one seems ever the more crappy.

Cloverfield ranks in the poor category because I don’t remember it at all. I remember the stupid trailer that everyone was a-gaga over. The film itself? No. I don’t even remember the monster. And I am very keen on movie monsters. Couldn’t tell you how tall, what color, how sharp teeth, if he had cool plates or sails on his back, or what sound he might have made. After first seeing it I wasn’t impressed but the quickness in which I forgot everything about this movie astounds me and makes me regard it as a horrible piece of pop culture. It doesn’t even achieve what the worst pop culture does and stay ingrained in the consciousness for any period of time. Speaking of forgettable, don’t get me started on the bland actors and actresses. They should immediately return to whatever WB family drama (that most likely stars Treat Williams) they emerged from and never grace the big screen again. This signifies the problem for a movie like this. If you are going to have stupid characters doing stupid things and placing their stupid friends in stupid situations then at least make them interesting. A prevailing theory in Hollywood today seems to be that we should care about these people only because they are pretty enough to star in a movie. Boo! So don’t waste your time on this one. Rent the original Godzilla to see how city trashing monster movies are supposed to be.

This uninteresting characters yet pretty actors in a bad movie brings me to The Strangers. I watched this one on a laptop from a pirated Ethiopian DVD rather than at 30,000 feet above in a metal hull flying across the sky. At least there is an attempt to go inside the characters a bit but it doesn’t work. Then the usual starts happening. False suspense and loads of scenes where people in creepy masks appear behind the character we don’t care about and then disappears again undetected. Just like movie monsters I am also keen on slasher films. But this new wave of horror/slasher flicks that have cropped up in the past few years have me either bored or disgusted. By disgusted I mean that in a “I can’t believe I am watching this crap” type of disgusted. The type of disgusted the people who make slasher films do not want you to feel. A couple spends the night at a remote family cabin. Some people come to kill them. Stuff, mostly uninteresting stuff, happens before they die. Ho hum. You’ve seen it before and better done.

For bland, pretty, uninteresting stuff happening look no further than 10,000 B.C. Another plane movie but for some reason I remember all the laughably bad scenes of this movie. I think when I was five years old and making up stories with action figures I came up with a more plausible and historically correct plot than this movie. Did any screenwriters even do the most basic of research to see what the prevailing theories are for how life was at that time period? After watching this movie the overwhelming answer is of course not. In the span of less than 90 interminable minutes the story goes from an arctic setting to the desert where, inexplicably, the wooly mammoths hang out to assist in pyramid construction, and then back to the arctic. The sabre-tooth cats live in the swamp that separates these two geographical areas and then there’s some slave revolt and a journey to find a kidnapped love thrown in for good measure. I make it sound much more interesting and involved than it really is.

Those were the worst of the worst. And I got to rant a bit, too. Nice.