My watchlist - worst of 2011
In 2011 I saw seven movies that got a disappointing score of 1 (out of 5). To recieve such a score means that the movie in question is almost provokingly crappy and gets me in a bad mood. It could also be just as disappointing.
Of these seven movies, five (a whooping 70 percent) were from 2004 - 2009, the other two were from 1990 and 1992.
So, the spontaneous question arises: Can you deduct - from this result - that newer movies in general are at a larger risk of being crap than older ones?
The two most mainstream of the pack, ‘Funny Games U.S.’ and ‘Ghost Rider’ were both made in 2007. Both have to be considered promising according to my preferences; ‘Funny Games U.S.’ is a remake of the german masterpiece (given a score of 5/5 - I’ll get back to that one in another post) and directed by the same director, while ‘Ghost rider’ is a Marvel superhero movie played by favorite actor Nicolas Cage. Normally, both movies should get a higher score. But the carbon copy of ‘Funny Games’ (it could have sufficed to add an english soundtrack to get the same effect) was far too provoking, and whatever was wrong with ‘Ghost Rider’ (probably everything), I cannot remember.
Only one of the movies, ‘Murder-Set-Pieces’, made the mistake of trying to be shocking while at the same time lacking all kinds of content. I would’ve guessed there were more of this kind on the list, because I feel a strong hate towards crap like that (while at the same time loving movies that truly shock). Perhaps Richard Kern’s ‘The Evil Cameraman’ could fit in here too, because even though that one also sucked, it was a truly ambitious try (that failed miserably, but even so), whilst ‘Murder-Set-Pieces’ didn’t show any cinematic ambition whatsoever.
All the more surprising, then, to find ‘Primer’ and ‘Dust Devil- amon the great failures of 2011, since both movies seemed very promising and by all accounts should get a high rating. ‘Dust Devil’, supposedly some sort of horror movie, was totally incoherent with awful actors and just about anything one an find in a terrible movie and ‘Primer’, meant as an “intelligent” movie, mostly had coherence issues - which still is far from acceptable when having nerds and techies as a supposed audience.
Last one out is the documentary ‘2012: Science or superstition’, available in it’s entirety above, which managed to start off as a movie about the pending apocalypse (less than a year to go) but derailed miserably to end up as a loose collection of interviews with single-minded conspirationists that no one would listen to voluntarily. Understand my disappointment!
So, finally, the list. Here they are, the worst movies i watched in 2011. Stay away from these:
2012: Science or superstition – Documentary on the coming apocalypse that derails to become a sub-standard mess of conspiration theories.
Dust Devil - Richard Stanley (‘Hardware’) comes out as a deranged moviemaker in this confused mess about… Well, what?
Funny Games U.S. - Michael Haneke translates his masterpiece to english for no reason whatsoever.
Ghost Rider - “Moahahaha!!! Few movies so well deserve this score as this one. Nothing is good here.” -Myself on another site
Murder-Set-Pieces - Nazi photographer rapes and kills while the audience yawns and turns the movie off.
Primer - Nerds build a machine and then there is intrigue.
The Evil Cameraman - Like ‘Murder-Set-Pieces’, but with higher ambition and a lower budget. And shorter, thank God!
What? The question? Yes, no, I don’t know. It’s probably just a coincidence that around 70 percent of the movies were that new, but on the other hand it is hard to find gems in the current flow of newly produced movies. Perhaps it’s a little too easy to make movies nowadays?
