Oscars Preview Day 3: Dubious Achievements Abound

Dubious Achievement Awards: Genre

Most Ridiculous Moment

• 300 2 – Eva Green gets naked and stays naked and sort of rapes the hero general pre-battle
• Bears – When uncle bears attack the cubs, trying to kill them in the middle of a children’s movie
• Belle – A Bronte-esque period drama full of actors who can’t and won’t do English accents…and Marxists before there was a Marx…and it’s based on a painting.
• Draft Day – The most implausible trade in NFL draft history. Even in fiction, the Cleveland Browns are a factory of sadness.
• Heaven Is for Real – Greg Kinnear has a crisis of faith…because of a miracle?
• The Judge – When we find out Robert Downey Jr. may have gone to 2^nd base with his daughter

WINNER: Bears. Imagine if Bambi had killed mommy deerest. In the words of the only sadistic child who might have enjoyed watching a grown pair of bears try to commit double cub-icide, “Then Bambi could do whatever he wants.” 

Stallone – Make It Stop! Award for Least Necessary Sequel, Non-Animated

• Begin Again - i.e. Once 2? Twice? Three Times a Lady to follow. 
• The Expendables 3 – It would be better if someone in this series ever was actually expendable. Game of Thrones has made a legend off of killing characters. You have an endless supply of washed up action stars lapping up on the shores of believability every year. Expend some.
• Into the Storm –Twister 2. Somehow manages to make Twister, the movie whose dialogue consisted almost entirely of “Look out!”, seem sophisticated.
• Sharknado 2 – It’s just good enough to no longer be bad enough. Self-stimulative to the point of running out of cum.
• Sin City: A Dame to Kill For – Bad comic book writing posing as noire.

WINNER: Begin Again. In an upset…because no one in The Expendables ever loses. The Voice tries to do Once. It doesn’t work. If you make a movie about music, you have to love music. This movie might love music…which is just the kind of McCartney-balls timidity that makes this a bad era for popular music. Worse, if this movie does love music, it loves bad music. It pits Keira Knightley’s emo-folk music against Adam Levine’s pop and then purports to let us think that the folk music is purer. Only whoever wrote the music sucked and the corporate pop version, in Mr. Levine’s vocal chords, is better. So, perhaps this is a Levine-vehicle, his big middle finger to everyone who says he’s making corporate drivel: see, it’s better than “real” music. If all we’ve got is sterile pop, at least do it well. And to underscore the point…as contractually obligated, an empty T-Pain cameo. I guess Mr. Levine is all we’ve got for the moment. Where have you gone John Lennon? Our nation turns its lonely ears to you. 

Special Achievement in Worst Idea for a Movie

When the Game Stands Tall – Are you the sort of obnoxious frontrunner who just bought a Patriots hat from Lidz? Ever felt bad for the team that never loses? Then we have the prohibitive favorite underdog story for you!

Michael Bay’s Best/Worst Laughably Bad Movie

• Hercules – Annual The Rock entry. 
• Horns – Harry Potter and the Role Way Outside His Range. 
• I, Frankenstein – How to breathe life into this story? Remake every Goth film ever: choral music, dark pastels, cathedrals, hard rock finale…and ridiculous Ferenghi demon makeup? Gorilla-suit zombie army? Then they take all of that and try to play it straight.
• Non-Stop – Honorable mention for special achievement in spontaneous hatred of America. Why don’t more thrillers go with the Clue plural endings – all of which are bad, but at least it puts the emphasis on a solid set-up?
• Pompeii – Instead of being about a volcano, it’s about freeing slaves, because every movie that doesn’t know what to be about has to be about freedom. You can see careers being smothered in the ash.
• Sabotage - Arnold goes all Cowboy Commando at the end, takes a shot, smokes a cigar, and dies. In other words, a strong contender.
• Transformers 4 – Marky Mark, copious unnecessary hotties, and dinosaur robot battles. Two notes: 1) not enough dinosaur robots. 2) Couldn’t the main hottie be 18? You’re making us all a little uncomfortable.
• Winter’s Tale – A plot so meandering I wondered if the writer had Alzheimer’s. One only wishes we could put this on one of those Eskimo ice floats and let it die out at sea.

BEST: Transformers 4. When it comes to blowing up, no director is his equal.

WORST: Pompeii.

Special Achievement in Possible Cult Classic Because It’s So Bad

Ping Pong Summer – I have a special place in my heart for Ocean City, it's the closest thing to bodysurfing I have on this coast. Susan Sarandon must as well, because she appears to have stumbled out of Seacrets drunk onto the set of the worst movie ever. In other words, I loved it.

Adam Sandler Award for Shockingly Unfunny Comedy

• Blended – Not content to ruin our remaining respect for him, Adam Sandler is now reprising his good movies and making them worse.
• Dumb and Dumber To – Funnier than Dumb and Dumberer.
• Machete Kills - …the joke.
• Tammy – Melissa McCarthy is barreling through her prime and heading straight for dreadful.

WINNER: Tammy. Mr. Sandler, you are on notice. 

Best Idea Poorly Executed

• Big Eyes – A great cast and an interesting topic with a built-in, can’t miss finale…that is completely ruined by giving away the secret from the start. This is like making a mystery film and then tracking the perpetrator instead of the detective.
• Neighbors – Perfect set-up, perfect cast. Should have been funnier than just funny.
• The Skeleton Twins – Put two funny people in a movie and then make it miserable. The most eminently hateful movie of the year.
• Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles – Michael Bay, terrific villain, one great action sequence, Will Arnett being funny, Megan Fox totally miscast as an irrepressible ‘journalist’…there was so much promise. And still, after 3 ninja turtle movies, they make Rafael the star. Rafael’s the worst. Ask any 30-something who his favorite turtle was, no one EVER says Rafael. 
• This Is Where I Leave You – So much talent doing so little. Disappointing even in the scope of the disappointment. A minor flop.

WINNER: Big Eyes.

Special Achievement in Retread Novelty Concept:

Million Dollar Arm – Once you’ve created the fake event, make a fake movie about the fake event. Unsurprisingly, Disney was involved.

Most Inexplicably Well-Reviewed Film

• John Wick – Keanu has one of the great boom-or-bust careers in Hollywood – for every Johnny Mnemonic, there’s an Excellent Adventure. For every Walk in the Clouds, there’s Point Break. Perhaps we just don’t know what to do when he’s in something average?
• Snowpiercer – An overlong high-concept sci-fi pic with an over-the-top ending and uneven tone.

WINNER: Snowpiercer. Of course, there is an explanation. Hollywood Kingpin Harvey Weinstein had a Korean director work this property, then demanded that he edit it to reasonable length, because only good movies get to be long. The director refused, and Weinstein killed the distribution and marketing as a result. An online campaign of fanboys responded with the usual FREE WHOMEVER campaign. The lesson here is that Weinstein may not be a patron of the arts, but he does know something about movies. This wasn’t good. All of the spirit of taking on the man that made everyone want to like this movie cannot change the fact that the man is often right.  

Why Everyone’s Favorite Movie Sucked: The Fault in Our Stars

The Fault in Our Stars – Everyone loved the fullhearted lovestory of two terminally ill teens. Except me. Overwrought, overwritten, saccharine, it steals liberally from the much better 50/50 and Juno and adds hefty doses of human cruelty to the genetically-hexed leads. The lead actress is terrible at everything but crying. The implausible Amsterdam trip is foisted on the movie to score a cheap link up to Anne Frank…because, just in case eternal love and cancer weren’t enough, we’re throwing in the Holocaust at half price. That's supposed to cheer us up after Willem Dafoe crushes their dreams as their favorite alcoholic author turned insufferable dick. All that would be bad enough, but the worst part? With all the misery of child killing Nazis, brutish role models, and certain death hanging over the plot, the savagely cruel lead waits an act plus to say, “I love you too.” Just what this crushing misery needed: false rejection!

Phantom Menace Award for Colossal Disappointment

Noah

Exodus

Transcendence

Interstellar

WINNER: Interstellar. The problem with any sci-fi pic is that the payoff is always underwhelming. When you live in a multiuniverse of infinite possibility, nothing is as disappointing as having to commit to one possible outcome. If it has one saving grace, at least there’s no Mass Effect star child lecture at the end. Nothing is worse than the star child.

Prefontaine Award for Annual Bizarre Duplication of Subject Matter: Exodus and Noah

With a lot of money getting made by mediocre New Testament biblical pics aimed at a religious audience, Hollywood reacts in a way so stereotypical it feels offensive to type-it out: by veering toward the Torah, and then banishing the religious significance in favor of a new age “what might actually have happened.”

Darren Aronofsky took on the challenge of the Noah story, trying to twist it into an environmentalist paean. Which would have been fine if not for the Claymation rockmonsters and extinct species on-a-stick moments. Of course, the Noah story is especially hard because not much happens, and then it ends with the prophet getting drunk and naked. How do we get there? By cutting and pasting the story of Abraham into the middle!

So Noah was bad, but at least it was creative about being bad. Exodus was just typically bad. Ridley Scott has completely given up. And yes, God is the star child.