I don’t necessarily enjoy highlighting the bad stuff. I do like to give every film a chance, in spite of possible preconceptions. As such, I try to see as much as possible of what’s released and as a consequence I inevitably end up watching films that aren’t very good.
These rank as the worst films I saw in 2012 through either paucity of ambition, cynical laziness or just plain misjudgement of themes and execution. The list includes feature films that received a UK general release between January 1st and December 31st 2012, on any format, but doesn’t include festival-only showings.
It also includes the 11-20 spots, for context:
20. Where Do We Go Now? (dir: Nadine Labaki)
19. What To Expect When You’re Expecting (dir: Kirk Jones)
18. Offender (dir: Ron Scalpello)
17. Jack And Jill (dir: Dennis Dugan)
16. Lovely Molly (dir: Eduardo Sánchez)
15. To Rome With Love (dir: Woody Allen)
14. Dr. Seuss’ The Lorax (dirs: Kyle Balda, Chris Renaud)
13. The Wedding Video (dir: Nigel Cole)
12. 360 (dir: Fernando Meirelles)
11. The Devil Inside (dir: William Brent Bell)
10. W.E. (dir: Madonna)
There’s arguably the scope for one interesting story here. There’s certainly not room for the offensive modern-day tale weaved throughout this.
9. Piranha 3DD (dir: John Gulager)
It’s not meant to be serious but that doesn’t mean it needs to be this bad. Woefully unfunny and over-reliant on a misfiring star cameo. Makes the first installment look like Jaws.
8. Nativity 2: Danger In The Manger! (dir: Debbie Isitt)
Cynical, with a suffocating improvvy script and reliance on thinking children 'acting naturally' is grounds enough to neglect just how chronic every element of it is.
7. A Few Best Men (dir: Stephan Elliott)
Filled with the very worst elements of farce and uniformly grim performances from a cast playing a coterie of laddish pricks and female characters who are either insipid or punchlines.
6. This Means War (dir: McG)
A charmless, sloppily edited mess that takes a weak joke and stretches it to breaking point, further proving action and romcoms rarely mix. It's a love story where all parties concerned are thoroughly unlikeable and completely dishonest with each other throughout.
5. Project X (dir: Nima Nourizadeh)
Absolutely deplorable, mindless found footage comedy which takes a scene which might pad out a flabby midsection of another teen comedy and stretches it to feature length – with added casual homophobia, disablism and misogyny.
4. Love Bite (dir: Andy De Emmony)
An abysmal, cynical stab at marrying a comedy-horror model with a queasily obvious attempt to ape the success of The Inbetweeners. Fails on all counts, making you look back on the golden era of Horne and Corden's Lesbian Vampire Killers with a warm glow of fond nostalgia.
3. Irvine Welsh’s Ecstasy (dir: Rob Heydon)
An abominable druggy drama with an awful script and even worse performances. The riffing on Trainspotting is so broad that at times it borders on parody - only minus any of the wit, charm or flair of its progenitor. The Scottish accents on display make Mike Myers sound born-and-bred.
2. Tim And Eric’s Billion Dollar Movie (dirs: Tim Heidecker, Eric Wareheim)
It attempts to break down the mystery of comedy and deconstruct the film through dry examinations of jokes and parodies of movie tropes but they fall completely flat at every turn. Not clever enough to succeed as a satire or outrageous enough to succeed in the gross out stakes, it is one thing to parody awful movies but that doesn’t make it exempt from being an awful movie itself.
Final tally for the year’s film viewing was 501, of which 418 (83%) were films I’d never seen before.
This list represents the best new films I saw throughout the year and includes feature films that received a UK release between January 1st and December 31st 2011, on any format, but doesn’t include festival showings.
It also includes the 11-20 spots, just for context:
20. The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo (David Fincher)
19. Animal Kingdom (David Michôd)
18. Beginners (Mike Mills)
17. I Saw The Devil (Jee-woon Kim)
16. Blue Valentine (Derek Cianfrance)
15. Cell 211 (Daniel Monzón)
14. Cave Of Forgotten Dreams (Werner Herzog)
13. The Artist (Michel Hazanavicius)
12. A Separation (Asghar Farhadi)
11. NEDS (Peter Mullan)
Wuthering Heights (Andrea Arnold)
A list of adjectives I'd use in describing Andrea Arnold’s take on Emily Brontë’s frequently-adapted novel: vital, visceral, modern, immediate, sensual, charged. There’s a raw energy to her earthy take which retains the gist but takes many artistically justified liberties. Boxed-in by the film’s intensely focused 4:3 frame, there’s a real sense of being part of Heathcliff and Cathy’s world, which makes it all the more touching when their close bond begins to fray.
Rango (Gore Verbinski)
What’s been missing from Hollywood studio animation lately? A peyote-fried, psychedelic Western homage populated by a cast of freakish animals. The cry of ‘it’s not really for kids’ has never been as apt as it is applied to this. When it isn’t spending its time hat-tipping Hunter S. Thompson it’s revelling in grisly, morbid detail and following a chameleon on an existential journey. This is as close as Johnny Depp will get to a spiritual sequel to Dead Man.
Tyrannosaur (Paddy Considine)
This tale of two lost souls both troubled by violence, as either aggressor or victim, is an assured feature directorial debut from Paddy Considine. It’s often bleak and troubling but absolutely never treats its characters with anything less than utmost humanity. It’s an exploration of what drives our baser emotions. Peter Mullan imbues Joseph with a fragility at odds with his threatening veneer while Olivia Colman gives an understated tragic performance that completely belies her comedy roots. This is heartbreaking, but ultimately beautiful, stuff.
Black Swan (Darren Aronofsky)
Darren Aronofsky continues apace with making each subsequent film a markedly different beast from that which came before with this masterful psychosexual thriller. Taking elements of The Red Shoes and mashing them with giallo tropes and Cronenbergian body horror, it creates a dark melodrama about identity and repression. A film ostensibly about ballet becomes a hysterical, shrieking nightmare through the use of an intricate soundscape, cunningly engineered jolts and horror prosthetics. It’s not subtle but it’s not required to be.
True Grit (Joel & Ethan Coen)
The Coen Brothers inject more grit into True Grit with this retelling of the grizzled tale which is not without the occasional flash of their usual oddities (witnessed most prominently in the striking image of what appears to be a bear on horseback appearing from the distance). For the most part this plays out as a surprisingly straight-up Western with Jeff Bridges’ shambling souse, Marshal Rooster Cogburn, rallying brilliantly against the impressive Hailee Steinfeld’s buttoned-up, determined child. Its elegiac qualities make way for elements of mismatched buddy comedy as the tone subtly shifts against the backdrop of the beautifully captured landscapes.
Trollhunter (André Øvredal)
From the simple premise of following the jaded employee of a bureaucratic agency dealing with Norway's native troll populace, there's a lot wrung from this mock-doc which proves found footage is not a spent force. Troll mythology is scientifically explained with a straight face but there's still room for sly allusions to the fairytales of yore and perfectly-pitched comic moments. Full of suspenseful vignettes, subtle effects and just the right amount of gore, it's a refreshing European take on the well-worn monster movie genre.
Melancholia (Lars von Trier)
The film starts with a rupturing bass rumble, which signifies Earth's atmosphere is being invaded by the eponymous celestial body, and immediately sets you ill at ease. A constant disquieting thrum pervades for the duration as the focus shifts from galactic affairs to a focused tale of depression as a family disintegrates at a country house wedding. Kirsten Dunst captivates as the morose Justine and the cinematography, framing moments like a Pre-Raphaelite painting, is astounding. This is a riveting human drama from Lars von Trier which also happens to feature the annihilation of Earth.
Bridesmaids (Paul Feig)
More than just another ensemble comedy, this is an acute deconstruction of the nature of friendships and a treatise on faded glory and life expectations. It's also an ensemble comedy. Not enough for you? It manages to find time to fit in one of the most charming romantic subplots of recent years, and features a grown woman punching her way through a 4 foot cookie.
Drive (Nicolas Winding Refn)
Without doubt this is the year's classiest actioner, which coolly underplays the little action it does have with restraint. It's a throwback in electric pink, underneath a neon glow and shot through with flashes of burnished gold. Ryan Gosling's stoic turn as he tentatively couples with Carey Mulligan means this is really a brutal, damaged love story as much as it is a stylishly rendered tale of botched robberies and vengeful mafiosi.
We Need To Talk About Kevin (Lynne Ramsay)
This is powerful, stunning filmmaking and a welcome return from Lynne Ramsay after nine years in the wilderness. The back-and-forth structure and recurring symbolism intensifies the psychological torment and leaves your guts torn out by the time the film’s lynchpin action finally occurs. Tilda Swinton has never been better and through both her and Ezra Miller’s performances, difficult questions are left untainted by easy answers. This is a confident mixture of heart-wrenching and horrifying, which impresses on every front.
WORST FILMS OF 2011
The worst films of the year list is again dominated by comedies. The notable trend among those in 2011 appears to be raunchy romcoms that want to have the appeal of their sweeter counterparts but also want to be able to say “vagina” every 4.67 words.
Here's the bottom ten:
10. Friend With Benefits (Will Gluck)
By the time an Alzheimer’s subplot rears its ugly head, this vapid mess will already have offended every sensibility.
9. Colombiana (Olivier Megaton)
A few impressive moments creep through the fug of all-consuming stupidity and ineptly-handled action but not enough to redeem it.
8. How Do You Know (James L. Brooks)
A string of contrivances held together by navel-gazing, from a cast and director who really should know better. It can’t even be bothered to punctuate its title.
7. What's Your Number? (Mark Mylod)
One. Out of five.
6. Zookeeper (Frank Coraci)
What’s the only thing worse than an Adam Sandler vehicle? An Adam Sandler stooge vehicle. With talking animals.
5. Sleeping Beauty (Julia Leigh)
Nihilistic erotic drama that’s neither erotic nor dramatic. The film itself is as blank and empty as its characters.
4. Anuvahood (Adam Deacon, Daniel Toland)
Woefully misjudged knockabout comedy that veers wildly between wacky romp and scenes of brutal violence.
3. No Strings Attached (Ivan Reitman)
Friends With Benefits without the relative charms of Justin Timberlake or Mila Kunis. Ashton Kutcher and Natalie Portman exchange fluids but not chemistry.
2. Just Go With It (Dennis Dugan)
Just don’t. Middle-aged Adam Sandler wank fantasy where he splurges hundreds of thousands of dollars on duping a model into having sex with him.
1. The Change-Up (David Dobkin)
A morally and emotionally bankrupt, misogynist body-swap comedy. High concept; lowest common denominator.
There’s a lot of chatter about 2010 not being a vintage year in terms of films but my overriding impression of the year’s films is pretty good. As ever, I saw stuff I hated and I saw stuff I expected to like, but didn’t. However, I probably saw more this year that I was impressed by (percentage-wise) than any other year I can recall.
In terms of housekeeping, my self-imposed criterion for inclusion in this list is whether it received a UK release between January 1st and December 31st 2010, on any format. This means I’ve had to miss out a few I saw at festivals, some of which stood a sure chance of making it on to the list, as well as including films that were eligible for awards season last year.
Anyway, from 10 to 1:
10) Somewhere
If you can ignore the fact that the basic premise of ‘jaded, melancholic actor holes-up in a hotel and forms a non-sexual bond with a much younger girl’ sounds pretty close to Sofia Coppola’s breakthrough film, Lost In Translation, this is a beautiful deconstruction of the Hollywood glamour mythos. Slow, thoughtful shots and languorous pace aren’t to everyone’s tastes but I really liked the performances and general ambience created. As a portrait of a completely alien character at a certain point in his life, I was completely drawn in and, I’m not ashamed to say, thoroughly moved.
9) The Other Guys
While no new ground was being broken, in either its chosen genre or Will Ferrell’s career, of all the flat-out comedies this year, this is the one which had the biggest impact. It proved there was life in retro buddy cop comedies after another high profile, disastrous attempt earlier in the year. Who knew Mark Wahlberg had untapped comic potential, outside of the unintentional? The entire cast were consistently hitting their marks, the action scenes worked as action scenes and the script was full of zingers. The fact it soundtracked a shootout to The White Stripes’ Icky Thump was merely icing on the cake.
8) Another Year
Mike Leigh’s suburban, middle-aged comedy-drama was one of those films that comes along and completely takes you by surprise. Essentially taking a one-or-two-day slice of each of the four seasons in a year in the life of Jim Broadbent and Ruth Sheen’s Tom and Gerri, it managed to capture the minutiae of everyday dealings with friends, acquaintances and family with pathos, warmth and natural charm without ever downplaying the drama in the seemingly ordinary. The characters and situations never feel like ciphers at the expense of a forced plot and, to a fault, everything and everyone is acutely well observed.
7) Dogtooth (Kynodontas)
A fascinating and disturbing premise, which reveals itself as the film progresses, marks this out as one of the most intriguing and memorable films of the year. The sheen of normalcy in which the events of the film are presented is what gives it its power. Just when you’re sure you have it sussed and it won’t go any further, it does. As the tension is amped up and the circumstances grow ever more sickening, the measured, muted feel of the film serves to warn you this could, in the darkest of imaginations, be entirely plausible.
6) Whip It
Funny and smart, without feeling forced, this is a high school ‘fitting-in’ movie that also makes for a classic tearjerker. There’s a bit of everything in the mix from well-directed sports sequences in the roller derby scenes, sass in the badinage between the characters and coming-of-age melodrama. Drew Barrymore shows she has flair behind the camera, as well in front of it, with the entire cast (Jimmy Fallon aside) really getting behind the material and imbuing it with warmth and charisma. Despite not pulling everything off entirely successfully, this is a film I can see myself revisiting fairly regularly.
5) The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo (Män Som Hatar Kvinnor)
This is certainly the best of the trilogy, before it becomes bogged down in back-story and all-encompassing conspiracies, and plays out like an edgy episode of any number of detective dramas. As a film it works completely as an atmospheric standalone. Lisbeth Salander is one of the most multi-faceted characters to emerge this year and Noomi Rapace absolutely nails the inner turmoil with a relatively restrained performance. The strength of the film lies in the fact that beneath the computer hacking and punky aesthetic of its lead character, this is a good old-fashioned murder mystery with a strong chemistry at its core.
4) Enter The Void
Gaspar Noé is one of the few directors who can legitimately lay claim to being hailed as a visionary. So little cinema these days is about experience and, for its faults, that is exactly what Enter The Void is; an experience. The pervading sense of unease is constant from the minute the credits begin. With a constantly roving camera which guides us in both natural and spectral POV, this feels as close as I can possibly imagine to being on strong hallucinogens in the Gotham of Joel Schumacher’s Batman films. While it certainly doesn’t have as strong an impact or message as Irreversible, this feels very much like the culmination of everything Noé has been toying with thus far and entirely designed to put the audience through the wringer. Pure cinema.
3) Four Lions
Despite the seemingly controversial premise, and the convention-breaking Chris Morris at the helm, this is absolutely not the film many thought it would be. Far more old-fashioned in its sensibilities than you might expect, this almost feels like a classic British sitcom about oafish underdogs misguidedly railing against the norms of society. Only in this case those norms happen to be the doctrines of Western civilisation and the underdogs a band of would-be Islamic jihadists. Quite how it manages to sustain a tone whereby you can be rooting for these guys, if not their cause or actions, is masterful. While the script contains its share of classic Morris wordplay, it’s also got scenes as touching as any I’ve seen this year. Brave? Yes. Stupid? No.
2) The Social Network
The very idea of a film documenting the story behind such a huge phenomenon in our recent history certainly initially seemed to me to be somewhat distasteful and more than a bit gauche. The fact that David Fincher and Aaron Sorkin managed to craft a compelling narrative from what amounts to programming and copyright law is a wonder. Jesse Eisenberg finally makes good on the promise he showed in Roger Dodger and The Squid and the Whale and gives the character of Mark Zuckerberg a sense of fatalistic narcissism, combined with awkward social ineptitude, which holds the film together. The sparing use of near-unnoticeable special effects, along with Armie Hammer’s performance, to render ‘The Winklevi’ stands as the technical achievement of the year and leaves me considering that David Fincher does still have it in him after his last few misfires.
1) Toy Story 3
Quite simply, as close to perfection as I can reasonably imagine any film getting. Any worries about how this might measure up to the previous instalments soon fell by the wayside as the requisite themes of abandonment reappeared and the central jeopardy of the characters’ predicament became apparent. The ‘jailbreak’ scenes constitute as good a sequence as I’ve seen in any film and the denouement is about as fitting as you could hope for in spite of the smallest injection of schmaltz. It has become this year’s ‘thing to say’ with regards the film but I saw the film twice in a day and was moved to tears both times by the time the incinerator scene rolled around. This cements Toy Story’s place as the most consistently fantastic trilogy of all time.
The Next Ten…
11) Ponyo
12) The Ghost 13) Inception
14) The Secret In Their Eyes 15) Greenberg
16) Up In The Air 17) Get Him To The Greek 18) Donkeys
19) Cemetery Junction 20) Black Death
A list that seems to be almost entirely populated by misfiring comedies (and ignoring the fact there were certain likely candidates I never saw) this is The Worst Ten Of 2010:
10) Tamara Drewe – I wouldn’t think it were possible to make a more smugly middle-class film than this. Entirely misjudged tone, very rarely funny and absolutely no-one to root for.
9) Bonded By Blood – Woeful celebration of the good ol’ British criminal underclass. As misogynistic as it is inept. An injection of Dyer may even have been an improvement.
8) Saw 3D – As bad as can be expected. Not even livened by visceral thrills. Makes you pine for the heady days of Saw VI.
7) Skyline – An alien invasion, as seen by actors whose range consists entirely of forced grimaces, from one room, then the garage, then the room, then the garage. And not in good way.
6) Burke & Hare – Completely fails on every level; as satire, as knockabout romp, as historical drama. There’s a fascinating story in the facts, not that you’d know it from this.
5) It’s A Wonderful Afterlife – Fusion of ‘horror’ and comedy with a British Asian twist. Short on anything approaching a laugh.
4) Cop Out – The low watermark in Kevin Smith’s career. Seems to have been directed by someone who’s never seen a comedy, let alone directed some great ones.
3) All About Steve – Sandra Bullock fails to convince that obsessive kookiness is endearing in this stalker-centric alleged rom-com.
2) Grown Ups – Peopled by the most reprehensible ensemble group of characters ever assembled, there’s no warmth to this crude, mean attempt at dewy-eyed nostalgia.
1) From Paris With Love – From the bland foil of Jonathan Rhys-Meyers to the incorrigibly over-egged John Travolta, every second of this is offensive on some level.
What follows is a list that couldn’t possibly be considered among the best of the year but, for whatever strange reason, exceeded expectations. The Biggest Surprises:
Youth In Revolt
Cyrus
The Joneses
I Am Love
Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky
World’s Greatest Dad
None of the following list were by any means awful but considering the mix of people involved they’re the ones I left feeling let down by in some way. There’s a bit of a blurring of the lines between this and them being seen as overrated, but this is a short list of what I see as the year’s Biggest Disappointments:
Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World
Shutter Island
A Prophet
Iron Man 2 The Lovely Bones
The Girl Who Played With Fire
Now this isn’t an exact science and I’m sure the scores don’t quite tally with the final order of preference or against each other. For a start, I’m certain I was overly generous to some films at the start of the year, but below is a link to the list of 459 films I watched in 2010 alongside a score out of five which they were given at the time.
