Wednesday, September 30, 2009

The Worst Movies of the Oughts

I don't generally make a habit of seeking out movies reputed to be awful (I'm kind of like this guy in that way), so I haven't seen any of the films that came in behind it, but it's hard for me to believe that Battlefield Earth was only the 27th worst movie of the past decade. I rented it with some friends back in college, when I was still into the idea of watching things because of the "so bad it's good" factor, and despite the spectacle of John Travolta in stilt heels and a Rasta wig belting out lines like "you must be out of your skullbone, puny man-animal!", that movie more than any other proved to me the existence of an entirely different kind of terrible. It was quite literally painful to watch - by the time the end credits mercifully rolled, I had a pounding headache from listening to the soundtrack, and my neck hurt from trying to follow action that was almost entirely filmed, for some reason, at a 45 degree angle. That other people who suffered through the experience of watching Battlefield Earth could find 26 movies made in the past ten years that were WORSE than it was (2.6 such stinkers per year if you're keeping track at home) makes me shudder.

Other notes:

1.)The list seems to be dominated by movies from three genres - action, lowbrow comedy, and thriller. There's no doubt that these genres do contribute more than their fair share of crap to the cinematic cesspool, and I realize the list was compiled merely by ranking films according to which had the lowest Tomatometer score, pretty much precluding anything put out by a highly-acclaimed filmmaker from "charting". Nevertheless, my own list would include a few prestige epics, Oscar bait dramas, and ill-conceived indies as well. Crash and Eyes Wide Shut would be strong contenders for my own top-10 list of the worst movies I've seen this decade, but since one won an Academy Award and the other was directed by the great Stanley Kubrick, there's no chance they'll receive the accolades (decolades?) they deserve on this sort of list.

2.)Dependable crapmeisters like Uwe Boll, Larry the Cable Guy, and the "(insert movie type here) Movie" guys unsurprisingly feature prominently on the list. But where's Michael Bay?

3.)Unfortunately for them, acclaimed performers like Robert de Niro, Ben Kingsley, and Diane Keaton also show up - De Niro twice. In fact if there's one thing that this list reminds me of, it's that good actors make bad movies with surprising regularity.

4.)Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun Li (#44) was really bad (it was the third part of a Trans-Pacific triple feature, for the record), but according to the list it's not even the worst video game adaptation of the '00's. Ouch.

5.)Producers should probably avoid pairing Lucy Liu and Antonio Banderas in another movie for at least a decade.

The full list is here.

No comments:

Post a Comment