Blah Blah Blah Awards – 2012

For nominations and now explanations, see this previous post.

The Tommy Lee Jones Screentime Award (For amassing the most screentime of the year):

- Channing Tatum (Haywire, The Vow, 10 Years, 21 Jump Street and Magic Mike)

The Kevin Spacey Must Have the Best Agent Award (For appearing in two or more of the best movies of the same year):

- Joseph Gordon-Levitt (Lincoln and Looper)

The Marlon Wayans Award (For appearing in two or more of the worst movies of the same year):

- Christopher Lloyd (Piranha DD and Oogieloves In the BIG Balloon Adventure)

The Freddie Prinze, Jr. Award (For the best acting in the worst movie of the year – male):

- Russell Crowe (The Man With The Iron Fists)

The Dina Meyer Award (For the best acting in the worst movie of the year – female):

- Malin Ackerman (Rock Of Ages)

The Anna Paquin Best Child Actor Award:

- Quvenzhané Wallis (Beasts Of The Southern Wild)

The Nicolas Cage Uneven Performance Award (For the biggest gap in quality between two different performances in the same year):

- Michael B. Jordan (Chronicle & Red Tails)

The Peter Sellers Multiple Role Award:

- Denis Lavant (Holy Motors)

The Sean Connery Best Cameo Award:

- James Badge Dale (Flight)

The Casey Affleck Worst Cameo Award:

- Chris Pine (Celeste And Jesse Forever)

The Alfred Hitchcock In Front of the Camera Award [For the least intrusive appearance by a movie’s own director(s)]:

- Rich Moore (Wreck-It Ralph)

The Quentin Tarantino In Front of the Camera Award [For most intrusive – not to mention annoying – appearance by a movie’s own director(s)]:

- Spike “HNIC” Lee (Red Hook Summer)

The Drew Barrymore All Grown Up Award:

- Kristy Wu (End Of Watch)

The Martin Scorsese Best Use of a Song Award:

- Zal Batmanglij for “Dreams” by Brit Marling (Sound Of My Voice)

The Andy Garcia Best Shot Award:

- Pierre Gruno – Through the door/through the neck (The Raid ~ Redemption)

The John Woo Best Shootout Award:

- Gareth Evans (The Raid ~ Redemption)

The William Friedkin Best Car Chase Award:

- Christopher McQuarrie (Jack Reacher)

The They Live Best Non-Martial Arts Fight Award:

- Doug Glatt vs. Ross Rhea (Goon)

The Die Hard 2 (Icicle) Award (For best use of an otherwise benevolent object as a weapon):

- Killer Joe (pumpkin pie filling)

The Cast of Nazis from Raiders of the Lost Ark Award (For worst performance of (an) actor(s) in scenes with special effects):

- Kristen Stewart (Breaking Dawn Part 2)

The Talking Pig Award (For the two movies most alike released in the same year):

- Mirror, Mirror and Snow White & The Huntsman

The Mulholland Falls Award (For movie that failed most miserably at being as shocking as it hoped to be):

- Bully

The Mulholland Falls Syndrome Award (For the biggest disappointment from the most promising ensemble cast):

- Haywire

The Cecil B. DeMille Award (For best portrayal of oneself):

- Kay Epperson (Bernie)

The Godfather Best Sequel Award:

- The Avengers

The Jaws Worst Sequel Award:

- Ice Age: Continental Drift

The The Man Who Knew Too Much Best Remake Award:

- Contraband

The Breathless Worst Remake Award:

- Total Recall

The Kevin Costner Worst Accent Award:

- Elizabeth Banks and Sam Worthington (Man On A Ledge)

The Meryl Streep Award for Best Accent (Female):

- Megalyn Echikonwoke (Damsels In Distress)

The Jon Voight Award for Best Accent (Male):

- Daniel Day-Lewis (Lincoln)

The Jon Voight Best Impression Award:

- Josh Brolin of Tommy Lee Jones as Agent K (Men In Black 3)

The Worst Impression Award:

- Anthony Hopkins of Alfred Hitchcock (Hitchcock)

The Gary Oldman Chameleon Award (For the most unrecognizable performance by an otherwise recognizable personality):

- Michael Wincott (Hitchcock)

The Hamlet Best Production Within A Production Award:

- Fix-It Felix Jr. (Wreck-It Ralph)

The “I’m Not The Bad Guy” Award (For the line so bad, it just had to be repeated):

- “We fight for freedom!” (Last Ounce Of Courage)

The 1st Annual This Is 40 Award (For supporting cast member(s) most deserving of a sort-of sequel):

- Joey and Angie (Man On A Ledge)

The Rosemary’s Baby Creepiest Moment Award:

- Baby Renesme (Breaking Dawn Part 2)

The Citizen Kane Award (For the least foreseeable ending):

- Breaking Dawn Part 2

The Passenger 57 Award (For the plot most thoroughly ruined by its trailer):

- Chronicle

The Nightwatch Award (For the most heavily promoted movie never to grace us with its presence in a theater):

- G.I. Joe: Retaliation

The Ten Best Movies – 2012

The movies of 2012 didn’t wind up being all they were made out to be. But they may have been something better. Something less predictable. What rose to the top, for the most part, were not the things you can so easily explain to others.  An Indonesian action masterpiece made by a Welshman. A visceral drama made by a Canadian actor. And a comedy about comedy made by a comedian who still says he has no idea how to make movies. And others that were even more difficult to sell us on. You just had to get out there and see them for yourself.

1. The Raid ~ Redemption – The Raid and I have been together awhile now. We know each other’s faults, but they only make our love stronger. Not every time is like the first time, but who wants that. They said it would get stale eventually, but we are still going strong and aren’t too concerned about the future being any different.

I know, you had that one night with The Raid too. And it was great. But all you remember are the best times. A hallway, a bullet through the neck, a broken doorway, another hallway. And hey, I remember those things too. There’s nothing quite like your first time with The Raid. But leaving it at that might give you the mistaken impression that The Raid is just spectacle. You won’t see its inner beauty without spending a little more time with it. Or a lot more time with it.

It was all there for you that first time, but too much was happening at once for you to parse it out. Nobody blames you. I was the same way. I didn’t realize what it was doing to me even without my noticing. I didn’t see how characters were fully realized in a word or simply a look. How a shot’s composition could tell you more about what was going on than the paragraphs of dialog it would take other movies. How a shadow could be the most ominous sight in a building full of darkness. The Raid is a perfect machine. It wastes nothing. When it holds on a man standing in a hallway for thirty full seconds, it is doing that for a reason. Any less, and what follows doesn’t compel you nearly as much.

There’s nothing like The Raid and that is fine, because The Raid is all I will ever need.

2. Wreck-It Ralph – Wreck-It Ralph had no trouble selling its nostalgic visit to an All Star Game of video game characters. But I’m not sure anyone sold on that alone came away satisfied. The references to games gone by were little more than production design. There to steep us in a world where video games are office jobs for those inside of them.

My video game playing peaked with Congo Bongo for Atari 5200. Point being, I have little to no pre-existing emotional connections to the vast universe(s) provided by these games. I have but a passing knowledge of who any of them are. So Wreck-It Ralph had to speak to me on its other merits.

And it had no problem doing so. From the opening narration, shruggingly delivered by John C. Reilly, to the chemical reactive climax, Wreck-It Ralph was filled with vivid characters and intricate settings. Punctuated with incredibly poignant moments and amazing reveals. With Brave failing so miserably to represent the usual Pixar output, it is as if this Disney product was meant to stand in its place. They Freak Fridayed themselves. And hopefully learned their respective lessons.

3. Lincoln – The greatest American director making a movie about the greatest American President really doesn’t seem like a tough sell. But try to get somebody who hasn’t already to see Lincoln. Tell them it’s pretty much exclusively about the 1864 Senate discussing the 13^th Amendment. Then watch them walk away.

They might know Daniel Day-Lewis is going to make them think there’s some archived footage out there he got to see in order to prepare for the role. They might know that Steven Spielberg can get any actor anywhere to show up for the tiniest part. They might even know that pretty much everyone says the same thing about it. But it’s understandably difficult to be thrilled about watching what amounts to antiquated C-SPAN.

And as such, it is equally as difficult to relate how Lincoln makes all of those reservations seem not just unwarranted, but nearly idiotic. As an American, to be bored by Lincoln is to be bored by the only true legend your country has to its name. When Edwin Stanton leaves the room in frustration at the start of another of the President’s stories, you know where he’s coming from, but you also couldn’t be more excited to listen.

Take it as a demonstration of how to inhabit a man who has become larger than life. Take it as a historical document on the fall of a horrible institutional injustice. Take it as a allegory for current civil rights issues. Take it as an enjoyable political thriller. It doesn’t matter. You can choose any of them or all of them and you are still left with a wonderful experience it will be impossible to accurately tell anyone else about.

4. The Turin Horse – I went to The Turin Horse with assumptions. But very little knowledge. I only knew (director) Béla Tarr as a name on a shirt. He was supposed to be a master of cinema. But the kind whose movies no one ever actually sees. I was ready to be bored. To regret coming to the theater. To once again test my seemingly bottomless limits of cinematic endurance. I heard he said this was to be his last movie. I had no idea it was even new. As it began, in startling black and white, my mind scrambled to place it in time. Was this from the 70s? Older than that? It looked too good to be that old. But they strike new prints of things like this all the time even though it couldn’t possibly be worth it. While I sat there watching this horse pull a cart for ten minutes, I thought, “It’s been thirty years. I wonder if this guy kept his word about this being his last movie…”

It was kind of staggering to find out The Turin Horse was brand new. It still doesn’t really make any sense. And so if I can’t even settle it for myself, how can I relate it to you?

Back to that horse. It pulls a cart. For ten minutes. The first ten minutes. That’s all that happens. A horse pulls a cart. The camera sways back and forth, creeps in and out. The score drones on and on. It doesn’t even seem like a movie, never mind one of the best ones. But I would have watched that horse pull that cart for another hour.  At least. I suppose that is precisely what a master of cinema can do. Somehow, in his hands, cart pulling, potato boiling, lantern lighting, wind blowing and well drying can all become fascinating apocalyptic visions.

5. The Avengers – OK, so this one sold itself just fine. But even so, after all the build up, the disbelief that this could really happen, that four giant blockbusters could all be smashed into one, not only did it not suffocate under its own weight, it was exponentially more than the sum of its parts.

Under Joss Whedon, every piece rose to the occasion. Captain America became the altruistic stalwart he mostly failed to be in his own movie. Black Widow had a purpose, and even a motivation. Loki emerged as a true villain, instead of simply a spoiled child. And Hulk was the star of the show it took two movies to disprove he always was.

Something like this, something bigger in scope than it could ever be in practice, is always going to be made up of moments. What binds them together taking a back seat to how memorable they are. And certainly The Avengers has far more of those moments than we could have expected, even at our most hopeful. To have those moments woven into a narrative that handed the spotlight over to each and every celebrated character and led neatly to a grand climactic battle where their talents are not only showcased, but field directed to serve a specific purpose seems impossible even now.

The overwhelming success of The Avengers will undoubtedly lead to far too many lesser attempts to combine properties that barely deserve to exist on their own and we may someday look back and resent what kind of wormhole the Tesseract opened us up to. But for now, The Avengers is a beacon of what commercialism can achieve if only it could see that we respond much better to it when it doesn’t take us for granted.

6. Looper – Seems as though even the most complimentary reviews of Looper can’t help but make some derogatory comment on its failure to make sense of time travel. They like to quote Bruce Willis’ line about not wanting to talk about it and draw a comparison to not thinking about it afterward or turning your brain off or some other such infuriating dismissive cliché. Funny thing about time travel though: it’s impossible. So when you question its presentation, you might as well be upset that the Harry Potter movies didn’t get magic right.

Looper is much more than the science fiction it employs. Mostly, it is pretty thoughtless about it. Not in a flippant way though, in a much more literal sense, wherein it doesn’t bother to dwell on it. Cars are yoked with solar panels. Drugs are in eye drops. Telekinesis is a stupid trick. Time travel is a boring job. These are things that aren’t worthy of note. It’s just the way of the world.  And it is in precisely this way that Looper can be a great story about how things never really change before it is one about hit men killing their future selves.

But it is that too. So along with any higher aspirations, Looper can also be a thrilling noir and/or a dizzying action piece. It is a rare melding of aesthetics we have in director Rian Johnson. He can satisfy the tenants of populist fare as well as the more esoteric art house expectations. And give it all a style in which neither is all that well versed. So please, think about Looper. It won’t break.

7. Argo – Somehow, the easiest, most straightforward success of 2012 is based on the least conceivable true story of 1980. It’s kind of the cinematic equivalent of the ubiquitous pop song you don’t want to like but find yourself singing even though you swear you don’t listen to those stations. Argo is inescapably satisfying (if you’re American anyway) and if it were feasible, bandcamp would be filled with mourful acoustic covers of it by now.

Ben Affleck (the director) has usurped all of the attention Argo has rightfully received this awards season. It is a surprise to seemingly everyone that he can do anything well. As if he hadn’t already done this twice before. I’m not saying he hasn’t learned anything in the meantime. I mean, he makes an unanswered phone call one of the tensest moments of the year. Throw in amazing performances by unknowns and superknowns in all sorts of parts and you have to believe that Ben Affleck is the Clint Eastwood we didn’t know we had until way too late. No one seems ready to throw his acting in there with the accolades though. Some people never forgive.

8. Sleepwalk With Me – It’s not a complicated story. Or even all that strangely told. But perhaps that is why, coupled with how it was made, it was impossible to sell on anyone. There were all sorts of email and social media campaigns, a fake feud with Avengers director Joss Whedon, and a short starring NPstaR Terry Gross. After the show I went to, Ira Glass spent 45 minutes answering questions about everything but the movie we’d just watched. And this worked at least as well as such methods could. Sleepwalk With Me did not fail by any means. But sadly, most people are only learning about its existence now that it is on their Recently Added queue on Netflix Watch Instantly.

Mike Birbiglia has always been more of a storyteller than a comedian. So it isn’t such a surprise that he would come out with something like this on his first try. Nor is it a surprise that a quasi-comedian would make one of the funniest movies of the year. What is odd, is this early, seemingly easy success goes against everything he is saying in Sleepwalk With Me. That you have to give up a lot of things to be good at the thing you love to do. That it takes awhile to find the voice that works. That you have to run through a few windows before any doors will open for you.

Of course, this is the movie based on the story he’s been telling in one form or another for years now. So maybe it isn’t a contradiction at all. Just an extension of the first point. We’ll have to see what he brings us next. Which might not be a movie at all. But that seems like it would be loss for everyone.

9. Take This Waltz – Sometimes the movies you like best aren’t such a pleasant experience. Look at any top critic’s best of the year list and you will surmise that this must be true of every movie worth seeing. But I don’t mean it challenges you or teaches you or anything so noble. Sometimes all it has to do, all that it can do, is devastate your ability to function as you were.

Michelle Williams especially, as she is the focus, is painfully authentic. Specific enough to embody a true person, but broad enough to represent any number of people you may know. You can’t stand what she is doing (or thinking about doing, which is more often the case) but you won’t for a second think it unbelievable. Or unavoidable.

We should all hope for the kind of trouble Take This Waltz portrays, really. But that doesn’t erode the impact it can have. You might have trouble with any number of things after watching it. From public showers to rickshaws, from chicken to putting your faith in anyone ever. Not because they’ll let you down, but because you’re not going to be able to help yourself one day and then what was the point?

10. Searching For Sugar Man – I knew what this movie’s “twist” was ahead of time. Or, I thought I did. It does such an astonishing job of setting the stage (sorry) for its story, I was totally convinced I’d gotten it wrong somehow. And that’s when it pulls the rug out.

Searching For Sugar Man isn’t just a great documentary. It looks and feels the way you wish a whole lot more narrative movies would. Even when you know what has to be coming, it can still evoke the emotions it wants to. It can manipulate you in any way it wants. Which is all the more astonishing, considering that it can’t imagine its plot into a new direction to do so.

A mix of history, legend, rebellion and mystery makes this one of the most exciting and eclectic movies of the year, and all without much of anything beyond talking heads. These are some of the most excitable interviews you’ll ever see. Even though it never stops telling you how much of a commercial failure its subject was, and you know this anyway because you have never heard of him, when they are through with you, you can’t believe it either. As if you were there in 1968, recording the album you knew would take over the world.

10.-15.

Django Unchained – Placing a Quentin Tarantino movie even this low puts it in an unfairly defensive position. So let’s just allow this as evidence of how good a year it was.

The Kid With A Bike – The most frustrating child in Belgium is at once the best and worst advertisement for adoption there has ever been.

Rust And Bone – No one in the world ever gets what they want and that is beautiful.

The Cabin In The Woods – Now we can imagine even the most generic of horror movies has something much more intersting going on behind it.

Jack Reacher – What we should wish all best selling novels could turn into.

The Ten Worst Movies – 2012

The 99% certainly got their due in the movies of 2012. Hardly a week passed where we didn’t hear the people sing, singing the song of angry men. The irony of so many giant wasteful blockbuster budgets being spent to deliver that message was hopefully not lost on anyone. But it is with some resignation that I submit these worst movies to you. Most of them products of the relative proletariat. I don’t feel guilty. These are the worst. It’s just too bad that they are. Because you can’t fight city hall with terrible movies.

1. Last Ounce Of Courage – Most people have a rule against politics and religion at Christmastime. This movie considers it an affront to American freedom if these things aren’t all mixed awkwardly together and forced down your throat. Last Ounce Of Courage doesn’t think anyone should be comfortable or happy at Christmas, least of all anyone who isn’t Christian.

Last Ounce Of Courage would have you believe that Christians are as universally persecuted today as they were in Roman Times. So it would only further this lunacy to point out the offenses to logic and the US Constitution that permeate the supposedly Christian message it puts forth. Fortunately, the more mundane offenses to basic movie making far outweigh anything else, so there is little reason to dwell on that potential trap.

In fact, it takes quite awhile to realize what the point will be. First, there was the September 14^th release date (September 11^th in one town you should probably never visit.) Then there is the title. Which suggests a lot of things, but none of them Christmas. So after a lot of laborious mourning a barely seen character and carefully dull family dynamics, when the Christmas issue arises, it seems like an oddly placed subplot at most. As it takes over the entire movie like metastasising pancreatic cancer, and is equated to the military’s struggle against terrorism, it never stops being a jaw dropping shock of awful, because it is always an insufficient and incongruous theme and thusly is always being propped up by some other painfully forced construct.

The most confusing of these is the villain, played with cigar-chomping self-satisfied mirth by Fred Williamson. His motivations for the destruction of Christmas in this tiny town (which somehow unquestionably represents the whole of the country when it comes to church and state being joined for life) are so unapologetically underdeveloped, they can really only be ascribed to the work of the devil. If you are suddenly concerned that the one black character in this movie has just been relegated to a manifestation of Satan, please know that this is not even among the top five off-putting things about Last Ounce Of Courage.

Reason To Watch It Anyway: It’s always a welcome surprise when somebody doesn’t seem to know what movie they are in. Even when the rest of what goes on around them isn’t awful (see Josh Peck in Red Dawn.) So to watch Jenna Boyd not only act better than everyone else in Last Ounce Of Courage (not a difficult feat), but act as if she is in the ABC Family production that Last Ounce Of Courage should have been (which is being gracious to it and/or insulting to ABC Family) is maybe the best example of this there has ever been. Still though, don’t watch this.

2. The FP – If an engineer designs a bridge that purposely doesn’t allow anything to cross it, the engineer may rightfully claim it to successfully serve any number of other purposes, but it will still be a bad bridge. Doing it on purpose, saying this bridge is so crazy you’ll laugh your way over it, that it’s funny because remember all those bad bridges you used to drive over when you were a teenager and didn’t know any better, that it is supposed to harken back to bridges from the 80s, none of this will ever make it anything other than the bad bridge that it was always intended to be.

The FP is only the first movie on this list that wants to be a terrible movie. So much so that it almost seems like playing into its hands placing it here. But while The FP (and its creators) might pretend not to mind being named one of the worst movies of the year, it (and they) will just assume I don’t get what they were going for. That I somehow missed the terribly subtle humor buried under overacting and a nonsensical premise. That these terrible things were done on purpose suffice as the only reason it isn’t terrible. Which only leaves them as the ones who don’t get it.

Reason To Watch It Anyway: You should be able to say something. A movie about a dystopian future where dancing is currency and/or a weapon (or whatever) should have a bright spot. But it doesn’t. The best I can do is direct you to a theater where everyone watching it will laugh hysterically at it because they believe they should.

3. A Thousand Words – No matter how you feel about Billy Crystal, it’s for the best Eddie Murphy backed out of hosting the Oscars. Because this is what happens when he doesn’t back out of things. Though perhaps he never expected anyone to have the opportunity to see A Thousand Words. He would have been right had he not made that brief strained comeback towards the end of 2011. But this was just the sort of window for which DreamWorks was waiting. Four years A Thousand Words was kept in limbo, hoping beyond hope that its star’s marketability would rise above sea level for just a brief moment. They thought they found that window. But it turned out to be a much smaller window than they could have predicted and were effectively nailing it shut it by allowing this to go public.

It’s a forgone conclusion that a movie finding its way out of the studio storage facility after four years will be and always was terrible. We see that plenty of terrible things are released exactly when they are supposed to be, so there must be something seriously wrong to warrant shutting it away. And there is. But it goes well beyond Eddie Murphy. His only sin seems to be not knowing what to say “no” to.

This is not to say he does anything of value in A Thousand Words. But then, A Thousand Words does not allow for that. It has found countless ways to render itself useless. This movie is only good at countervailing itself. It wants to have zero impact so it offsets any prospective plot point with another that will cancel it out.

The very premise robs Eddie Murphy of his voice, castrating him of any remaining potential he may have been hiding from us the past decade. A premise that by itself, while simplistic, isn’t so terrible (a man has only as many words left in his life as a tree in his yard has leaves), but is mishandled in so many disparate baffling ways, you can barely point out how ludicrous they are because the stupidity has too many layers. Jack (Eddie Murphy) is a literary agent, basically a salesman, and by virtue of doing his job is burdened with this curse. A curse, it is later revealed, was given to him by accident. So there’s no way for him to learn the lesson that he didn’t need to learn in the first place. Whatever happens to the tree, happens to him, so obviously that means it tickles when squirrels run on it and when it is sprayed with pesticide, he gets high. He can’t speak, so his wife (Kerry Washington) decides this means he doesn’t love her. Yet he can communicate in any number of wordless ways, so she walks out on a man screaming at her with his eyes (though in her defense, Eddie Murphy is screaming at everyone with his eyes, even us – see above.) He is told to repair his relationships as a way of reversing the curse, but the only reason any of them are in jeopardy is the curse in the first place. When it turns out it’s his dead absentee father that Jack needs to work it out with, something never mentioned before this reveal, he uses his last three words for forgiveness. Then he dies. But only temporarily. And so in the end, it’s unclear whether this curse was real or not or whether Jack truly forgives his father or not or whether Eddie Murphy was ever funny because from here it all seems impossible.

Reason To Watch It Anyway: Clark Duke is OK as Eddie Murphy’s assistant. I mean, not really, I just have to pick something.

4. Piranha DD – Like The FP, Piranha DD wants to be bad. More specifically, it doesn’t want to be good. It thinks that the path to having fun at the movies is paved with laziness. That the worst decisions are funnier because they are the worst decisions. It doesn’t want to have to try is the point. Because it is only in setting out to fail that it thinks it can succeed.

The first one wasn’t so different. It wanted to be a part of both worlds. To be a ridiculous adventure the way its less self-actualized predecessors (from the original Piranha to  Anaconda) were, but also to be hyperaware of its place in that lineage. It couldn’t quite straddle that line, but at least one of its feet was on the side of being worthwhile.

This sequel has leapt clear across the line and left it behind. In its cloying self-awareness, it knows it is a sequel, so you are already on board and expecting something more. Unfortunately, in this case, that means more stupidity, more indolence, more idiocy. Which, in turn, leads to less of all the things that make movies watchable.

By virtue of the joke title alone, Piranha DD is looking to be rewarded for never meeting any of your most basic expectations. Without its transparent, even open, desire to be bad, it would still be terrible. It would probably still make this list. But its longing for your ironic embrace makes it all the more pathetic and detestable.

Reason To Watch It Anyway: Matt Bush is pretty good as the lovelorn mascot who is OK in a crisis. He is playing a real person amidst a literal pool of actors who ascribe to this idea that a terrible script isn’t enough. Bad dialog needs to be delivered poorly, lest anyone mistake it as an actor’s fault.

5. Oogieloves In The BIG Balloon Adventure – It is reported that producer Kenn Viselman had the idea for the “interactive adventure” that Oogieloves claims to be while watching an audience “interact” with Madea Goes To Jail. This makes a lot of sense since like Tyler Perry movies, Oogieloves knows it has an audience so desperate for content that it doesn’t have to be any good. It just has to hit a few specific notes and will weather the storm of criticism with a seawall made of money.

Unfortunately, the audience Oogieloves was counting on needs another, more passive audience to get it to the theater. And while parents are amazing people who can put up with all manner of thing those of us not among them cannot imagine, there is a limit. And Oogieloves went so far beyond that limit it became an interactive adventure simply trying to see it. Already regretting their collective decision to show it just two days after the release, theaters were canceling shows of it with abandon.

Catching up to this whack-a-mole screening schedule should have seemed like a victory in and of itself. But there’s really no way to not know what you are in for, even if you have no idea what an Oogielove is or looks like. Yes, it is for tiny children and so without one I should be unqualified to pass judgment. I understand this. I do not completely agree, but it is not disregarded entirely. Actually watching Oogieloves In The BIG Balloon Adventure, you cannot help but be offended on behalf of every tiny child out there. This movie is insulting the intelligence of beings who have barely yet had the chance to develop any.

Reason To Watch It Anyway: There are a lot of reasons. Embarrassing cameos that top each other in insanity. Milkshake drinking contests won by fish. A girl who loves squares. A vacuum cleaner named J. Edgar. And best of all a pillow who sleeps all the time and at one point dreams of himself sleeping. This last is a shockingly great joke buried in the weirdness. I don’t want you reading that and thinking it is somehow indicative of the rest of it. It is just Oogieloves bringing hope to stopped clocks everywhere.

6. The Devil Inside – The found footage format exposes at least as many flaws as it hides. And The Devil Inside cannot afford the exchange rate. From the opening 911 call, it is excruciatingly clear that it will always value its pallid attempts at shock over anything that might fall under the heading of competent movie making.

We are to believe that The Holy Roman Catholic Church (“the HC” as no one should ever refer to it) is distancing itself from its long history of exorcisms at just the worst possible time. But luckily two rogue priests aren’t going to let that stop them.

I’m sorry. Since you can’t hear my tone, I fear I may have just made The Devil Inside sound exciting. But long before you get to any of that, you have to watch some actors try and convince you they are real people talking about a real incident that the movie needs you to believe was an exorcism gone wrong even though none of the characters talking about it believe that to be the case. Then you follow a girl to The Vatican where apparently you can just walk around wherever you want to with a cameraman in tow. But watch out! A nun might have weird eyes and a dog might bark at you. Because this movie needs scares. Desperately.

Then the priests take the girl and her increasingly annoying cameraman to see the girl’s incarcerated mother, the victim of that prior failed exorcism. She does some crazy talking and the priests decide that’s enough proof for them. So they hatch a plan to try a do over exorcism. Which amounts to getting in a room with her and locking the door. What happens next doesn’t matter because it’s all awful.

It’s a little like the joke about the terrible food and such small portions to then attack the closing of The Devil Inside. It’s mercifully short, but only because it decides to pull the plug on itself seemingly mid-sentence. It’s the most terrifying moment every moviegoer dreads: the ambiguous ending. Then black. For awhile. Then credits. The slowest moving credits you’ve ever seen. So you can be sure to catch the name of every person who did this to you.

Reason To Watch It Anyway: N/A

7. Exit Strategy – When something like What To Expect When You’re Expecting fails (both critically and commercially), we can’t wait to point and laugh and damn it to the Rotten Tomato dungeon. And there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. But to then give a pass to something just as, if not much more awful, just with a far lower profile, to even applaud it for its effort, is inexcusable. Especially when that effort has been applied toward making a low budget version of that higher profile awful thing.

Exit Strategy has so much wrong with it, it’s difficult to know where too start. And I think it had the same problem with itself. The gimmick tied to the title, wherein a man is taught the steps to extricate himself from an unwanted relationship (but still get to sleep on the couch) isn’t introduced until there is barely twenty minutes left in the movie. Up until that point, we are left to watch said unwanted relationship go from shruggingly banal to bizarrely intense. And all this without the benefit of a lead that has any setting beyond listless. We are meant to believe he wants out of this thing that has gone so horribly wrong, but we never believed he was in it to begin with.

This leads to maybe the most odious part of Exit Strategy. The girl is made out to be so crazy and the guy so apathetic that it seems as though it must be aiming to make some kind of commentary on this. That he will see how awful his motivations are, that actions speak louder than words, that maybe she’s not so crazy to want certain things from him, especially since he doesn’t seem to do anything at all. Ever.

But no, we really are meant to side with this selfish bore, who you want to call manipulative too, but can’t because that would involve some notion of activity on his part. We really are meant to see it as a triumph when, even after he sleep walks his way through terrible advice, he gets everything he wants without really compromising anything. Basically, Exit Strategy is an emotionally abusive boyfriend that will leave you wondering if maybe you’re the crazy one because you didn’t really believe you’d ever let someone like it into your life.

Reason To Watch It Anyway: It pains me (slightly) to say these things, because I know people involved in making this. That is why I made sure I saw it. I might not have known of its existence otherwise. That is a pretty narrow reason, I know, but it’s really all I’ve got for you on this one.

8. Jess + Moss – I got involved in a chess tournament once, despite having no idea how to play. I lost twice very quickly so in my final game I decided to not worry about winning because that was never going to happen, and so I made sure to move in as confusing a way as possible and (theoretically) last much longer. And it worked. My opponent had to consider, for at least a moment, that I knew something he did not. What I was doing made no sense and was impossible to predict and therefore, for a time, impossible to defeat.

Jess + Moss employs this same trickery. Even though you feel it being boring drivel right in front of you, it gives off this scent of something you are missing. Like it’s so far ahead of you right now, but if you stick with it, you’re all going to wind up in the same place and won’t that be exciting.

But exciting is one thing Jess + Moss will certainly never be. And it isn’t as if there is no place for lyricism or impressionism in cinema. But these can be crutches just as crude and annoying as explosions or sex are to the uninspired studio product this kind of movie is generally lauded for not being.

It didn’t take that long for my chess opponent to figure out I had no idea what I was doing. It was fun to watch him stew in confusion for a few minutes, but ultimately, he recomposed and took care of things the way he was used to. And so will you wise up to Jess + Moss and know it has nothing to offer you, that while technically playing by the rules, it has no true sense of what it wants to accomplish, that it knows this cannot end well, but wants to forestall your realization of that for as long as it can.

Reason To Watch It Anyway: It looks nice. Sometimes. Sometimes it seems to be going out of its way to disallow you to even see what’s going on, which is fine because even when you can see, you don’t really know what’s going on. Because nothing is ever going on.

9. The Man With The Iron Fists – Maybe it is possible to be too big a fan of something. RZA, director/star of this movie, has probably had to deal with just this sort of thing in his regular profession as a producer/rapper. I’m sure there are a host of people out there who consider themselves the biggest RZA fans in the world and make beats and raps that they think are in homage to him, that they sound just like what he would do if he weren’t busy making terrible movies. But odds are, they don’t sound anything like that. And if for some reason one of them had made a enough money and friends doing something else they were good at that they were able to hire Ghostface Killa to do some guest appearances on an album of such attempts at hero worship, The RZA could only cringe and try not to make any overtly public statements of embarrassment.

Yes, kung fu movies are, for the most part, bad. Even in their prime, they were cheaply produced fodder and there isn’t a whole lot to distinguish one from another. But there is an aesthetic that can make even the lesser of them entertaining. Liking them isn’t the problem. It’s thinking they can (or should) be reproduced in completely different circumstances. RZA’s friend and hype man Quentin Tarantino seems to defy this idea. But what his emulators cannot seem to grasp is that he uses the things he loves as springboards for his own creations. He makes new ideas out of old ones. With Man With The Iron Fists, RZA only paints over those old ideas. With something that might not even be paint.

And this only touches on the theory behind a tremendous failure. All the acting is terrible (exception noted below), mostly in a predictable fashion with snarling arrogant villains who just can’t keep their voices down or their motivations within reason. But the performance that puts this movie over the top is that of its supposed star. The RZA is so monotonous it seems like it must be a joke. If he wasn’t someone you already knew you would have no choice but to assume he was some sort of contest winner. He wants you to feel sorry for his beleaguered protagonist but seems embarrassed to show any pain when his regular old non-iron fists are taken from him. He wants us to cheer for him when he uses the titular iron fists, but he looks instantly bored with them. In fact, he looks bored with everything. And I guess I really can’t blame him.

Reason To Watch It Anyway: Russell Crowe is the only one acting well, but that might be because he has an actual character to play. But then, maybe he has a character to play because he’s a good actor? It’s impossible to tell which came first with Man With The Iron Fists, the terrible ideas or the terrible execution of those ideas.

10. Hyde Park On Hudson – Two years ago, with Morning Glory, his last attempt at directing, Roger Michell fascinated those few of us who watched with a bizarre mix of frenetic incompetence and plodding blandness. I said then that it seemed as if there was no director. That nothing was consistent nor cohesive and while you never knew what might happen next, you knew you’d hate it. Well, now it appears as though I could not have been more wrong. Roger Michell was definitely on set, directing his knickers off. Because Hyde Park On Hudson achieves so many of the same things, though goes about achieving them in new, unbelievably boring ways.

Daisy (Laura Linney) reads her diary over a bunch of haphazard scenes (ones in which she is usually standing around barely noticeable) and even when this quasi-narration does have glancing bearing on what we are watching, it is never about her. Only her impressions of her cousin, President Franklin Roosevelt. So when later, she takes a stand against him and then triumphantly backs off that stand for almost no reason, we are meant to feel something, I’m sure, but there’s no way to tell what that might be since we have no idea who she is.

President Roosevelt seduces women with his stamp collection. The King and Queen of England are informed of their schedule and situation only after they’ve been flown across an ocean and driven into the countryside of upstate New York. We are expected to laugh at the terrible jokes told by important people just like their subservients are doing in the movie. They go back to that stamp collection! Twice!

Despite a clear narrator (a relentless, oppressive narrator), there is an absence of point of view. One moment this is Daisy’s story, the next it is the King of England’s, then President Roosevelt’s. It begins as an American movie, then it is a British one. Then it is no one’s because who knows what it’s trying to accomplish.

The whole thing is leading to one moment, a famous one, involving hot dogs and the King of England. It was an important one for the world and the countries directly involved, but there is no set up for it beyond watching royalty turn their noses up at the notion that this is even a food. Such is the plight of Hyde Park On Hudson. It’s sure it’s shown up for something important, but it doesn’t really know what, so it’s just going to meander around in the country for awhile until somebody tells it it can go home.

Reason To Watch It Anyway: I like to imagine an Avengers-like team up movie with Colin Firth and Helena Bonham Carter dropping in on Bill Murray’s proficient FDR impression. This is not a reason to watch, of course, but if someone is inexplicably nominated for this, it will be your best bet in getting through it.

10. – 15.

Act Of Valor – Calling Act Of Valor one of the worst movies of the year feels a little like being Bill Mahr after 9/11. You’re not saying anything untrue, but it can’t help but sound like you hate your country. And maybe you do, if they’re going to force this sort of thing on you.

Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter – Don’t let the title fool you, it wants you to think it’s cool when Lincoln swings an axe. You won’t.

Rock Of Ages – The greatest trick Rock Of Ages ever pulled, was convincing the world rock was still alive in the 80’s so it could kill it all over again.

Casa De Mi Padre – ¿Esto es una comedia o una telenovela? ¿Otras culturas son divertidas, no? ¿Por qué no están riendo? Ay de mi.

Good Deeds – Tyler Perry makes a movie about how he’s too good for his own good and the only way out of it is to be even better.

The Most Surprising(ly Good) Movies – 2012

This is a pessimistic list. It means I go into a lot of movies expecting them to be terrible. Or at least mundane enough to forget about come this time of year. But these movies are the reasons I do just that. At times, it feels better to come out of something worthy of this list than one considered to be the best. But I suppose it helps to never expect much of anyone.

1. Bernie – Even if this were not a true story, there would be little doubt as to where it was headed. Bernie never intends on surprising anyone. Not in the traditional sense. The events are all inevitable. From the first moments you will know this, even if you weren’t explicitly told by all the semi-documentarian interviews with people who sort of heard what happened maybe. Which you are.

The surprise of Bernie comes from how easily you can be swayed into sympathy for someone who objectively doesn’t deserve any. And the semi-pseudo-documentary architecture helps to deliver that. Afterwards, you might be able to shake it off and question whether or not it’s right to think of the titular character the way you did, but that should only prove further how effective the movie is. You can’t ask much more of the medium than to become so wholly immersed in a situation of which you have no business being a part.

2. The Possession – There are at least three of these every year. Whether the subject is ghosts, possession, demon, or esoteric religious artifact, it makes little difference. They are horror movies that count on you not needing anything more than an atmospheric trailer to get your money. You will walk away unsatisfied, barely able to remember any of it (especially when it has a title as generic as The Possession), and you might even know that beforehand but you can’t help yourself. The appeal and the expectation does not generally move beyond that. If you find yourself mildly scared or shocked at any point at all, you probably count that as a victory.

I can’t say you will find that moment in The Possession, never mind more than one. But then, that wouldn’t be so surprising if you did. It would just be the best you could hope for. What you will find is a compelling family drama that turns into a taut frame up movie. Only the framer can’t be dealt with in the normal cathartic physical manner because it’s possessing the framee’s daughter. Which means finally, yes, it has to succumb to its roots and ultimately do some supernatural things that probably don’t really make sense, but even that comes across as a reluctant last resort and is aided tremendously by the shockingly awesome guide played by Matisyahu.

3. Madagascar 3 – On the one hand, the bar for animated movies has been raised so high lately that it would be unwise to expect anything to be as lifeless as the other Madagascars have been. But to think otherwise would be flying in the face of a much more proven theorem, that sequels of highly successful franchises are terrified of change.

Somehow, Madagascar did not rest on its painfully unfunny laurels. It hired a screenwriter known for much more intimate fare and then got a seriously accredited Director of Photography to make sure it would never fall static. The result is comedy and action that could easily have made Madagascar 3 one of the best movies of 2012. Unfortunately, this ideology only carries so much weight and eventually focus groups overtly infiltrate a climax that will leave you baffled. Or shout-singing nonsense about a wig.

4. 21 Jump Street – When a little way into the trailer for 21 Jump Street, it is revealed that this promising buddy cop comedy starring Jonah Hill and Channing Tatum was in fact, a 21 Jump Street movie, it felt like a theft. Like a promising original funny movie had just been stolen from us and replaced with yet another remake of a thing too old for its target audience to remember.

But 21 Jump Street was aware of this and seemingly everything else as it meta-ed its way into the great buddy cop comedy it seemed like it could have been from the outset.

5. Safe – You don’t really think of Jason Statham as an actor, even if you realize that’s all he is. He’s more of a bowling ball. Something you throw at stuff so you can watch it fall down. I figured someday, Sofia Coppola would make him play some sad version of himself and the world would briefly realize they’d never given him enough credit. So that it would come out in what seemed like a factory-made placeholder between Transporter and Expendables movies is the epitome of surprising.

But it isn’t just Jason Statham’s performance that makes Safe stand out. Even though it’s not telling a terribly original story, everything about Safe feels just slightly different. From the way the action is shot and choreographed to the motivations of every marginal character. Not exactly what one would expect from the director of Remember The Titans and Uptown Girls.

6.-10.

People Like Us – With a horrendous poster, a trailer drowning in boredom when it bothered to make any sense and a title that could mean as many different things as inflections your imagination could muster, People Like Us seemed dead on arrival. Before arrival even. But great performances, properly motivated characters and even accurate LA geography make this not only better than it looked, but better than it should be.

The Bourne Legacy – I would never have guessed that a less action-oriented, more complicated Bourne movie would manage to revive what had so quickly devolved into nonsense. Never mind that Jeremy Renner could be a thousand times more charismatic than Matt Damon in the lead of it.

The Three Stooges - A double surprise. That this unwanted, unwarranted and uninspired resurrection could be among the funniest movies of the year, and that it could be brought to us by the Farrelly Brothers. Who finally again found a way to make a dumb (but not stupid – mostly) comedy that, while not completely eradicating the awful humor you’re expecting, is paced quickly enough to be packed with jokes you don’t.

Pitch Perfect – The trailer wanted me to believe that not only was a bunch of white girls singing “No Diggety” impressive and original, but also funny. Turns out Pitch Perfect knew itself a lot better than I did.

Contraband – What seems like a standard revenge thriller turns out to be comedic con game, with Mark Wahlberg leading a team of misfits into a really weird spiral of uncontrollable events. Sometimes, it seems like this movie surprises itself. It can’t help but do so to you too.

The Most Disappointing Movies – 2012

I must be getting better at managing my expectations. For there are some absent titles you will no doubt wonder about. Odds are I thought them just as terrible as you did, I just didn’t go in thinking I would get any different. The Dark Knight was just as dumb as The Dark Knight Rises, it just had a Joker to distract you. There hasn’t been a good Alien movie in a very long time and Ridley Scott hasn’t exactly been turning in gems lately either. And I don’t know what you saw in The Hobbit trailers that made you think you weren’t in for another three hours of the most toothless filmmaking on this Earth. So these are the ones that not only best let us down, they are the ones that did something much more difficult: they made us drop our guard.

1. Bully – With Bully, there’s no shortage of things with which to be disappointed. Before anyone could even see it, the MPAA rated it R and advocates were up in arms. The people that need to see it (namely the throngs of kids who love documentaries and will finally be shaken from their silence on bullying when they flock to this one) would be unable to. To counter this injustice, The Weinsteins took their ball home with them, releasing it without a rating, ensuring it would never play in more than 300 theaters nationwide. That showed ‘em.

What all this did accomplish though, was a heightened sense of anticipation. Something was going on with this bullying documentary that we all definitely needed to pay to see.

And so actually sitting in one of the lucky quarter-filled theaters that carried it could only be anti-climactic. To put it mildly. First, there was barely anything objectionable that would have made an R rating necessary. The MPAA overreacting is nothing new, but this movie was supposed to be shocking somehow to warrant all that fuss.

But all of that serves only as a set up to how inept the actual movie is. Not only does Bully fail to create empathy for any of the bullied, it might do the opposite. The main focal point is so cloying and annoying, you will be impressed by the restraint these supposed bullies show. There’s a shoehorned lesbian storyline in which all of the bullying must be imagined because the subject is by far the happiest person involved (including everyone watching.) Strangest of all, absolutely no shot can stay in focus. It gets so bad sometimes, it just has to be on purpose, but it feels more symptomatic of the general incompetence than any stylistic choice. And then, as a grand finale, after reports fall on dumb ears, the makers of the documentary decide to break pretty much the only law of documentary filmmaking left standing: THEY USE THEIR FOOTAGE TO TELL ON A KID. Never mind the lack of objectivity or the purity of the format, this goes against the very point you are trying to get across, that those in the situation have to be the ones to speak out, that they can’t wait around for parents or teachers or anyone else to notice. Unless maybe every bullied kid is going to have a crew of people recording their every move from now on. If that was their mission, they failed on getting that across as well.

2. Brave – Cars 2 was an anomaly. Pixar had been going along so well for so long, you had to shrug off a lackluster sequel to something that wasn’t their best to begin with. There was something slightly off about the Brave trailers, but only in hindsight. At the time, they seemed great, if slightly uninformative. For good measure, there was some sort of animation upgrade we were supposed to be excited about. And then there was that commotion about the new sound system that was forcing some theaters to renovate their speakers on fairly short notice. Expectations were sort of nonchalantly high. And worse than that, there wasn’t any reason to question it.

But beyond Merida’s much lauded hair, there wasn’t anything Pixar about Brave. It barely seems worthy of regular Disney animation the way that’s been going. If you had one of those people in your life that dismissed Pixar as “cartoons for children” or something similar, you had to be thankful this wasn’t the one you finally convinced them to give a chance. It is exactly what they think all of them are. Which isn’t even to say bad. But cartoon for kids would probably do just fine.

3./4. Haywire/Magic Mike – At least one of these should have been the best thing Steven Soderbergh has ever done. Which for me at least, is saying quite a lot.  Each was the next logical step in the personal genre he has been bent on producing: a movie built around the particular skill of its star. Even if that star isn’t really an actor. With The Girlfriend Experience, he got an appropriately dullish performance from Sasha Grey, but what surrounded her wasn’t so far away from what he is used to doing.

With Haywire, the problem wasn’t the fighting. That mostly worked fine and was certainly stamped with a distinct Soderbergh distance and starkness. But nothing connecting the fighting made any sense or wanted to. In a typical action movie, that might not matter. But for this to happen here was not only unfulfilling, but made worse by the otherwise static style inherent in this “lesser” Soderbergh fare. And unlike it did for Sasha Grey, being unavoidably prosaic did not play in Gina Carrano’s favor.

Channing Tatum is not in danger of being dull. Neither is Matthew McConaughey. So performance should not have been an issue. But it seems as though Steven Soderbergh wants to challenge himself. It’s the only way to justify some of the cast of Magic Mike. But still, the greatest failure is what comes between the “action.” It’s as if they just let Channing Tatum dance and thought they’d worry about whatever else went on  at a later date that never arrived.

5. The Master – Paul Thomas Anderson has been trying to lose me for years now, so it shouldn’t come as any kind of shock that with The Master, he finally did. With There Will Be Blood, Magnolia, even Punch-Drunk Love, I couldn’t ever be truly sure of what he wanted me to think or feel, but it didn’t seem to matter. Not totally getting it only drove me closer to it. Whatever it was. So this time I sat and waited to fall into the same trap, but the ground always held frustratingly firm beneath me.

All the usual elements appeared to be present: amazing camerawork, obsessive verisimilitude of time and place, inexplicably driven characters and weird but wonderful performances. But they do not coalesce. It’s like throwing all the proven ingredients into a bowl and neglecting to mix them. I suppose it could be sort of comforting that these things alone have not somehow been tricking me all this time.

6.-10.

John Carter – It was a shaky proposition from the start, to dazzle us with the story all of our most dazzling movies have forever mined for inspiration (and more.) So for it to show its weirdly tanned face here on this list means something truly terrible happened out there on Barsoom.

Compliance –Watching ‘real’ people be this stupid is what the internet and MTV are for.

Ruby Sparks – This movie wants us to be very excited about all the possibilities its premise implies, without any intention of exploring them.

Jeff, Who Lives At Home – Having a character in your movie profess a love for another movie that uses coincidence to achieve plot progression does not mean your movie’s coincidences that achieve plot progression are miraculously forgiven.

Celeste And Jesse Forever – No one is saying Rashida Jones isn’t better in pretty much every way, but save for a few comedic flourishes, this might as well be a Katherine Heigel movie.

And The Nominees Are…

I didn’t get a whole lot of help last year, but I did find I liked having a bunch of nominees. So here they are again. I realize there is a month of movies left in 2012 and that I will (and have) more than likely see(n) more than you have, so you feel as if there’s nothing you can add. But that is definitely not true. So if you find any glaring omissions, please let me know.

(Winners are in bold. Not every category is represented here, for that, go here.)

The Freddie Prinze, Jr. Award (For the best acting in the worst movie of the year – male):

- Guy Pearce (Seeking Justice)

- Stephen Dorff (Brake)

- Russell Crowe (The Man With The Iron Fists)

- Matt Bush (Piranha DD)

Brake and Seeking Justice really aren’t quite bad enough, so this was a two man race. And I think Matt Bush was seriously great in those phone commercials, but come on. Plus, everyone else in The Man With The Iron Fists is so much worse than pretty much anyone in Piranha DD. Which is… well, you get it.

The Dina Meyer Award (For the best acting in the worst movie of the year – female):

- Spencer Locke (Detention)

- Jenna Boyd (Last Ounce Of Courage)

- Malin Ackerman (Rock Of Ages)

- Roselyn Sanchez (Act Of Valor)

- Dakota Fanning (Breaking Dawn Part 2)

If you read The Ten Worst Movies post, you’d assume this was going to Jenna Boyd. But she is more like ordering cereal at a gross restaurant, the safe choice on the menu. Malin Ackerman is the weird dish on that same menu that has a cult following and is keeping that gross restaurant in business. The way she is going, she’s going to get this award named after her in a few years.

The Anna Paquin Best Child Actor Award:

- Quvenzhané Wallis (Beasts Of The Southern Wild)

- Michael Hall D’Addario (People Like Us)

- Kodi Smit-McPhee (ParaNorman)

- Pierce Gagnon (Looper)

- Thomas Doret (The Kid With A Bike)

Well, yeah. Kid gets nominated for an Oscar, she might have this sewn up. But this was another amazing year for this category. There’s like five more not even nominated. I can’t say it was close, but second place, if you’re wondering, is Thomas Doret. If there are Belgian Oscars, he’s going to win one.

The Nicolas Cage Uneven Performance Award (For the biggest gap in quality between two different performances in the same year):

- Tommy Lee Jones (Hope Springs & Men In Black 3)

- Lynn Collins (Unconditional & John Carter)

- Michael Bacall [writer] (21 Jump Street & Project X)

- Michael B. Jordan (Chronicle & Red Tails)

- Cody Horn (End Of Watch & Magic Mike)

I never considered giving this to a non-performer before. And I almost did. But too much can happen between script and screen. Taking the writer out of it though, makes it kind of a dead heat. I am choosing Michael B. Jordan not only because of how terrible he is in Red Tails (everyone is) but because he manages to just disappear in it after making a relatively memorable entrance.

(Oh yeah, for clarity’s sake, the good performance is always listed first.)

The Peter Sellers Multiple Role Award:

- Ben Whishaw (Cloud Atlas)

- Michelle Rodriguez (Resident Evil: Retribution)

- Catherine O’Hara (Frankenweenie)

- Martin Short (Frankenweenie)

- Denis Lavant (Holy Motors)

I reluctantly award this to Denis Lavant. I don’t think every one of his ten or maybe eleven characters were all that alarmingly different or remarkable, but enough of them were, most especially the father driving his daughter home.

The Sean Connery Best Cameo Award:

- Harry Dean Stanton (The Avengers)

- Johnny Depp and Peter DeLouise (21 Jump Street)

- S. Epatha Merkerson (Lincoln)

- Michael Stuhlbarg and Michael Pitt (Seven Psychopaths)

- James Badge Dale (Flight)

- Ralph Macchio (Hitchcock)

Tough one coming down to Harry Dean Stanton and winner James Badge Dale. But while Harry Dean Stanton is funny and great, James Badge Dale steals the stairwell away from Denzel Washington. A feat difficult enough when he isn’t in the middle of an Oscar caliber performance.

The Casey Affleck Worst Cameo Award:

- Eli Roth (Rock Of Ages)

- Chris Pine (Celeste And Jesse Forever)

- Tom Skerritt (Ted)

- Michael Massee (The Amazing Spider-Man)

- Deborah Ann Woll (Ruby Sparks)

- Isiah Whitlock, Jr. (Red Hook Summer)

These came from all directions this year. The weird useless shadowy figure at the end of Spider-Man, the ex-girlfriend who shows up to overtly explain the main character’s problem in Ruby Sparks, a director’s friend showing up on set and getting tossed in (Rock Of Ages), an embarrassing non-joke in Ted, and a weird call back to previous characters played by Isaiah Whitlock, Jr. But Chris Pine is the pure version of what this category wants to root out: the bizarre, pointless and otherwise distracting-because-of-who-it-is-and-nothing-else cameo. Thank you Celeste And Jesse Forever.

The Alfred Hitchcock In Front of the Camera Award (For the least intrusive appearance by a movie’s own director(s)):

- Mike Birbiglia (Sleepwalk With Me)

- Rich Moore (Wreck-It Ralph)

- David Wain (Wanderlust)

I try to stay away from giving this to the director/star of a movie. So often that is someone who is an actor first, director second. Which is barely the case here, but it’s still an odd case, because who else was going to play Matt Pandamiglio? Rich Moore is Sour Bill though and if you have any idea what I’m talking about, you probably are surprised that wasn’t an actor whose name you recognize, never mind the director of Wreck-It Ralph.

The Quentin Tarantino In Front of the Camera Award [For most intrusive – not to mention annoying – appearance by a movie’s own director(s)]:

- Jason Trost (The FP)

- RZA (The Man With The Iron Fists)

- Barry Sonnenfeld (Men In Black 3)

- Spike “HNIC” Lee (Red Hook Summer)

Now here, I wouldn’t have any problem naming the director/star as the winner. Especially when said director/star shouldn’t be either of those. Which happened twice in 2012. And yet, Spike Lee, who could easily own the naming rights to this category, decided to slam dunk this one by reprising his role of Mookie from Do The Right Thing as a weird joke in a movie that is not funny and is rarely meant to be. Mookie is still delivering pizzas too, which is sad and impractical. And then there’s the nickname. I don’t know what to make of that, but that is exactly how his name appears in the acting credits.

The Drew Barrymore All Grown Up Award:

- Connor Cruise (Red Dawn)

- Chlöe Grace Moretz (Dark Shadows)

- Kristy Wu (End Of Watch)

While Chlöe Grace Moretz looks like an entirely different person now, she’s still playing a teenager in Dark Shadows and was arguably more grown up as Hit Girl. While she looks almost exactly the same, Flight 29 Down’s Kristy Wu is definitely playing older in End Of Watch than she ever did on that kids’ version of L O S T that wound up being better than L O S T.

The Martin Scorsese Best Use of a Song Award:

- Brent McCorkle for “???” by ??? (Unconditional)

- Sarah Polley for “Video Killed The Radio Star” by The Buggles (Take This Waltz)

- Zal Batmanglij for “Dreams” by Brit Marling (Sound Of My Voice)

- Ben Affleck for “Dance The Night Away” by Van Halen (Argo)

- Frédéric Jardin for “Another One Bites The Dust” by Queen (Nuit Blanche)

- Leos Carax for “Let My Baby Ride” by Doctor L (Holy Motors)

- Daniel Nettheim for “I’m On Fire” by Bruce Springsteen (The Hunter)

It wouldn’t have won anyway, but I’m sorry I never found out the name of the song from Unconditional. It was a very good use of it, whatever it was. But “Dreams” (originally by The Cranberries) means so many things to Sound Of My Voice.

The Andy Garcia Impossible Shot Award:

- Jennifer Lawrence – Apple(s) (The Hunger Games)

- Pierre Gruno – Through the door/through the neck (The Raid ~ Redemption)

- Richard Cabral, Diamonique, Maurice Compte and/or Yahira Garcia – Brian Taylor’s walkie-talkie and camera and nothing else (End Of Watch)

- Adam DeVine – burrito throw (Pitch Perfect)

Things like the burrito throw get overlooked because they are a joke. But please take a moment to think about hitting a person at a gas pump from a moving bus on the road with something as non-ballistic and aerodynamic as flour wrapped rice and beans. Still, The Raid. That shot (both kinds) are stuck in your mind forever.

The John Woo Best Shootout Award:

- Gareth Evans (The Raid ~ Redemption)

- Baltasar Kormákur (Contraband)

- Boaz Yakin (Safe)

- Quentin Tarantino (Django Unchained)

- Christopher McQuarrie (Jack Reacher)

- Rian Johnson (Looper)

- David Ayer (End Of Watch)

So many great options. Frentic (End Of Watch, Contraband), exacting (Jack Reacher) ludicrous (Django Unchained), innovative (Safe) and almost entirely imagined (Looper) are all great, but ultimately can’t compete with the simple addition of a guy getting shot, stumbling backward and then returning to the fray.

The William Friedkin Best Car Chase Award:

- Daniel Espinosa (Safe House)

- Christopher McQuarrie (Jack Reacher)

- Tony Gilroy (The Bourne Legacy)

- Eric Darnell, Tom McGrath and Conrad Vernon  (Madagascar 3)

- Sam Mendes (Skyfall)

It is a struggle not to give this to yet another animated feature. It seems as if they are cheating. But even though Madagascar 3’s chase is the thing that cements the weird feeling you get that it might actually be great, Jack Reacher wins handily with its deliberate, tiered chase of three factions that all know exactly what they’re doing, scored exclusively by the sound of an engine.

The They Live Best Non-Martial Arts Fight Award:

- Doug Glatt vs. Ross Rhea (Goon)

- Eagles vs. Indians (Silver Linings Playbook)

- Joe vs. the yard (Unconditional)

- Zavala vs. Mr. Tre (End Of Watch)

When a whole movie leads up to one confrontation, it really has to deliver. And it does.

The Cast of Nazis from Raiders Of The Lost Ark Award (For worst performance of (an) actor(s) in scenes with special effects):

- Milla Jovovich (Resident Evil: Retribution)

- Nathan Lane (Mirror, Mirror)

- Kristen Stewart (Breaking Dawn Part 2)

I only saw a little bit of it, but I think the cast of Underworld: Awakening might actually deserve this award. But for now, Kristen Stewart’s reaction to her unbelievably stupid fast sitting could win this by itself. And it doesn’t have to, because she also chases a deer.

The Talking Pig Award (For the two movies most alike released in the same year):

- The Master and Sound Of My Voice

- The Lucky One and People Like Us

- The Raid ~ Redemption and Dredd

- The Raven and Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter

- Mirror, Mirror and Snow White & The Huntsman

I try to fill this category with red herrings, but it’s always so obvious. How does something like this even happen?

The Mulholland Falls Award (For movie that failed most miserably at being as shocking as it hoped to be):

- Life Of Pi

- Tim And Eric’s Billion Dollar Movie

- Bully

For more specifics, see this year’s Most Disappointing Movies list.

The Mulholland Falls Syndrome Award (For the biggest disappointment from the most promising ensemble cast):

- Prometheus

- The Dark Knight Rises

- Friends With Kids

- Haywire

Even though it isn’t supposed to be included in the decision-making, I would like to throw the director onto the pile as well.

The 1st Annual This Is 40 Award (for supporting cast member(s) most deserving of a sort-of sequel):

- Orozco and Davis (End Of Watch)

- Yettis (Rise Of The Guardians)

- Lucy (Nuit Blanche)

- Lone Wolf (Expendables 2)

- Ricardo “Ranger” Mañoso (One For The Money)

- Joey and Angie (Man On A Ledge)

I came up with this category after End Of Watch. So you’d think the all-girl squad car team would take this easily. But I knew it was a good category when I remembered the real winner deserve their own show on USA. An aspiring thief takes his annoying girlfriend on jobs with him. It’s an amazing premise and if the annoying girlfriend if Genesis Rodriguez, it will be one of the funniest new shows on television. That said, Lone Wolf already had his shot and Ranger basically does have his own USA show premiering this week.

The Cecil B. DeMille Award (For best portrayal of oneself):

- Kay Epperson (Bernie)

- Megan Fox (The Dictator)

- Norah Jones (Ted)

It was a struggle finding anyone else to nominate this year. Kay Epperson is a really good fake interview, but that prison visit scene is amazing.

The Kevin Costner Worst Accent Award:

- Gavin Mitchell (Tonight You’re Mine)

- Elizabeth Banks and Sam Worthington (Man On A Ledge)

- Noel Fisher (Breaking Dawn Part 2)

- Ben Mendelsohn (The Dark Knight Rises)

- Lynn Collins (John Carter)

- Isabel Lucas (Red Dawn)

In a year saturated with terrible accents, I have to go with quantity over quality. Sam Worthington can’t do American to save his life, but has done at least passable British before so I don’t know why this movie couldn’t allow him and actually British Jamie Bell to find some common ground in order to play brothers. But that’s nothing compared to what Elizabeth Banks is doing. Distracting, disgusting and totally unnecessary.

The Meryl Streep Award for Best Accent (Female):

- Emily Blunt (Looper)

- Michelle Williams (Take This Waltz)

- Juno Temple (Killer Joe)

- Megalyn Echikonwoke (Damsels In Distress)

- Kylie Min0gue (Holy Motors)

Everyone is really good, but only Megalyn Echikonwoke’s is both a character-making affect and a joke at the same time.

The Jon Voight Award for Best Accent (Male):

- Jason Clarke (Lawless)

- Daniel Day-Lewis (Lincoln)

- Liev Schreiber (Goon)

- Michael Wincott (Hitchcock)

- Alex Russell (Chronicle)

It’s much more than an accent, of course, but I can only give what I have.

The Jon Voight Best Impression Award:

- Alan Tudyk of Ed Wynn as The Mad Hatter (Wreck-It Ralph)

- Joseph Gordon-Levitt of Bruce Willis (Looper)

- Josh Brolin of Tommy Lee Jones as Agent K (Men In Black 3)

- Jacki Weaver of Sally Struthers (Silver Linings Playbook)

Josh Brolin had this won from the poster alone. The rest is icing or gravy or some other topping of choice. (And Jacki Weaver’s inclusion was a joke because what in the world was she doing? And now she’s up for an Oscar for it? Unbelievable.)

The Worst Impression Award:

- Tim Heidecker of Nick Nolte (The Comedy)

- Sam Rockwell of Colin Farrel (Seven Psychopaths)

- Anthony Hopkins of Alfred Hitchcock (Hitchcock)

- Michael Fassbender of Peter O’Toole as T.E. Lawrence (Prometheus)

- Michael Peña and Jake Gyllenhaal of each other as women maybe (End Of Watch)

Out of context, it isn’t the worst of these, but it’s the most integral to the movie. Obviously.

The Gary Oldman Chameleon Award (for the most unrecognizable performance by an otherwise recognizable personality):

- Daniel Day-Lewis (Lincoln)

- James Badge Dale (Flight)

- Aaron Johnson (Savages)

- Lee Horsley (Django Unchained)

- Michael Wincott (Hitchcock)

Daniel Day-Lewis in unfairly dismissable because while yes,  he is gone and there is Abraham Lincoln, it is impossible to not have an awareness that someone is doing that. Your awe gives him away. When you finally see who Ed Gein is, however, and realize you’ve seen (never mind heard) him a bunch already, it’s hard to consider anyone else.

The Hamlet Best Production Within A Production Award:

- “Dirty Pink vs. Tainted Love” (Tonight You’re Mine)

- Fix-It Felix Jr. (Wreck-It Ralph)

- stand up (Sleepwalk With Me)

- The Jed MacAldonich episode of Flame Outs (California Solo)

- “Doctor Doctor Give Me Gas (In My Ass)” (Sound Of Noise)

- “Money 4 U Honey” (Sound Of Noise)

- “Cups (You’re Gonna Miss Me)” (Pitch Perfect)

Wow. A little music heavy for my liking, but this category did very well for itself this year. It’s as impossible to not give this to Sound Of Noise as it is to choose between performances. And so it goes to the production that needs to equally serve its masters of story, aesthetic and comedy. And doesn’t waver on any of them.

The Die Hard 2 Icicle Award (for the best use of an otherwise benevolent object as a weapon):

- pumpkin pie filling (Killer Joe)

- plate (Safe)

- urine (Life Of Pi)

I think we should all applaud Libby’s for allowing its product to used like that.

The “I’m Not The Bad Guy” Award (for the line so bad, it just had to be repeated):

- “The true true” (Cloud Atlas)

- “We fight for freedom!” (Last Ounce Of Courage)

- “Argo fuck yourself” (Argo)

It bears repeating: Last Ounce Of Courage is about Christmas.

The Rosemary’s Baby Creepiest Moment Award:

- pile of limbs (Lincoln)

- “I found the kids” (End Of Watch)

- watching a seizure (The Comedy)

- finding Van Hauser (End Of Watch)

- Baby Renesme (Breaking Dawn Part 2)

- ¡Ja, Ja, Ja! (End Of Watch)

- take the cravat (Seven Psychopaths)

- Song Of Solomon 2:14 (Red Hook Summer)

- “Should I call you dad?” (Breaking Dawn Part 2)

So many serious, creepy things out there but the one you can never shake is the bizarrely computerized baby face in Breaking Dawn Part 2.

The Citizen Kane Award (for the least foreseeable ending):

- Breaking Dawn Part 2

- End Of Watch

- Life Of Pi

The Breaking Dawn Part 2 twist is doubly as effective since it had four and four-fifths movies to set up the fact that nothing interesting would ever happen in this series.

The Passenger 57 Award (for the plot most thoroughly ruined by its trailer):

- Flight

- The Lucky One

- Chronicle

- End Of Watch

The Chronicle trailer not only gives away every one of its beats, it finds a way to spoil its beginning while still being a really good and obviously effective trailer.

Blah Blah Blah Awards – 2011

To see the nominations (and now, explanations of the winners) for most categories, click here.

The Tommy Lee Jones Screentime Award (For amassing the most screentime of the year):

- Jessica Chastain (The Debt, Tree Of Life, Take Shelter, The Help, Coriolanus, Texas Killing Fields)

The Kevin Spacey Must Have the Best Agent Award (For appearing in the most top ten movies of the year):

- Conrad Vernon (Kung Fu Panda 2 and Puss In Boots)

The Marlon Wayans Award (for appearing in two or more of the worst movies of the same year.]:

- Vanessa Hudgens (Beastly and Sucker Punch)

The Freddie Prinze, Jr. Award (For the best acting in the worst movie of the year – male):

- Rutger Hauer (Hobo With A Shotgun)

The Dina Meyer Award (For the best acting in the worst movie of the year – female):

- Amber Heard (Drive Angry)

The Anna Paquin Best Child Actor Award:

- Mélusine Mayance (Sarah’s Key)

The Nicolas Cage Uneven Performance Award (For the biggest gap in quality between two different performances in the same year):

- Gary Oldman (Red Riding Hood and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy)

The Peter Sellers Multiple Role Award:

- Mel Gibson (The Beaver)

The Sean Connery Best Cameo Award:

- Adrian Brody (Midnight In Paris)

The Casey Affleck Worst Cameo Award:

- Ving Rhames (Mission: Impossible Ghost Protocol)

The Alfred Hitchcock In Front of the Camera Award (For the least intrusive appearance by a movie’s own director(s)):

- Gavin O’Connor (Warrior)

The Quentin Tarantino In Front of the Camera Award [For most intrusive – not to mention annoying – appearance by a movie’s own director(s)]:

- Kenneth Lonergan (Margaret)

The Drew Barrymore All Grown Up Award:

- Elizabeth Olsen (Martha Marcy Mae Marlene)

The Martin Scorsese Best Use of a Song Award:

- Jason Reitman [“The Concept” by Teenage Fanclub (Young Adult)]

The Andy Garcia Best Shot Award:

- Steven Soderbergh – bat to pig (Contagion)

The John Woo Best Shootout Award:

- Justin Lin (Fast Five)

The French Connection Best Car Chase Award:

- Drive

The They Live Best Non-Martial Arts Fight Award:

- Vin Diesel vs. The Rock (Fast Five)

The Die Hard  2 Icicle Award (for best use of an otherwise benevolent object as a weapon):

- table (Mission: Impossible Ghost Protocol)

The Cast of Nazis from Raiders of the Lost Ark Award (For worst performance of (an) actor(s) in scenes with special effects):

- Til Schweiger (The Three Musketeers)

The Talking Pig Award (For the two movies most alike released in the same year):

- No Strings Attached and Friends With Benefits

The Mulholland Falls Award (For movie that failed most miserably at being as shocking as it hoped to be):

- Rampart

The Mulholland Falls Syndrome Award (For the biggest disappointment from the most promising ensemble cast):

- Cowboys & Aliens

The Cecil B. DeMille Award (For best portrayal of oneself):

- Steve Coogan (The Trip)

The Godfather Best Sequel Award:

- Puss In Boots

The Jaws Worst Sequel Award:

- The Hangover II

The The Man Who Knew Too Much Best Remake Award:

- The Debt

The Breathless Worst Remake Award:

- Just Go With It

The Kevin Costner Worst Accent Award:

- Carla Gugino (Sucker Punch)

The Meryl Streep Award for Best Accent (Female):

- Isla Fisher (Rango)

The Jon Voight Award for Best Accent (Male):

- John C. Reilly (Cedar Rapids)

The Jon Voight Best Impression Award:

- Steve Coogan of Stephen Hawking (The Trip)

The Worst Impression Award:

- Abby Elliot of Drew Barrymore (No Strings Attached)

The Lon Chaney Chameleon Award (for the most unrecognizable performance by an otherwise recognizable personality):

- Kelly McGillis (Stake Land)

The Hamlet Best Production Within A Production Award:

- JetBlue ad  (Pom Wonderful Presents The Greatest Movie Ever Sold)

The “I’m Not The Bad Guy” Award (for the line so bad, it just had to be repeated):

- “To go against the Church is to go against God” (Priest)

The Rosemary’s Baby Creepiest Moment Award:

- Brandon & Cissy (Shame)

The Citizen Kane Unseen Ending Award:

- Final Destination 5

The Passenger 57 Award (for the plot most thoroughly ruined by its trailer):

- The Lincoln Lawyer

The Nightwatch Award (for the most heavily promoted movie never to grace us with its presence in a theater):

- The Resident