Keith Simanton from IMDB put out this list for the top 10 worst movie moments. I included the top 2 here:
"#1 - "The Imprint Scene:" The first half of The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn was like the Halloween edition of Bride magazine and the second half was Rosemary's C-section. It's in the latter half of the film wherein *SPOILER ALERT* Jacob (Taylor Lautner) locks eyes with the minutes-old succubus spawn of Edward (Robert Pattinson)and Bella's(Kristen Stewart) wedlock romp. Instead of thinking, "Hey, cute baby" he suddenly sees her mature before his eyes (kind of like Erica Kane's daughter Bianca in All My Children) into a redheaded Red Sonja and becomes her lifelong mate. It's the maraschino cherry on top of one seriously loopy movie.
#2: "The C-Section:" More The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn SPOILERS!! Speaking of that C-section, it really has to be seen to be believed. In the book the baby that is growing inside of Bella claws its demonic little way out. In the film they come up with an even more unnerving solution for getting the little toddler out of her emaciated mommy. Edward, it appears, chews it out!!"
There is a reason why I don't like the Twilight series (other than the lack of it having an interesting story to tell and no talent actors in it) it's ridiculous and apparently sometimes completely vile and disturbed.
Peter Travers from Rolling Stone Magazine said it best, "One of the most nauseating successes. The worst thing about America...people wanting to go see this vampire garbage."
This is some of the worst movies of 2011 according to GQ magazine. I had to include them 'cuz some of them are too damn funny not to:
The Worst Movies of the Year
This was the year Adam Sandler dressed in drag in Jack and Jill. The year they tried to bring back Conan the Barbarian. Hell, this year, Kevin James ate at a T.G.I. Friday's with a gorilla in Zookeeper. But none of those movies even cracked our list. Nope. These are the worst sins committed to celluloid in 2011
By The Editors of GQ
War Horse
Some films are born bad with the audacity of cynicism: The fat-suit cash-grab Jack and Jill and its fellow copycat crappers Red Riding Hood, Beastly, Abduction, Conan the Barbarian, The Hangover Part II, Arthur, Mars Needs Moms, New Year's Eve, The Three Musketeers, and Big Mommas: Like Father, Like Son were indisputably among the worst-executed, least entertaining, and most calculated films of the year. But their failures were not exactly shocks. I sighed, but I didn't howl. The film that left me sputtering and spewing and fuming was War Horse, thanks to the sour-milk surprise of seeing Steven Spielberg make a film so insultingly high-brow juvenile.
War Horse is both the worst sort of self-important Oscar bait and the most preachy sort of Caldecott kids-book award bait: A syrupy stunted-growth picture-book about how every gosh-darn soldier has a heart made of hay. The parents are local color, the soldiers are stock archetypes who seem to share bunkers with Elmer Fudd, and everyone, everywhere, is decent on the inside. The horse, of course, is the most pure of all, becoming almost comically sentient as it tends to other beasts and gobbles up all the best close-ups.
War Horse underestimates its audience in many of the same ways the year's other D-list tween and man-child duds do, only with an epic sense of self-importance. The overblown, manipulative-as-your-mom John Williams score tells the audience how it must feel from beat to beat with less subtlety than the soundtrack to an episode of 16 and Pregnant: It's such intrusive, nanny-state steering, Spielberg might as well screw training wheels into your heart. Every rough edge of the story (the father's alcoholism, the parent's flawed marriage, the animal abuse) has been sanded down so much there's nothing left but mushy sawdust. Character flaws are raised, then excused, and finally praised: Why does Dad drink so much and why is he such a jerk? First answer: He's having a tough time. Second: Actually, because he was a war hero, honey.
In the original stage production of War Horse, the Germans spoke German and the French spoke French. In the Lincoln Center adaptation in New York, they spoke in thickly accented English. In War Horse, the charming German soldier speaks such ridiculously good English that the director has no choice but to have another character feign shock at the Kraut's newscaster locution. What are the odds? In this film, no word, symbol, plot twist, or emotion will go misunderstood. The fog of war is hovered away.
Middlebrow wags like to complain a lot about how bad comic book adaptations imbue childish stories with grand social-political themes. It seems far worse to reduce the entirety of WWI to picture-book bathos about how everyone loves horses and it's a small world, after all. Yes, there have been worse casts. Sure, that big black horse looks great storming across the battlefield, but no number of pretty shots can save a concept so insipid. To put it another way, in 2070, do you want to see an Oscar contender about a sweet-hearted Baathist and a decent Blackwater contractor who, against the artfully composed tracer fire of Fallujah, bond together, and save a brave, noble camel?—Logan Hill
The Future
So you're a cat. A stray cat, with a mangy, wooly, mane-like ring of fur around your collar. You're missing a paw, too. Still, you're a cat. Could be worse. Then this woman comes along. She's got a halo of brown hair and eyes like droplets from the clear blue ocean. And the affect of an electroshocked horse. She's going to put you in her movie, she says. Gonna be a big star. You're a cat, so whatever. Still, you don't realize that she's going to condescend to and objectify your pain. How? Well, she's going to assume your voice (remember, you're a cat and don't actually have a human speaking voice.) That voice is going to sound the way couples rapt by their own eensy-weensy baby talk sound. This is meant to seem adorable. It will make people want to hang themselves, minimizing your struggle. Then, she's going to represent you, during her otherwise unbearable film about adrift Los Angeles 30-somethings unaware of how to conduct themselves in the world, as a pair of puppet legs. Well, technically one puppet leg and one bandaged puppet appendage. This is all starting to sound bizarre and horrifying to you, I know. It gets worse—you're the whole point of this movie, but no one really cares for you. Instead, they use your imminent arrival in their home—you're not even in their home yet!—as an opportunity to discover that they are deeply shallow people who can sometimes bend the space and time continuum to their needs. Look, I don't get it either, cat. The worst part? The whole time, Droplet Eyes is calling you Paw Paw. That's not your name. It's probably Ralph. Or Tiger. Definitely not Paw Paw. Then again, you're just a three-legged cat. What right do you have to dignity?—Sean Fennessey
Straw Dogs
The message of this movie in one sentence: If Kate Bosworth would just put on a goddamn bra, six hillbillies might still be alive today. The worst thing about hack director Rod Lurie's pointless, stupid remake of the scandalously ultraviolent 1971 Sam Peckinpah original—in which a milquetoast academic works up the guts to defend his gorgeous wife from a home invasion by a crew of drooling local savages—is that Lurie actually thinks he's saying something honest about the primal nature of men. His only innovation (if you could call it that) is to stir in a splash of red state-blue state frisson, transplanting the action from the English countryside to the American Deep South and turning Dustin Hoffman's math professor into a Hollywood screenwriter played by James Marsden—and in the process converting Peckinpah's psycho-sexual tangle of urges into the year's lamest political allegory. The only part I liked: toward the end, during the bad guys' climactic siege, when James Woods—playing a mouth-breathing football coach whose decades of drunken, abusive behavior toward just about everyone in town is tolerated because, uh, he coaches football?—gets a pot of scalding hot water thrown in his face. At that moment, I laughed, because I thought to myself, "That's exactly what watching this movie feels like."—Devin Gordon
Green Lantern
I read comic books when I was a kid, but I wasn't a Green Lantern-ite. (A Green Lantern-head?) I wasn't a junior member of the Lantern corps; I didn't have a plastic emerald power ring I found at the bottom of a box of Kix. What I'm saying is that, I didn't have any expectations to disappoint. I just couldn't sleep.
So around 2 a.m., I got out of bed, scrolled through my OnDemand options, and thought, "Hey, that movie stars Ryan Reynolds, whom I've inexplicably adored since Two Guys, a Girl and a Pizza Place, as a test pilot who becomes a superhero and Blake Lively, who takes the nice naked photos of herself, as another test pilot and there are aliens and that seems all right." But the special effects were as muddy and floundering as Hubble Telescope images before they fixed the mirror; the jokes were a five year old's jokes; the plot was either too simple or too confusing; the villain seemed to be a big evil yellow blob. It definitely did not have “that Star Wars feel,” which is what Definitely Maybe's Ryan Reynolds kept telling people when it came out. And it definitely was not The Right Stuff with Superheroes and Aliens and A Naked Blake Lively.
I made it about 40 minutes in. Then I went back to bed, and stared at the ceiling, which was more entertaining.—Mark Lotto
We Need to Talk About Kevin 
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I would like to add my own worst film of 2011.
Battle: Los Angeles was pretty damn terrible and I have a review of it in one of my previous posts.
There's lots of reasons it sucked but most of all you didn't ever get interested in the characters. The story was interesting on paper. I mean, who wouldn't want to see another movie about an alien invasion, but the movie fails to make you care about the people left to fight the battle. Which means you end up not caring who wins.
A close runner up would be Justin Bieber: Never Say Never. I've not seen the movie, nor will I waste a second of my life watching that little teenage snot-nosed no talent girlie-voiced boy who is grossly overpaid do anything. I'm positive that this movie sucks because Justin Bieber does.
The surprise of the year for me was that I actually enjoyed the remake movie of the television series The A-Team. I thought it wasn't going to be very good, but ended up being pretty enjoyable.
Some films are born bad with the audacity of cynicism: The fat-suit cash-grab Jack and Jill and its fellow copycat crappers Red Riding Hood, Beastly, Abduction, Conan the Barbarian, The Hangover Part II, Arthur, Mars Needs Moms, New Year's Eve, The Three Musketeers, and Big Mommas: Like Father, Like Son were indisputably among the worst-executed, least entertaining, and most calculated films of the year. But their failures were not exactly shocks. I sighed, but I didn't howl. The film that left me sputtering and spewing and fuming was War Horse, thanks to the sour-milk surprise of seeing Steven Spielberg make a film so insultingly high-brow juvenile.
War Horse is both the worst sort of self-important Oscar bait and the most preachy sort of Caldecott kids-book award bait: A syrupy stunted-growth picture-book about how every gosh-darn soldier has a heart made of hay. The parents are local color, the soldiers are stock archetypes who seem to share bunkers with Elmer Fudd, and everyone, everywhere, is decent on the inside. The horse, of course, is the most pure of all, becoming almost comically sentient as it tends to other beasts and gobbles up all the best close-ups.
In the original stage production of War Horse, the Germans spoke German and the French spoke French. In the Lincoln Center adaptation in New York, they spoke in thickly accented English. In War Horse, the charming German soldier speaks such ridiculously good English that the director has no choice but to have another character feign shock at the Kraut's newscaster locution. What are the odds? In this film, no word, symbol, plot twist, or emotion will go misunderstood. The fog of war is hovered away.
Middlebrow wags like to complain a lot about how bad comic book adaptations imbue childish stories with grand social-political themes. It seems far worse to reduce the entirety of WWI to picture-book bathos about how everyone loves horses and it's a small world, after all. Yes, there have been worse casts. Sure, that big black horse looks great storming across the battlefield, but no number of pretty shots can save a concept so insipid. To put it another way, in 2070, do you want to see an Oscar contender about a sweet-hearted Baathist and a decent Blackwater contractor who, against the artfully composed tracer fire of Fallujah, bond together, and save a brave, noble camel?—Logan Hill
So you're a cat. A stray cat, with a mangy, wooly, mane-like ring of fur around your collar. You're missing a paw, too. Still, you're a cat. Could be worse. Then this woman comes along. She's got a halo of brown hair and eyes like droplets from the clear blue ocean. And the affect of an electroshocked horse. She's going to put you in her movie, she says. Gonna be a big star. You're a cat, so whatever. Still, you don't realize that she's going to condescend to and objectify your pain. How? Well, she's going to assume your voice (remember, you're a cat and don't actually have a human speaking voice.) That voice is going to sound the way couples rapt by their own eensy-weensy baby talk sound. This is meant to seem adorable. It will make people want to hang themselves, minimizing your struggle. Then, she's going to represent you, during her otherwise unbearable film about adrift Los Angeles 30-somethings unaware of how to conduct themselves in the world, as a pair of puppet legs. Well, technically one puppet leg and one bandaged puppet appendage. This is all starting to sound bizarre and horrifying to you, I know. It gets worse—you're the whole point of this movie, but no one really cares for you. Instead, they use your imminent arrival in their home—you're not even in their home yet!—as an opportunity to discover that they are deeply shallow people who can sometimes bend the space and time continuum to their needs. Look, I don't get it either, cat. The worst part? The whole time, Droplet Eyes is calling you Paw Paw. That's not your name. It's probably Ralph. Or Tiger. Definitely not Paw Paw. Then again, you're just a three-legged cat. What right do you have to dignity?—Sean Fennessey
The message of this movie in one sentence: If Kate Bosworth would just put on a goddamn bra, six hillbillies might still be alive today. The worst thing about hack director Rod Lurie's pointless, stupid remake of the scandalously ultraviolent 1971 Sam Peckinpah original—in which a milquetoast academic works up the guts to defend his gorgeous wife from a home invasion by a crew of drooling local savages—is that Lurie actually thinks he's saying something honest about the primal nature of men. His only innovation (if you could call it that) is to stir in a splash of red state-blue state frisson, transplanting the action from the English countryside to the American Deep South and turning Dustin Hoffman's math professor into a Hollywood screenwriter played by James Marsden—and in the process converting Peckinpah's psycho-sexual tangle of urges into the year's lamest political allegory. The only part I liked: toward the end, during the bad guys' climactic siege, when James Woods—playing a mouth-breathing football coach whose decades of drunken, abusive behavior toward just about everyone in town is tolerated because, uh, he coaches football?—gets a pot of scalding hot water thrown in his face. At that moment, I laughed, because I thought to myself, "That's exactly what watching this movie feels like."—Devin Gordon
I read comic books when I was a kid, but I wasn't a Green Lantern-ite. (A Green Lantern-head?) I wasn't a junior member of the Lantern corps; I didn't have a plastic emerald power ring I found at the bottom of a box of Kix. What I'm saying is that, I didn't have any expectations to disappoint. I just couldn't sleep.
So around 2 a.m., I got out of bed, scrolled through my OnDemand options, and thought, "Hey, that movie stars Ryan Reynolds, whom I've inexplicably adored since Two Guys, a Girl and a Pizza Place, as a test pilot who becomes a superhero and Blake Lively, who takes the nice naked photos of herself, as another test pilot and there are aliens and that seems all right." But the special effects were as muddy and floundering as Hubble Telescope images before they fixed the mirror; the jokes were a five year old's jokes; the plot was either too simple or too confusing; the villain seemed to be a big evil yellow blob. It definitely did not have “that Star Wars feel,” which is what Definitely Maybe's Ryan Reynolds kept telling people when it came out. And it definitely was not The Right Stuff with Superheroes and Aliens and A Naked Blake Lively.
I made it about 40 minutes in. Then I went back to bed, and stared at the ceiling, which was more entertaining.—Mark Lotto
We Need to Talk About Kevin I saw director Lynne Ramsay's latest film a few months ago, and I was going to watch it again just to be sure I had all my facts straight. But. I. Could. Not. Bear. It. The first thing my friend and I did after watching the film was race to the nearest bar, which is good news for alcoholics. For us, it was simply the most expedient way to wipe the experience from our minds. Kevin is relentlessly, mind-numbingly, soul-crushingly—and, worst of all—pointlessly depressing. It's like a parody of an art film, without the benefit of one single laugh.
A woman (Tilda Swinton) and her husband (John C. Reilly) have a baby. The mother feels no love for her boy (the reason is never revealed). Kevin becomes a silent child who plays nice with dad while secretly torturing mom (Reilly, at his most doltish, is oblivious bordering on mentally slow). When Kevin (now played by the beautiful Ezra Miller) becomes a teenager, he goes on a killing spree at his local high school, possibly to hurt mom or simply because he is a psychopath. Much of the film is about Swinton dealing with the aftermath—her (I suppose) grief and guilt, as well as retribution from the community. Yes, she inexplicably (Idiotically? Passive- aggressively? Masochistically? Who knows why!) remains in the same town.
Swinton is mesmerizing—really, it's impossible look away from that translucent mask of a face—but the film isn't helped by her usual reticence, which compounds the film's ambiguity. The equivalent of cinematic quicksand, We Need to Talk About Kevin slowly suffocates the viewer with inexplicable...what? Grief? Anxiety? Boredom? In my case, the emotion was anger. The drinks, however, were excellent.—Mary Kaye Schilling
Larry CrowneThere were three in-flight movie options on Continental Flight 15 last month. The first was Monte Carlo, which stars that girl Justin Bieber is dating. The second was Larry Crowne, with Tom Hanks and Julia Roberts. Somehow, the third, which I cannot recall, was less enticing than the last two. I chose Larry Crowne.
You remember the previews. Larry Crowne (Tom Hanks) has just been laid off, so he goes to community college, where he meets Julia Roberts, a disaffected professor with a drinking problem. It's unclear which mega-star this movie was intended to be a vehicle for: The movie opens on Tom Hanks, and it follows him throughout, but his character doesn't change or evolve. He continues to be the same lovable loser he was in the beginning—except that, in the end, he gets the girl. Roberts's character, meanwhile, quits drinking, leaves her boring husband, and starts to care about her job again, all within the course of an hour and a half. In this movie, Man meets Slob, Slob becomes Woman, and then Man is ready to fall in love with Woman. (Woman is, of course, predisposed to like Man as he is, to demand nothing of him.) It's such a simple plot that you could watch it with the sound off and gather every major reveal from visual cues alone—which is actually what I did on my return flight, when faced with the same three movie options. My headphones had broken and I'd finished my book, so I sat and watched Tom ride his Vespa around the big, silent screen in the bulkhead between first in coach, for a second time. The Vespa symbolizes reclaimed youth—it is the vehicle of choice for cool kids who inexplicably populate this community college. Julia's blender full of ice and liquor is meant to symbolize depression and neediness. In reality, Vespas are only driven by douchebags and Europeans (and combinations of the two), and a blended drink full of ice and liquor is a delicious, refreshing thing. In fact, I've never wanted one more.—Mark Byrne
You remember the previews. Larry Crowne (Tom Hanks) has just been laid off, so he goes to community college, where he meets Julia Roberts, a disaffected professor with a drinking problem. It's unclear which mega-star this movie was intended to be a vehicle for: The movie opens on Tom Hanks, and it follows him throughout, but his character doesn't change or evolve. He continues to be the same lovable loser he was in the beginning—except that, in the end, he gets the girl. Roberts's character, meanwhile, quits drinking, leaves her boring husband, and starts to care about her job again, all within the course of an hour and a half. In this movie, Man meets Slob, Slob becomes Woman, and then Man is ready to fall in love with Woman. (Woman is, of course, predisposed to like Man as he is, to demand nothing of him.) It's such a simple plot that you could watch it with the sound off and gather every major reveal from visual cues alone—which is actually what I did on my return flight, when faced with the same three movie options. My headphones had broken and I'd finished my book, so I sat and watched Tom ride his Vespa around the big, silent screen in the bulkhead between first in coach, for a second time. The Vespa symbolizes reclaimed youth—it is the vehicle of choice for cool kids who inexplicably populate this community college. Julia's blender full of ice and liquor is meant to symbolize depression and neediness. In reality, Vespas are only driven by douchebags and Europeans (and combinations of the two), and a blended drink full of ice and liquor is a delicious, refreshing thing. In fact, I've never wanted one more.—Mark Byrne
The Adventures of TintinI didn't hate The Adventures of Tintin because I'm biased against kid's movies. In fact, I was one of the lone souls in this office who liked Steven Spielberg's other animal-hero epic, War Horse (THAT HORSE!). I hated it because I'm 26. I'm 26 and I shouldn't have to try hard to follow the plot of a movie that is made for seven-year-olds. A movie that is also made by Steven Spielberg. But that is exactly what happened during Tintin.
So, there's, like, this treasure. But it's in another realm. And you can only see that realm if you're drunk or a ghost or something? I don't know! It's really complicated!
That's not the only reason I didn't like it. They made Tintin an animated boy-who-looks-like-a-lesbian, a recreation that is, first of all, not true to the legendary comic, and second, a two-year-old meme. The movie, in my limited understanding, also seemed to tacitly tell kids to go get hammered. Black-out drunk. Seeing-things drunk. The hero of the film is a pirate who receives these presage visions that lead to a hidden treasure. He only gets those visions when he is six sheets to the wind, though. It's like the Spielberg equivalent of a bonerific Disney priest.
There was one bright point: Every now and then a movie is so pissing bad that my body pays me a favor. It happens when I don't have the smarts to get up and leave mid-scene. Or am just too proud to admit I've wasted $12 on awful cinema. My brain, on some psychosomatic shit, will just stone-cold conk out. This happened only once this year, during this movie, for about five minutes.
I don't remember at exactly what point the reflex kicked in. But I do remember waking up from a blissful-but-belated slumber to find a drunk Snowy the Dog, burping, in 3-D. And that was impressive. That was not the worst.—Andrew Richdale
So, there's, like, this treasure. But it's in another realm. And you can only see that realm if you're drunk or a ghost or something? I don't know! It's really complicated!
That's not the only reason I didn't like it. They made Tintin an animated boy-who-looks-like-a-lesbian, a recreation that is, first of all, not true to the legendary comic, and second, a two-year-old meme. The movie, in my limited understanding, also seemed to tacitly tell kids to go get hammered. Black-out drunk. Seeing-things drunk. The hero of the film is a pirate who receives these presage visions that lead to a hidden treasure. He only gets those visions when he is six sheets to the wind, though. It's like the Spielberg equivalent of a bonerific Disney priest.
There was one bright point: Every now and then a movie is so pissing bad that my body pays me a favor. It happens when I don't have the smarts to get up and leave mid-scene. Or am just too proud to admit I've wasted $12 on awful cinema. My brain, on some psychosomatic shit, will just stone-cold conk out. This happened only once this year, during this movie, for about five minutes.
I don't remember at exactly what point the reflex kicked in. But I do remember waking up from a blissful-but-belated slumber to find a drunk Snowy the Dog, burping, in 3-D. And that was impressive. That was not the worst.—Andrew Richdale
New Year's EveNew Year's Eve feels like the movie adaptation of a vodka ad. There's an orgy of pretty people wearing sparkly clothes, spewing lines of dialogue composed by a committee seemingly intent on selling things. They're slogans, really. Like: "How do you explain the entire world coming together on one night?" "The countdown begins!" "Let's do it!" "Somebody's gonna have a happy New Year tonight!" "Are you amazed yet?" And "You may have just found The One." Don't tell me you can't see every single one of these sentences on the side of a bus, printed in bold letters beneath a picture of a sweating bottle of vodka. Or hear them in the chorus of a Black Eyed Peas song—the auditory version of a vodka ad.
But you know what this movie is actually selling? OUR DIGNITY. (Along with those last few wisps of Robert De Niro's soul.) It's like returning a defective microwave to The Home Depot and having them put the same defective microwave in a shiny new microwave box for a repackaging fee of $12. You've seen New Year's Eve already. It was called CrazyStupidLoveActuallyValentinesDay. And this year's mutation doesn't try half as hard as last year's Valentine's Day at silly things like "plot," "character development," and "logic." Which is, I know, akin to saying "Hitler didn't try half as hard as Eichmann to be nice!" Please don't infer that Valentine's Day is good. New Year's Eve, though, defies even basic expectations. An example: Jon Bon Jovi stars in this movie. He plays a singer named "Jensen." I'm pretty sure director Garry Marshall just handed him the International Pain Scale and pointed to the face he wanted Bon Jovi to attempt in each scene. Every interaction with him begins with another character unsubtly illuminating his emotional status for us: "Jensen, you look sad!" or "Jensen, you must be so happy right now!"
Also—and this is where I would usually text-scream SPOILER ALERT, if there was something here to be spoiled—Robert De Niro plays a curmudgeon dying of cancer, refusing treatment for some inexplicable reason. The very professional doctors taking care of him say loudly, within earshot of his room, "I doubt he'll make it even minutes into the New Year" and "I'm surprised he hasn't died already! What is he holding on for?" Naturally, the Times Square ball drop. Because lifelong New Yorkers love Times Square on New Year's Eve. His last wish is to go up to the hospital roof and watch it. (In fact: "The only reason I picked this dirty, short-staffed hospital is because I know the roof has a good view of Times Square!") He gets to the roof. He dies with a smile on his face just moments into the New Year. Cut to Josh Duhamel, in a parallel vignette, waxing Hallmark poetic on the importance of hope to a bloated ensemble of dead-eyed actors who can't even bother to rouse themselves for the paycheck. Even the extras can't get up for this movie.
Here's the good news: At some point Marshall and his team will run out of holidays. Eventually. Until then, from the producers of Valentine's Day and New Year's Eve, comes Columbus Day. And Summer Friday. And, ultimately, Yom Kippur (Tagline: "We're hungry! For love.") and Veteran's Day ("Falling in love doesn't require legs.") Then this mind-numbingly pasteurized genre will expire. To quote New Year's Eve, "Let the countdown begin."—Lauren Bans
But you know what this movie is actually selling? OUR DIGNITY. (Along with those last few wisps of Robert De Niro's soul.) It's like returning a defective microwave to The Home Depot and having them put the same defective microwave in a shiny new microwave box for a repackaging fee of $12. You've seen New Year's Eve already. It was called CrazyStupidLoveActuallyValentinesDay. And this year's mutation doesn't try half as hard as last year's Valentine's Day at silly things like "plot," "character development," and "logic." Which is, I know, akin to saying "Hitler didn't try half as hard as Eichmann to be nice!" Please don't infer that Valentine's Day is good. New Year's Eve, though, defies even basic expectations. An example: Jon Bon Jovi stars in this movie. He plays a singer named "Jensen." I'm pretty sure director Garry Marshall just handed him the International Pain Scale and pointed to the face he wanted Bon Jovi to attempt in each scene. Every interaction with him begins with another character unsubtly illuminating his emotional status for us: "Jensen, you look sad!" or "Jensen, you must be so happy right now!"
Also—and this is where I would usually text-scream SPOILER ALERT, if there was something here to be spoiled—Robert De Niro plays a curmudgeon dying of cancer, refusing treatment for some inexplicable reason. The very professional doctors taking care of him say loudly, within earshot of his room, "I doubt he'll make it even minutes into the New Year" and "I'm surprised he hasn't died already! What is he holding on for?" Naturally, the Times Square ball drop. Because lifelong New Yorkers love Times Square on New Year's Eve. His last wish is to go up to the hospital roof and watch it. (In fact: "The only reason I picked this dirty, short-staffed hospital is because I know the roof has a good view of Times Square!") He gets to the roof. He dies with a smile on his face just moments into the New Year. Cut to Josh Duhamel, in a parallel vignette, waxing Hallmark poetic on the importance of hope to a bloated ensemble of dead-eyed actors who can't even bother to rouse themselves for the paycheck. Even the extras can't get up for this movie.
Here's the good news: At some point Marshall and his team will run out of holidays. Eventually. Until then, from the producers of Valentine's Day and New Year's Eve, comes Columbus Day. And Summer Friday. And, ultimately, Yom Kippur (Tagline: "We're hungry! For love.") and Veteran's Day ("Falling in love doesn't require legs.") Then this mind-numbingly pasteurized genre will expire. To quote New Year's Eve, "Let the countdown begin."—Lauren Bans
I would like to add my own worst film of 2011.
Battle: Los Angeles was pretty damn terrible and I have a review of it in one of my previous posts.
There's lots of reasons it sucked but most of all you didn't ever get interested in the characters. The story was interesting on paper. I mean, who wouldn't want to see another movie about an alien invasion, but the movie fails to make you care about the people left to fight the battle. Which means you end up not caring who wins.
A close runner up would be Justin Bieber: Never Say Never. I've not seen the movie, nor will I waste a second of my life watching that little teenage snot-nosed no talent girlie-voiced boy who is grossly overpaid do anything. I'm positive that this movie sucks because Justin Bieber does.
The surprise of the year for me was that I actually enjoyed the remake movie of the television series The A-Team. I thought it wasn't going to be very good, but ended up being pretty enjoyable.
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