Movies of 2013: My Bottom 10

So just to confuse those of you who like to move in #1Direction (token gesture for the teenage girls who read my blog), we're now going to shift gears into reverse, leap a long way backwards on my list to number 140, and count 'up' (as in backwards) my bottom 10. Just a reminder that the films on this particular list aren't necessarily bad, but to put it another way, they definitely are.

140) Flight (2012, Robert Zemeckis)

I think it’s testament to the quality of my film selection process this year that there are a couple of decent (but just fatally flawed) films from ‘this year’ on my bottom 10 – you don’t have to scroll down much further to see the other. Obviously the Academy Award nods given to this and the other help this drop down further because the accolades given to Washington’s performance don’t hide the problems with this film but just exacerbate my annoyance at them. Leaving aside his performance - which is really quite good, actually, even though he’s playing Denzel Washington – and discuss firstly what a mess this film is. Is it a disaster flick? A courtroom/legal drama? A 'battle with personal demons' drama? Any one of those might have been alright, but this film tries to be all three at once, and the final sequence just sums up beautifully how confused it is, because it leaves us with this message and theme which really hasn’t been mentioned at all up to that point and makes you ask “Oh, is that what the point of the film was?” Also, aargh those John Goodman scenes. What an atrocious waste of a wonderful actor. Seriously what in the hell is he, and those scenes, doing in this movie? Trying to be three things at once apparently wasn't enough, so let's throw in 'buddy drug comedy'??? Throwing those scenes into this movie is like going to the hollowed-out crater of a plane crash scene and putting a bomb in it, because that fucked-up mess can always be even more fucked-up.  The thing is, this film actually had some pretty good parts but overall it’s a poorly-oiled, rusty machine with broken and missing parts and people still kicking the shit out of it.

141) Lo Imposible (2012, J.A. Bayona)

I told you it wouldn’t be long before another ‘this year’ film. OK so this movie actually holds together a lot better than Flight. To continue the whole ‘machinery’ analogy, this film is like a machine that works pretty well for what it was created to do, but what it was created to do was create actual human excrement and go into crowded places and fling it around the place. It’s a sappy, predictable and formulaic piece of saccharine TV soap opera, with an awe-inspiring tsunami sequence and some decent acting. The reason this is actually below Flight though is basically because I just felt unaffected by any of the really large emotional climaxes (perhaps because I knew they were coming), while the bigger moments in Flight stood out among the rubble. If you can suspend the screaming shrieks of disbelief that this film instills in even the most vulnerable and credulous viewer, it could actually be somewhat touching. But it never reached a level above 'midday movie to kill time before Days of our Lives' material for me.

142) Little Women (1994, Gilliam Armstrong)

OK this is more than a little unfair. There’s really nothing particularly wrong with this film - if you like stories about little girls realising they’re no longer little girls; they’re little women, then by all means watch this film. Trouble is, as I implied ages and ages ago when discussing The Importance of Being Earnest, I find something stodgy and wooden about such straight page-to-screen adaptations of beloved material. And even though I haven’t read Little Women, this still just feels like such a self-conscious lifting straight off the page. The difference is I don’t think the book itself would be as entertaining and witty as Importance, so this film isn’t either, and while Importance has Colin Firth to ameliorate the stagey lack of imagination, this has... Winona Ryder. Bzzzt. Wrong answer.

143) Ghostbusters II (1989, Ivan Reitman)

Haha, you’d forgotten this one was coming, didn’t you? I mentioned I watch Ghost busters, and this, in a marathon session one morning, and you probably thought the sequel was going to be higher on the list! Well joke’s on you, you presumptuous idiot, that’ll teach you to jump to conclusions? Don’t you feel utterly, utterly foolish now? Don’t you want to just hurl yourself off your nearest volcano crater bridge? You will find out in this book? Seriously though, everything that was wrong with the first Ghost Busters film is repeated in spades here, and it’s so much worse if you watch the two back-to-back. The whole lack of any kind of science in their science fiction is made even more glaring here when oh, what do you know, the machinery they built doesn’t work again, and they need to try something even more radical and crazy with wacky gizmos than they tried before. There’s really a limit to how far you can push that story formula, and that limit is at most one film. There’s also a limit to how much Peter Venkman I can tolerate, and that limit is about an eighth of a film.

144) The Ninth Gate (1999, Roman Polanski)

If Polanski’s early European films were somewhat baffling, his foray into Hollywood popcorn is just disappointing. Also funny that when you’re dealing with films about deluded people summoning up demons to take over the world, I’ve ranked Ghostbusters II ahead of this one. This is just heavy-handed farcical nonsense, trying to masquerade as some kind of historical intrigue. The Emmanuelle Seigner character is risibly shoehorned in, and the whole thing just plays out like some weird Gothic teenager’s wet dream. Rosemary's Baby this certainly isn't; it lacks the unease, the sheer menace, of that earlier effort, and just typifies some kind of descent into generic commercial slush for an otherwise interesting director. It’s saying something when by far the most alert and excited I was watching this ‘thriller’ was in about the third scene when Johnny Depp is walking down Bleecker Street in NYC and I recognised the exact spot from my travels there. Disappointing.

145) Fatal Attraction (1987, Adrian Lyne)

Wow, I really don’t respond to trashy, ham-fisted melodrama, do I? I don’t feel bad at all about this film being as low as it is, obviously, because anyone who counts it among their liked films could only do so by filing it under ‘guilty pleasures’. Frankly we’re dealing again here with TV movie territory; Glenn Close’s Alex Forrest comes right out of some David Hasselhoff career-reboot vehicle, the way she starts out easy-going, friendly, charming, and then what... oh, yeah, becomes a hysterical psycho stalker bitch who’s probably also a vampire but they cut those scenes out (possibly because they, unlike the rest of this, lacked verisimilitude). There are, yet, no redeemable qualities to this film – Michael Douglas is uncharismatic, the plot is predictable but all the biggest moments are shriekingly over-played. The worst part is it’s quite clear that everybody in this film is taking it very seriously; if it had any tongue-in-cheek moments, it could almost be redeemed as having been in on the joke that it ends up being.

146) A Life Less Ordinary (1997, Danny Boyle)

Ah, Danny Boyle. You’ve had a mixed year with me. Which is to say, you’ve had a mixed career. Earlier when I discussed Shallow Grave, I discussed how Boyle works best in a somewhat dark milieu. Where he’s at his worst (or, least comfortable) is in quirky romantic comedy, as in this film. Funnily enough, with the exception of Cameron Diaz (not a fan) he’s working with a good cast here, including Holly Hunter, Delroy Lindo, Dan Hedaya, and his mainstay Ewan McGregor, but at the end of the day nobody can elevate this above the level of silly schlock. The whole ‘angels’ conceit oddly enough felt far-fetched to me – 'oddly' not because it’s not far-fetched, because it is – but because it seemed unnecessary, and incongruent with the rest of the film, which already has an interesting plot conceit. This maybe makes for some decent evening entertainment with your SO, but taken on its own there’s very little to recommend this film.

147) The Miracle Worker (1962, Arthur Penn)

OK, so for a film with an IMDb rating of 8.1 this is pretty damn low on the list. Am I the one monster in the pack? (trust me, that metaphor works) Or am I just the only person who’s willing to see through the façade of inspirational sweetness this film puts out there? Actually it’s probably the former, I’m afraid. The fact is that in spite of knowing and imagining how terrible an existence Helen Keller’s must have been - not being able to interact in any way with the world around her - I just found her so bloody irritating in this film. But not so much her personally, the film itself was irritating because it just seemed to be 90 minutes of Helen loudly breaking things and wrestling really quite violently and uncomfortably with Annie (played by Anne Bancroft). It was basically just one long stream of frustration porn followed by ten minutes of “hooray, it’s finally worked! Huzzah for humanity!”. Obviously Arthur Penn, maker of Bonnie and Clyde, is not interested in the usual heart-warming formula. But I don’t know, there is still a reason that formula exists.

148) Funny People (2009, Judd Apatow)

For a movie about funny people making other people laugh, this really isn’t funny. Having said that, I don’t think it was ever really the point to make it funny but the point seems instead to make a ‘behind-the-curtain’ look at the stand-up life. The only trouble is it’s bad in that sense as well. It’s rare indeed for Adam Sandler to become even less likeable on screen but his George Simmons is a complete twat, inoperable condition or not. The biggest problem with this film, though, is that it doesn’t even know what it’s doing. A huge part of the film seems to be setting up the fact that Sandler is going to reconnect with his ex-wife and settle down and become a better guy, and then it sort of realises too late that that's not going to work… whoops, well let's trying and make it about the bromance? No there’s no chemistry there either. Oh well, let’s just roll the credits and maybe people will have gotten some satisfaction out of it. Messy = all well and good if it’s funny, and not funny = all well and good if there’s a satisfying serious point, but messy and not funny? Sorry, Judd Apatow. You’ve made far better films. This one is only really more enjoyable than… say…

149) Incendies (2010, Denis Villeneuve)

No, I'm just fucking with my brother here.

149) The Beach (2000, Danny Boyle)

I remember when this film came out. It was panned sight-unseen by me for being lady porn staring Leo DiCaprio's torso: at the very height of DiCaprio’s hysterically-screaming-underwear-throwing-nymphet phase, he stars in a movie mostly topless and all the hysterically-screaming-nymphets pack an extra pair of underwear and tramp off to the movies in droves. Back then, little did I suspect that Leo would toil for ten years under the tutelage of Martin Scorsese and earn a modicum of respect from me. Little did I know at the time that at the helm of this film was the maker of that wonderful dark comedy Shallow Grave. So what better time to catch up with, and re-educate myself about, this film than now, at the height of possibility for proving myself wrong? Yes, the circumstances were right. What wasn't right was that this film may not have just been lady porn. But worse yet: ninety minutes of a still image of a shirtless DiCaprio staring at the camera would have been far more worthy of being put on film than the brainless shit this film ends up being. It’s over-the-top teenage soap opera drivel, comprising of the most atrociously awkward dialogue and an adolescent fantasy plot that even Boyle can’t inject with the right quantity of sinister darkness. He tries - oh, he tries - but there's just such bad writing, so many cardboard cutout characters being badly portrayed here; even Tilda Swinton can't escape playing a caricature of herself, and she wasn't even famous yet. At the end of the day this film is just so silly that any semblance of suspense, or desire for emotional investment, gets crushed under the weight of the pile of money this film made from hysterical teenage girls (#1D #Harry4life). But seriously, on that point, Leo is cute but  I don’t think anyone could go that crazy for his shapeless, pasty torso; he's no McConaughey. Maybe I was, and am, wrong about what this film aimed to do. But I'm not wrong about it failing to do anything else.

Now let's all take a deep breath. Put the negativity aside, and tomorrow we'll go back to the lush, verdant pastures at the top of my list. Or rather, knowing my taste in films, the gnarled, hollowed-out husks of once-lush pastures ravaged by disaster and chemical warfare. But artistic integrity!