Movies of 2014 Part 3: Bottom 31

So although I'm leaping backwards, and reversing my 'countdown' order to be a 'countup' order, there shouldn't be any real explanation necessary. This is my 31 least-favourite films I watched in 2014. Some of them were not necessarily bad, but something was lacking. Let's call it 'spirit'.

151) Stranger than Paradise (1984, Jim Jarmusch)

Jarmusch is very hit and miss for me. Not just in terms of overall films but even within the same film. This is definitely true of what most consider his masterpiece, Dead Man, which has an interesting aesthetic but I found otherwise completely intractable.

Then there are his earlier films like this, which all have the same sort of no-fucks-given nonchalance about story, character, and so forth – it’s all just about creating a vibe. Well, congratulations Jim. Most filmmakers manage to do that in a few shots and then bother with making a film; they don’t just draw out vibe-creation to 90 minutes.

152) St Joan (1957, Otto Preminger)

OK so I have big problems with Joan of Arc films in general, if only because I have big problems with the story of Joan of Arc.

But then comparing this film to Carl Theodor Dreyer’s harrowing La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc draws out so many more problems. Where Dreyer made effectively a horror film about suffering and anguish, Preminger here makes a very plodding and very sanctimonious epic that just held very little interest for me. It has a very history-on-screen vibe which I tend to find somewhat dull at the best of times, but then there’s also just an unfortunate pandering to religious mysticism that just rubbed me the wrong way.

153) Playtime (1967, Jacques Tati)

It’s quite possible I was just in the wrong frame of mind when I watched this, and maybe I need to educate myself with more Tati to understand what he’s doing here.

But this virtually silent, surreal walk through an alterna-Paris was interminable for me, and while there were some moments of mild amusement, they were few and far between. What’s more, once I realised a joke had just happened it made me sit up and pay attention only to find that that was it, and there wasn’t more coming.

It’s an interesting film I guess, but I didn’t find it an interesting watch at all.

154) Get Shorty (1995, Barry Sonnenfeld)

This is one of quite a few films that really should be part of the middling dross section of this write-up, but in sorting managed to fall through the cracks somehow.

Basically there’s nothing particularly wrong with this film that should earn it that ‘bottom 31’ achievement badge. It’s mildly amusing, certainly fast-paced enough to be entertaining, with a suitably convoluted Elmore Leonard plot and cast of characters.

It just feels like a massive Hollywood circlejerk though, even though it’s mercilessly lampooning Hollywood – because I know how much Hollywood loves self-satire. It had very little other meaning for me. Quite middling.

155) Where the Wild Things Are (2009, Spike Jonze)

Yep another one that really fell through the cracks. I’ve seen some mixed things said about this: Josh Larsen from Filmspotting had this on his top 10 films of the past nine years list for some reason, while reviews at the time seemed utterly lukewarm, which is why I didn’t go out and see it despite my interest in Spike Jonze.

I think people who really, really love this film also really, really loved the book. As far as I can tell it’s a very true adaptation, in terms of both the story and characters and more generally, the spirit of the thing. But I remember reading the book as a kid and being very nonplussed about it, and I think the same thing happened to me here.

And I’m not really sure what Josh sees in it, but then he tends to take an unseemly delight in anything that feels overly childish to me (we’ll get to more of that later), and this certainly does that.

156) Cabin in the Sky (1943, Vincente Minnelli/Busby Berkeley)

An interesting musical at least in terms of the concept, this film combines a great deal of gospel music with African American mysticism and produces a light-hearted story of love and redemption.

I found the tone quite puzzling, though: it felt actually quite dark at times and then at others it’s all a bit Vaudevillian and slapsticky. As a result I was never really captured by the characters and the film went by quite slowly.

157) Greatest Show on Earth (1952, Cecil B DeMille)

OK so I’m disappointed indeed that this one fell through the cracks, because I’ve been trying to argue with my brother that it’s not all that bad a film. And yet, here it is in my bottom 31.

This is a bit of an epic and a lot of a spectacle, but hidden within its showiness is actually a decent and human story about love and envy. The cast put together a great ensemble and there are some entertaining circus sequences.

OK, so it’s still mediocre. But it’s a damn sight better and less ridiculous than Around the World in 80 Days.

158) Desperado (1995, Robert Rodriguez)

This one didn’t really fall through the cracks. For a film with a western aesthetic that has lots of gunslinging action, I sure found it dull. It just seems very samey with this ultra-violent genre of modern popcorn western.

Perhaps I should have watched El Mariachi first. I don’t think there was any confusion about the characters or the situation, but maybe coming in with preconceived ideas of the premise helps you enjoy it more, or enjoy the nuances of Rodriguez’s work more.

Ha! Just kidding. He has no nuances.

159) Swing Time (1936, George Stevens)

This was definitely one that fell through the cracks, but at the same time I’m a bit confused as to why this did, and yet Carefree and White Christmas managed to pip that magic 150 mark: the former because it’s just as unmemorable a film as this but with some great dance sequences (as this also has), and the latter because it’s basically exactly the same plot.

I guess I was probably just harder on this film because it was on this list of Classic Movies you must see, and I’m not really sure why. I feel like they may have just had a board of Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers vehicles and they faced away from it and threw a dart backwards.

I don’t know, personally I just found more charm in Easter Parade. And Top Hat.

160) Amarcord (1973, Federico Fellini)

OK, this can be the simplest and quickest write-up ever!

Why is this in my bottom 31? It’s a Fellini film.

You want more? Well there is one aspect of this film that makes it worth watching and memorable - and in fact is really great - but I can’t say what it is because I refuse to spoil it for my brother, who by the way has to SMS me just before he starts to watch this.

But apart from that, it’s full of Fellini-isms, and Fellini-ness, and as with all Fellini films, is just a huge mess that people inexplicably find some meaning or interest in. I’m getting tired of bothering with him.

161) Nashville (1975, Robert Altman)

Wow, this is three films on a row from that Buzzfeed list that find themselves in my bottom 31 because well, they just don’t really deserve to be considered ‘classic’ movies that ‘film buffs’ ‘should’ see.

So I didn’t really hate this as much as I’ve hated other Altman messes, like M*A*S*H, but it feels like a very heartless and ultimately pointless ensemble piece. Sort of an excuse for having an entire movie through-line, by instead having a bunch of different narratives that you can just cut to whenever one thread wears thin.

That criticism could, of course, be applied to any multi-linear narrative with varying success, but it’s definitely how I felt watching this. As I said above, I just didn’t see the point.

162) Syriana (2005, Stephen Gaghan)

Wow, speaking of messes. It’s quite possible that there could be a really intense and interesting thriller in here, and certainly that’s what the marketing told me to expect.

But it just all washed over me, and I felt like I was drowning in a sea of tangled storylines and puffed-up political agendas. There is, I think, a very fine balance between making a multi-thread thriller of big, ambitious scope and making a convoluted jumble.

As maligned as it often is, I think something like Crash manages to maintain and communicate its message very effectively through all its threads. Here, it just gets lost, for me at least.

163) Farewell my Concubine (Ba Wang Bie Ji, 1993, Kaige Chen)

Woah, jeez, another of those Buzzfeed films that finds itself down here, and in fact it looks like the bottom of the lot, which surprises me a bit.

There’s some decent stuff in this film – beautiful cinematography and a set of really solid performances – but enjoyment I think relies on a bunch of things. Firstly, you need to be happy to sit through a very long film; and secondly, you have to have a sensibility for operatic things. A fondness for Chinese opera in particular would come in very handy here.

I don’t have that sort of sensibility so it just seemed far too mired in self-pity and melodrama – which may indeed have still been OK if it didn’t just keep dragging on.

164) Secret Love (Bimilae, 2010, Hoon-I Ryu)

I have absolutely no idea why I watched this film. I had to IMDb it even to remind myself of what it was about.

Basically it’s been a very disappointing year in watching Korean cinema for me. Admittedly I didn’t seek out anything with huge reputations (this has a microscopic reputation, if at all) but this was a typical example of a film that has the same aesthetic and ambition of your best Korean cinema but just doesn’t live up to it.

It’s far too caught up in its own histrionics really to sell the convoluted thriller aspect, but ultimately it just lacked feeling as well. I don’t just mean ‘feeling’ in the sense of poignancy or melancholy but even the feeling of malevolence of an Oldboy could have done wonders with this. Just very meh.

165) American Hustle (2013, David O Russell)

Part of David O Russell’s inexplicable meteoric rise to critical acclaim concurrent with his meteoric crash to the depths of hell in terms of film quality, this film has the essence of a curious conman movie, until Russell got his glitter-coated, style-over-substance paws all over it.

At the same time, this has been one of the most astutely-slammed films of recent times, and it’ll be a bit of a cliché for me to heap more deserving shit on it. Instead I’m going to bow to a superior acid-tongued critic, The New York Post’s Kyle Smith who absolutely nails it in his first paragraph:

“So David O. Russell invited over some interesting actors (and also Bradley Cooper) to be filmed at a 1970s theme party. Too bad that footage didn’t make a movie.”

(Rest of his excellent review here)

166) Fletch (1985, Michael Ritchie)

I guess I had a mini project of watching some classic SNL-born comedies of the 80s this year, looking at what’s also coming in a few films time.

This is actually a fairly amusing noir satire with its head screwed on right and some jokes of varying success. So why does it find itself so low on my list? Two words: Chase, and Chevy. Not necessarily in that order.

I don’t know why but everything Chase does is dripping with irritating smug. I don’t find him funny, I definitely don’t find him likeable. He’s serviceable when he’s playing a parody of himself in Community, but when he was a youngster, I just don’t get his popularity.

167) Vanya on 42nd St (1994, Louis Malle)

Yeah, well, just to prove I’m not just anti-low-brow, have about the most high-brow film conceivable even lower down.

This is a really odd, and really oddly pointless film. Basically it’s film footage of an off-broadway theatre company doing their last minute run-through of an upcoming production of Uncle Vanya.

The cast is great; the truth that they bring to their line recitations is great; it retains the vibe of Chekhov’s play in a weird ‘meta’ way; but it’s still just footage of a line run.

168) I am Legend (2007, Francis Lawrence)

Perfectly predictable last man on earth fare. This is a complete cliché by this point, almost as complete and clichéd as the idea of casting Will Smith in anything, oh and why not make him the world’s leading scientician while you’re at it.

I’m actually OK with Will Smith in general, but I just think his charisma works best when he’s got someone to play off. And I mean a straight man, not a dog that doesn’t talk. I just didn’t enjoy his company enough to be stuck with him alone for most of this.

169) ¡Three Amigos! (1986, John Landis)

Yes, more SNL 80s comedy, and again more Chevy Chase dragging down his far more charming co-stars.

I guess it’s kind of unfair to compare this unfavourable with Galaxy Quest, since that film was obviously riffing on the same theme as this more than ten years later, but I just think that latter film made such a brilliant spoof of tacky 60s TV while at the same time wholeheartedly embracing its culture and its fandom.

¡Three Amigos! I feel doesn’t quite embrace the culture: it’s more caught up in its love of SNL cast members, so the three guys become disproportionately celebrated and everything else is just relegated to caricature. Some jokes work, but the film didn’t do anything for me.

170) Thor (2011, Kenneth Branagh)

So I did watch all of the pre-Avengers films in order to watch The Avengers this year. Both Captain America and the Avengers itself were in my middling sludge list, and this finds itself down here. Why, in particular?

I’m probably being a bit unfair on this, but as an Old Norse literature buff and a comic book ignoramus I was a bit taken aback a few years back to learn that there actually was a comic book called Thor and it did consist of a comic-book-afied version of the Old Norse universe.

So how successfully did it translate? Actually not too badly, which is why I think I’m being a bit unfair. I found it generally a bit formulaic and the action sequences lacked coherence for me, and Chris Hemsworth’s hair has far more acting ability than he does, but overall it was solid action fare.

171) Iron Man (2008, Jon Favreau)

So we move via Thor from the inexplicable popularity of a smug twerp in the 80s to the inexplicable popularity of a smug twerp, today.

Someone out there: please explain to me: Robert Downey Jr – what the fuck? No, I have very little else to say: what the fuck?

Is it that he went to jail, hahaha? Or is it really that people have a constant undying love for irritating smugness? It’s not even really that he’s so irritatingly smug that leaves me in the dark, it’s that that’s all he’s got. There’s no other angle, or depth, to his acting ability. It’s just rattle off smugness, hahaha.

Oh, and just add Gwyneth Paltrow into this mix. No mystery at all why it’s down this low. Can’t remember if I’ve said this publicly or not yet but I really think she and the acting profession desperately need a conscious uncoupling.

172) The Jungle Book (1967, Wolfgang Reitherman)

So I mentioned when talking about Where the Wild Things Are that Josh from Filmspotting takes an overly friendly approach to things that I find ridiculously childish. And I think that applies to classic Disney animation more than anything else.  He doesn’t even seem to factor in the rose-tinted glasses of nostalgia he views these old films through to see that they are really saccharine, flaccid and awkwardly one-dimensional by today’s standards.

But let’s take this one on its own merit. It’s an episodic kind of tale, presumably drawing its stories’ inspiration loosely from its source material, imbued with a bunch of decent, upbeat songs. It’s got no very coherent storyline, though, and my frustration as an adult watching this kept growing as it got further and further away from even an attempt at a storyline.

This is perfectly fine, imaginative stuff to plonk your kids down in front of, but they should still be judged on their own merits, and this is just a mess. As, I hasten to point out that I discovered lately, is my most beloved childhood film Mary Poppins. Nostalgia or no nostalgia, they’re all largely gibberish.

173) The Big Boss (Tang Shan da Xiong, 1971, Wei Lo/Chia-Hsiang Wu)

Watched this purely because on the day I watched it, I felt like some old Bruce Lee. The version I watched had a really shit dubbing job - well, actually the dubbing was OK but it was shit in the sense that any dubbing is shit.

Basically this film is a video game, only without the enjoyment of being able to control the characters. Bruce finds himself embroiled in a dispute between his worker friends and the corrupt management of an ice factory, and must eventually battle his way through several levels of bad guys before fighting the big boss.

There are some really, really ridiculous moments, most notably involving a set of attack dogs, but it’s ultimately campy fun. It’s you know, not ‘good’ though.

174) Drinking Buddies (2013, Joe Swanberg)

Got this film from my library because Adam from Filmspotting talked about it a bit when it came out – I think mainly because he likes Jake Johnson and not because the film had any profound impact on him. I’m not sure what sort of impact it had on him but it can’t possibly have been profound.

This is actually a reasonably sweet friendship-romance film: Johnson, Olivia Wilde, Anna Kendrick, set in and around a craft beer brewery. It’s sort of my world, but at the same time it’s just not particularly interesting, at all.

I think what’s really missing here is comedy: there’s maybe a bit of humour in the way the characters interact, but it’s just the way that friends interact, there’s nothing situational about the humour and nothing that made me laugh out loud. Kind of cute, but very pointless.

175) The Misfits (1961, John Huston)

Speaking of pointless: Marilyn Monroe in a western. Or, for that matter, any film.

This is probably not such a bad film, but it left me bored and frankly feeling like I’d wasted my time. It doesn’t have any of the sense of adventure or frontier tension that I generally love in westerns, it’s really just more of a mismatch buddy comedy set in the old west.

Old Clark Gable has none of the melting charm of Old Burt Lancaster, and Marilyn Monroe, as hinted at previously, has none of the melting charm of a flat, grey, rock.

So ultimately I was just not won over by any of this.

176) Alien³ (1992, David Fincher)

I’m still fairly lukewarm about the original Alien film, but I love James Cameron’s sequel, so continuing that upward trajectory was my only possible expectations for this third, and presumably necessary, film.

Unfortunately the trajectory didn’t continue and it didn’t feel wholly necessary. It’s fun to see Sigourney Weaver running around with no hair, but the whole all-male prison setting is very grimey-for-the-sake-of-grimey.

It kind of serves as a precursor to Fincher’s film aesthetic, but it’s just lots of fights and gore and predictability otherwise. Probably as necessary a film as Terminator 3 which, as we all know, doesn’t exist and never will.

177) Evil Dead II (1987, Sam Raimi)

Ah, speaking of unnecessary films…

This is a perfectly fine film, provided you’ve never seen Evil Dead or are very happy to watch the exact same film for a second time.

Basically this film serves as much purpose as a scrolling marquee at the beginning of Army of Darkness that reads “At some point, Ash fell into a timewarp and got a chainsaw”.

When I first picked up Army of Darkness many years ago I first asked the IMDb boards if it was necessary to watch the two Evil Dead films first, and the answer was a resounding ‘no’. Little did I know at the time that it wasn’t actually necessary to watch number 2 at all. Ever.

178) Sleeping Beauty (1959, Clyde Geronimi)

Yes, more classic Disney hate from me.

This film falls down mainly because it’s so languid and frankly dull. The story is reasonably interesting, and the magical elements are well animated, but I just felt it had no character. While Maleficent to her credit is probably the archetype of evil stepmother characters, the portrayal these days feels like nothing more than a cliché, and Aurora is just your cardboard cut-out pretty girl.

At the same time, this falls down in my estimation further than The Jungle Book because it’s not just flights of imaginative fancy that I would happily stick my hypothetical kids down in front of. It’s effectively a rape fantasy where being pretty ultimately saves the day.

179) Dumb & Dumber (1994, Peter & Bobby Farrelly)

It’s always handy when a film’s title doubles as my review in its entirety.

Given the internet’s giddy excitement last year about the announcement of a sequel to this beloved sophisticated comedy, I felt it was time to catch up and further my education into the works of the esteemed Farrelly brothers.

Unfortunately in making this decision I forgot about the two maxims of the universe: one, the internet is full of complete morons; and two, the more complete a moron you are, the louder your voice will be.

According to the IMDb this film is about two “good-hearted but incredibly stupid friends”. I don’t know if I’m just not stupid or braindead enough to find the ‘heart’ in these two but they struck me as yes, incredibly stupid, but in a malicious, selfish and dangerous way. All of which may have been OK if I’d laughed at any of their antics. Unfortunately I’m not quite stupid or seven-years-old enough to find this funny.

180) The Chaser (Chugyeogja, 2008, Hong-jin Na)

Yes, another piece of very disappointing Korean cinema for me, this. A bit less of a random choice than Secret Love, this came on my radar during Filmspotting’s Korean Auteurs marathon where they rated this film highly enough as a genre-bending thriller.

In truth this is objectively of far higher quality than most of the rest of my bottom 10, but I just had a horrible, horrible time with it. It’s just constant, bludgeoning despair, where presumably our sympathy is meant to waver and shift for and against our protagonist but I just found myself hating everyone and everything in it.

At the same time, I experienced a similar level of unrelenting brutality from Kim Jee-woon’s I Saw the Devil, but that latter all built to a really take-it-or-leave-it denouement which provided a satisfying level of catharsis no matter how you really felt about it. The Chaser offers no end to its ambiguity and its blurring of the line between good and evil so the only conclusion that you can draw is that the world and everything in it sucks.

I don’t like films that make me feel like that. Speaking of which…

181) The Wolf of Wall Street (2013, Martin Scorsese)

No, I’m not kidding. If I ranked the films I’ve seen in the last ten years, this would be bottom. What’s more, if I ranked the films I’ve seen in the last ten years on a more objective measure of ‘quality’ rather than my own personal reaction, this would still be bottom.

So firstly, I’d like to address my brother. Earlier in the year when I saw this, he spent about a week asking me again and again “What did you think of The Wolf of Wall Street?” and I successfully dodged those questions until he stopped asking. I knew then where this would be at the end of the year. Additionally, in response to one of one of his 2014 film write-ups (it was #300-#281) I said that I “violently disagreed with one of your rankings” and he naturally assumed that I meant a film was dramatically lower than it should have been. No, it was this film, and it was ridiculously high. He also had the sheer audacity to try and pander to the idiotic masses by qualifying “I do appreciate that it was a good film”. He's wrong, and so is everybody, and here’s why.

Firstly, I need to admit that my own personal reaction to this was strongly negative. Not just that Jordan Belfort and his lackeys were devoid of charisma, but the film itself is long and utterly tedious. There have only been two occasions in my life when I’ve actually had to grit my teeth and stop myself walking out of a film. One was Raja Gosnell’s Scooby-Doo (2002) and the other was this, and they are on par with each other in terms of sophistication.

What really gets my goat about the acclaim that this film got was that people talked about this in the same conversation with Goodfellas and Casino as the climax of some kind of Scorsese trilogy of American corruption. The comparison is ludicrous, for the simple reason that The Wolf of Wall Street lacks the most basic element of any drama: there is nothing at stake.

On the surface the comparison seems apt: it’s people, engaging in criminal activity, and plenty of footage of them kicking their feet up and enjoying the finer things in life at the expense of their souls and the American taxpayer. But think back on the scene in Goodfellas where Tommy gets ‘made’. Think of the final confrontation between Ace and Nicky in Casino. Now think of the scene in The Wolf of Wall Street where the stakes are life-and-death. Oh, there isn’t one? Silly me, this probably isn’t dramatically on par then.

It also reveals a fundamental flaw in this film’s obsession with consumption: in Goodfellas and Casino I can’t help but forgive the characters for their wasteful excess in living the high life, because I accept that they’re playing an extremely high-risk game and winning. It feels like they deserve it. In The Wolf of Wall Street where they’re not really putting any stake on the table it doesn’t feel right to just sit and celebrate their unwarranted success, and yet that’s the only thing the film offers.

But what’s worse than that is I really feel Scorsese brings a blatant narrative dishonesty to this film. He completely whitewashes – presumably by basing it on Belfort’s own account of the events – any sense of the people who lost money on his Ponzi schemes. Not that a rich victim sob story would ameliorate the film, but it just goes to prove that he’s actually not interested in showing any impact. I didn’t miss that this was entirely his intention, but the glitz wore thin very quickly when I realised that this monotony would continue for the entire running time.

I think a far better way to compare this film is with Spielberg’s Catch me if you Can. Again unfavourably for this film - since I would compare it unfavourably with your average Kardashian sex-tape - but I think the two are very similar in their approach. Both tell the story of conmen, and both of them are focussed primarily on watching those conmen enjoy the high life. They even both have ‘father figure’ characters who act as stabilising figures to the rampant recklessness. But the key difference is that Spielberg’s focus is on the relationship between the conman and his pursuer as they try to outwit each other, and time and time again the conman is proven to be the wilier player. Spielberg finally asks the question, at what cost?

Scorsese cares about none of this, it’s just prolonged footage of a frivolous orgy with no cost. We know that Belfort will eventually get caught, because this should happen, and we know we can’t care, because there is obviously nothing on the line throughout. He gets a few years in prison? Yep, who gives a shit. I certainly don’t.

So what do I say to all of those people who enjoyed this film? Well, power to you. The truth is that if you’re entertained for five minutes watching somebody masturbate into a hundred-dollar bill, then you’re likely to be entertained for two and a half hours of the same. But repeating the same joke over and over again (haha, they’re spending money extravagantly! Hilarious!) doesn’t make a good film, no matter how entertaining you find that joke. In fact, it goes a long way to making this a bad film when that's all it is.

The only time that I actually laughed, at all, during my hours of torture, was late in the piece when Belfort in a drug-fuelled rage slaps his wife. No, I didn’t chuckle at the domestic violence, but rather at the fact that there was an audible gasp throughout my fellow members of the audience. As if after all that we’ve just witnessed, a slap on the face is suddenly shocking behaviour and so out of character for this upright citizen.

I look forward to the day when Belfort and this dribble of a film are discarded in the sewer of history.

Until that day, I will relieve myself by celebrating some truly great bits of filmmaking, when my top 20 is revealed tomorrow.