1. Jack and Jill
Unlike many of my critical brethren, I have in the past found merit in Adam Sandler’s comedy, and not just in his cute Wedding Singer days. As recently as February I sat through Just Go with It without suffering much. I even laughed some; you could say I just went with it. That proved impossible with Jack and Jill, in which Jack (Adam Sandler), a commercial director, endures a holiday visit from the embarrassing twin sister he loathes, played by Sandler in drag. The question arises: Does Sandler have it in for some female relative — an aunt, grandmother, sister or cousin? Was there an elementary-school incident during which he was beaten by a frump with cankles and a tendency to whine and lisp? The level of anger in his portrayal of an idiotic, crass, needy Jewish lady from the Bronx suggests some deep-rooted trauma somewhere. Or maybe he hates us, the audience. It certainly felt that way.
2. Sucker Punch
Wildly exploitative sexism, couched as girl power, from 300 director Zack Snyder. A teenager named Baby Doll (the entirely dull Emily Browning) is tossed into a mental asylum by her evil stepfather, who either raped and killed Baby’s little sister or just killed her. Within the confines of the loony bin, Baby Doll visits various alternative realities, all populated with other beautiful young girls wearing rompers, schoolgirl kilts and such. The other realities include a busy bordello and ongoing martial-arts/steampunk/dragon-filled battles directed by the Wise Man (Scott Glenn). Abbie Cornish and Jena Malone, poor things, are fellow inmates in all realities. Baby Doll hatches a plan to escape using a combination of kung fu moves and supersexy dancing that the audience never sees (Snyder chooses a strange time for discretion), but it’s a race against time, since she’s scheduled to be lobotomized by a handsome doctor (Jon Hamm). Snyder, who has a story and screenplay credit, appears to have been influenced by everything from Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar to Sin City and maybe some old episodes of Charlie’s Angels. That’s a combination that can make you beg for the ice pick and mallet.
3. Red Riding Hood
Amanda Seyfried’s big eyes are mesmerizing. Her blond hair falls in pretty waves. She looks wonderful in red. Those are the only good things to be said about this grotesque version of the classic fairy tale, which was directed by Catherine Hardwicke. In keeping with Hardwicke’s Twilight past (she helmed the first film), Red is ripe with twisted messages about sexuality and beckoning werewolves, but, hard though it may be to believe, it’s much, much sillier than Twilight. Seeing what Hollywood did to this fairy tale is a reminder to not get too excited about the prospects of next year’s Snow White & the Huntsman and Mirror, Mirror. On the other hand, the movie is proof that Gary Oldman, who chews the scenery as a witch-hunting priest in Red Riding Hood and stars as the perfectly reserved George Smiley in December’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, can rebound from anything.
4. Your Highness
This was a year when the charm of wasted slackers wore very thin. Russell Brand was wholly obnoxious in the Arthur remake, Seth Rogen a useless bore in The Green Hornet. But the most repellent of them all was Danny McBride as Thadeous in Your Highness. The movie seemed to have Mel Brooksian potential: two medieval princes, one saintly (James Franco), the other a lazy stoner (McBride) set out on a quest to save a damsel in distress (Zooey Deschanel). With David Gordon Green directing, this was basically a Pineapple Express reunion. But Your Highness turned out to be a bewildering disaster that even a dozen bong hits couldn’t save. McBride, who co-wrote the screenplay, is a funny guy, but the film’s jokes skew toward appealing to homophobes and fifth graders. It truly feels as though something is missing, almost as if McBride and Green sketched out a series of situations that they planned to fill in with improvisation before being unexpectedly called away. How did Natalie Portman justify the gift of her bare bottom to a movie like this?
5. Zookeeper
The worst children’s movie I saw this year* didn’t immediately present itself as such. Watching an affable zookeeper (Kevin James) putter around a Boston zoo wasn’t painful. Not that I cared about his romantic dilemma — instead of noticing his lovely colleague (Rosario Dawson), he twists himself in knots to woo back a superficial twit (Leslie Bibb) who dumped him because she inexplicably disapproves of his job. Who doesn’t like animals? Or enjoy the powerful beacon of a Rosario Dawson smile? But then the animals start speaking and the tasteless torture begins. Sylvester Stallone voices a blowhard lion, Cher is his emasculating mate, and most gruesome of all, Nick Nolte is a gorilla who longs to dine at TGIF’s. The combination of inane human behavior (the zookeeper takes urinating lessons from a wolf) and gross imaginings of conversations between animals is toxic.
6. Trespass
Director Joel Schumacher’s home-invasion drama stars two Oscar winners, Nicole Kidman and Nicolas Cage. So how bad could it be? Extremely. Signing up for a screenplay like this was an unfathomable choice, at least for Kidman. (Let’s face it, the Cage rule is to make at least four bad films for every good one.) “I just feel like there had to have been Soviet blackmailers involved,” my local video-store clerk said as he handed over the DVD of Trespass, released less than a month after its video-on-demand/theatrical rollout. Kidman is the neglected wife, Cage a diamond broker who secretly mortgaged their home to the hilt. Her performance is wan and his is cold, even when they’re clinging together on the floor, awaiting death. The home invaders are familiar types: a hunk, a jittery stripper and a slavering muscleman whose principal duty is to up the rape-fear factor. It’s all titillation, though; these yahoos aren’t remotely scary. I never thought I’d say this, but here is a movie that made me look back fondly on both versions of Michael Haneke’s Funny Games, in which at least the brutality was honest and the threats vivid.
7. The Future
I very much enjoyed writer/director/performance artist Miranda July’s smart 2005 film Me and You and Everyone We Know. I also very much enjoy cats, and rarely a day passes when I don’t narrate something as my own kitty. So don’t think The Future gained its place on this list simply because it features cloying feline narration (voiced by July), although it did confirm my hunch that imagining cat conversation, like clipping one’s nails, is best not done in public. The film’s two youngish Angelenos, Jason (Hamish Linklater), who does tech support on the phone, and dance teacher Sophie (July), are so aimless that their decision to adopt Paw Paw, a stray recovering from an accident, is a huge event, a life changer. In the month before they are to take the cat home, Sophie debases herself with a lover outside her hipster class, while Jason quits his job and makes friends with an eccentric elderly man. Presumably we’re meant to find this infantile couple representative of a generation adrift, because otherwise, what’s the point? Yet July holds them at such an ironic remove that they seem like cardboard cutouts. July positions herself as a provocateur, but she’s more of a scab picker, and the wounds she’s toying with here are minor.
8. I Melt with You
In Big Sur, four longtime friends gather for their annual reunion. There’s a doctor (Rob Lowe) who arrives bearing pharmaceuticals, a sleazebag (Jeremy Piven) with suspicious business dealings and a high school teacher (Thomas Jane) who once was big man on campus. The fourth friend (Christian McKay) is gay and guilt-ridden. They pop pills, snort powders, booze it up and invite hot young locals over. Then one of them drags out a 25-year-old pact, and they confront the disillusionment of their lives. Despite director Mark Pellington’s attempts at suspense — he keeps showing fragments of the pact, but we can’t see what it says, and there’s a local cop (Carla Gugino) whose inopportune investigations might divert the dudes from their mission — there’s no question as to what resolution he has planned for this collective midlife crisis. The journey there is agonizingly long, loud and false. Even the dissipation feels like an act. Only the scenery has merit.
9. Miral
It would be very easy to make a list of the worst movies of the year if one limited oneself simply to those made for the teen demographic. I’m still smarting over I Am Number Four‘s cheesy performances, barely there story and loud pyrotechnics. But a movie like Miral edges out the average trash because of the dashed hopes involved. Director Julian Schnabel brought his artist’s sensibility to The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, turning a sappy book into an achingly sensory experience. That and Before Night Falls suggested that whatever he’d have to say about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in this adaptation of Rula Jebreal’s novel would at least be unusual and visually alluring. But Schnabel was defeated by the size of his canvas. He tried to jam decades’ worth of history into two hours and in the end threw up his hands; even the story he used as his framework remained unfinished. Finally, there was his peculiar casting of Indian actress Frieda Pinto to play the title character, a passionate Palestinian schoolgirl — a choice that undercut his good intentions. The performance he got from her in no way validates it.
10. Breaking Dawn
Yeah, I didn’t get it, as scores of you reminded me in our comments section. But the appeal of this cinematic chastity belt about the noble vampire (Robert Pattinson) and the girl who loves him (Kristen Stewart) was not always completely lost on me. I love Anna Kendrick. I like Bella’s buffoonish dad. Somewhere around the second installment of Twilight, an entertaining sense of self-parody emerged. But this entry, which held within it the teasing promise of explosive consummation, instead delivered soap-opera-level dry humping in high-thread-count sheets. The film’s crisis was something genuine — a hybrid fetus sucking the life out of Bella from the inside. Yet the vapid cast of Cullens standing around the old manse made the topic about as compelling as a debate over whether to order new curtains. The birth itself should have been exciting. Instead, the arrival of the youngest Cullen, as directed by Bill Condon, felt like just another anticlimactic piece of this prim, weirdly pro-life, anti-fun saga. This was the bloodiest of the Twilight movies but somehow the most bloodless.
