Thursday, January 17, 2019

Thursday Movie Picks - 2018 Movies

Written as part of the weekly blogathon hosted by Wandering Through the Shelves. Join our ever-growing group by picking three movies that fit the week's theme and writing a bit about them!

NO! IT'S TOO EARLY!! I STILL HAVEN'T SEEN EVERYTHING FROM 2018 YET!!!

...he screamed unto the heavens, cursing release schedules and day jobs and Moviepass and NYC transit and and and....

AND THEN! He had a revelation. "Why don't I do the WORST films of 2018 instead of the best? At this point, I know what I'm gonna hate of what I haven't seen, and if any of them are worse than my current bottom three, well... they are SO not worth my time!"

And so it was, he chose three films from 2018 that you should absolutely NOT see. Under any circumstances. Speaking from personal experience.

Beautiful Boy (Felix van Groeningen) Oh lord. Look, I like Timothée Chalamet and Steve Carell as much as the next gay guy, but... neither of them are very good in this. Chalamet comes close, but he's not helped at all by the script, which is cliché after cliché that does a great disservice to not just one book, but two (this is supposed to be an adaptation of both father David and son Nic's memoirs about Nic's addiction). I'm sure they thought they were doing something interesting with the structure of the film, and they're not exactly WRONG - mirroring the cyclic nature of addiction in the plot structure is certainly a valid approach - but it's so poorly done that it makes for a wildly unsatisfying movie on the face of things. And that's before we get to the terribly sloppy editing and utterly god-awful music cues (seriously the worst in any film I've seen in a LOOOOOOONG time). In any other year, this would very likely be the absolute worst, and certainly the most disappointing, film of the year.

Fifty Shades Freed (James Foley) SIGH. The absolute worst thing this franchise did was put the second and third movies in the hands of male writers and directors. To the extent that the first film was any good, it was because it had a point of view that unquestionably came from the female voices at the helm. Since then, poor Dakota Johnson has been working overtime to put these blander than bland sequels over, playing opposite a romantic lead who CLEARLY doesn't want to be there, reading lines that have to be contorted to all hell to sound like anything human beings would actually say. This third one isn't even particularly sexy, WHICH IS THIS FRANCHISE'S ENTIRE REASON FOR BEING. Of course, a lot of the blame can be laid at the feet of the source material, in which literally nothing happens except people getting pissy about something they have no business getting pissy about, until the climax where suddenly everyone remembered that these things are actually supposed to have something called a plot, involving characters who, ya know, DO THINGS OF CONSEQUENCE. Anyway, this is deadly dull, and not even Dakota Johnson, brilliant as she has always been in these godforsaken films, can save it. In any other year, this would very like be the absolute nadir of film.

BUT NOT THIS YEAR.

Because this year, we had...

Life Itself (Dan Fogelman) I... I don't even know what to say. I mean... what on Earth CAN one say about something so fundamentally flawed and misguided that in ANY OTHER CIRCUMSTANCE, if it had EVEN ONE REDEEMING VALUE, it would likely go all the way past "abysmally awful" to become strangely admirable somehow. But, reader, I can honestly say: IT DOES NOT. For more of my unedited thoughts, check out my live-tweet (yes, I was high, and no, it did not help), but suffice it to say, it is PAINFULLY clear that everyone involved in making this thought that it was all clever and deep and meaningful and probably spiritual, but it is LOUSY with crazy structural ideas that not only don't work, but very specifically don't work IN A MOVIE THAT IS SUPPOSED TO BE HEARTWARMING. I mean... at least, I'm PRETTY sure that's supposed to be the feeling we're left with at the end, when the movie pins its entire reason for existence and its entire emotional weight on someone we first meet in the film's closing minutes. But instead, the entire thing ends up being a complete WTF moment writ large, a faux-humanistic wannabe-meaningful story that only ends up being a massive joke played on its unsuspecting audience. Or, in short, the opening unreliable narrator gambit so completely loses the audience's trust that it would take a miracle to get it back, and this movie is wholly incapable (not to mention undeserving) of a miracle.

10 comments:

  1. I didn't mind Beautiful Boy but I haven't seen the other two. Your live tweets of Life Itself are hysterical that movie sounds like a massive train wreck.

    It's almost tempting to watch...almost.

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    1. OOF, Life Itself is ALMOST worth watching for how insane it is, but honestly... I can't in good conscience recommend you do that lol

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  2. I haven't seen Beautiful Boy as I kind of want to myself because of Steve Carrell and Timothee Chalamet.

    Fifty Shades Freed.... um, I didn't like the first film but the second film.... I'll just post this rant I gave on the film.

    Life Itself... that film can fuck off and fuck Dan Fogelman. What is so fucking special about This is Us?

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  3. Are you OK? I can feel your pain through my monitor. And I haven't even seen any of these.

    I did see the original Fifty Shades. It was terrible enough that I just skipped both sequels. For some strange reason, I thought it kept the director on board. To hear that us men took that over and somehow made it worse? Wow. Now, I KNOW I'll never watch them.

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  4. Shame....I was quite looking forward to Beautiful Boy. The other two I only heard bad things about so never planned to see them.

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  5. Oh man..I thought Beautiful Boy was supposed to be good but even the trailer shows itself to be predictable and would have been a an after school special many moons ago. 50 Shades of blecch...who cares...moving on....So many good actors in the last film but it sounds like a train wreck

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  6. Fifty Shades Freed is the only I've seen and I agree, it's f***ing awful!

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  7. oh my God all of those are on my watchlist lol Life Itself seems like such a misguided mess but I wonder if it menages to be even worse than Collateral Beauty

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  8. Everyone has hated on Life Itself, and yet it has Oscar Isaac so I just know I'm going to watch it anyway...and then hate myself for it!

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  9. Awesome picks! I love your reaction to Fifty Shades Freed. It describes the series to a tee - especially the last two films having a male director. They basically copied the set design from Sam Taylor Johnson and didn't even try to cover up the awful script/story.

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