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.
Written as part of the weekly blogathon hosted by Wandering Through the Shelves. You can play along by picking three movies that fit the week's theme and telling us a bit about them - it's so easy!
Oof, you guys.
As if things weren't bad enough in the world, this week we have to pick movies based on TV series. While not ALL of them are disasters (Guy Ritchie's recent take on The Man From U.N.C.L.E. was perfect late-summer fun), pretty much all of the ones I can think of are.
With one notable exception.
What follows are, in order, a truly terrible adaptation that might as well not even be one, a pretty good adaptation that might as well not even be one, and quite possibly the greatest film adaptation of a TV show ever made.
Lost In Space (Stephen Hopkins, 1998) As a child of 14, I remember thinking this was fun, but certainly inferior to such classics of cinema as Independence Day. Time has NOT been kind to it. It's a low point for pretty much everyone involved, but thankfully (nearly) all of their careers suffered barely a bit. The set-up is exactly the same as the 60s TV series, but updated with a lot more serious action and big VFX set-pieces. As they did in the 90s. But in its quest to be a blockbuster, the film abandons all of the charm of the TV series, becoming just another generic sci-fi film. Trivia alert: This (of all things) was the movie that ended Titanic's 15-week reign at the top of the box office.
Get Smart (Peter Segal, 2008) Look: the original Get Smart TV series is one of my favorite shows of all time, and if I'm being honest, this movie is almost as funny as that series. But it's ONLY because of Steve Carell as bumbling secret agent Maxwell Smart, perfectly riding the tone set by the legendary Don Adams from the TV series. The rest of the movie, though, is boilerplate spy stuff, with decent support from Anne Hathaway, Dwayne Johnson, Alan Arkin, and Terence Stamp. In other words: This didn't have to be an adaptation of Get Smart. It could have just been a spy spoof with that cast going by completely different character names. Nonetheless, I still enjoy this movie. It still makes me laugh, despite the fact that everything it did, Spy has since done better.
In The Loop (Armando Iannucci, 2009) An extrapolation from his successful UK comedy series The Thick of It, Armando Iannucci's In The Loop is the best political satire in AGES. It also has the filthiest language ("Why don't I pop a jaunty little bonnet on your purview and ram it up your ass with a lubricated horse cock?"), the best one-liners ("Okay, fuckity-bye," "Kiss my sweaty balls, you fat fuck!"), and the single greatest, most hard-won punchline in recent years. Inimitable performances from Anna Chlumsky, Mimi Kennedy, James Gandolfini, David Rasche, and of course Peter Capaldi as Malcolm Tucker, the foulest mouth in the United Kingdom, make the already great script even better. What makes it such a brilliant adaptation is that it takes existing characters from a TV series and puts them on a much larger playing field while staying true to the feel of the series without feeling like a bunch of TV episodes stitched together (Sex and the City), a Very Special Episode (Veronica Mars), or like any other generic movie (Charlie's Angels). All of this feels completely true to the series that spawned it while also feeling like its own thing, which is difficult to do. Plus, it's GREAT on every single level.
