Monday Morning Quarterback Part I

By BOP Staff

January 10, 2012

Defending stuff is fun!

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Brett Beach: I have to list two, if only because they are for completely different reasons.

Patch Adams - for being so emotionally fraudulent and cynical, I was crying tears of rage back in 1998 (I refer specifically to the butterfly, although Robin Williams wearing a clown nose for the kiddies in the cancer ward is a close second).

Beverly Hills Cop III - which I only saw recently for the first time, for being contemptuous of its audience, horribly cruel and violent, tone-deaf to such a degree I wondered if the entire film was meant to be satire and for being the worst film by a spotty director who has nonetheless directed several genre classics (John Landis).

Edwin Davies: Easy; Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. Crass, moronic, racist, sexist, incoherent and just plain boring, this is the very antithesis of what action cinema should be. It's just a series of weightless, incompetent setpieces strung together with no sense of rhythm and flow to them, making it impossible to give a damn about anything that happens, and whenever anything does happen it usually ends after about 30 seconds. Not only that, but it's two and a half hours long. I don't care if a film's terrible, but it should at least have the decency to be short.

Incidentally, of those F-scorers, Solaris, Bug and Wolf Creek are all good to very good films, they're just really, really uncompromising in very different ways. Anyone who hasn't seen them should check them out. Bug's probably the best of the three since it unites the weather mountain face of Michael Shannon with the director of The Exorcist.




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Reagen Sulewski: If I'm limiting myself to major studio big-time releases (and excluding the easy targets of Uwe Boll films), probably the most incompetent film I've ever seen was last year's Jonah Hex, which I'm not convinced was actually finished. Last year was a banner year for this, too, as Sex and the City 2 was the most morally repellent film I've ever seen. As far as completely unpleasant experiences in the theater, that title probably goes to Stigmata, which gave me a headache and made no sense.

I'll also stick up for Solaris, which is a beautiful film, but not really anyone's idea of a good time, you know?

Bruce Hall: Two of my most hated blockbusters of all time - Armageddon and Independence Day. Box office aside, both movies were little more than a string of lowest common denominator action clichés and disaster movie tropes arranged in convenient checklist form. Despite having different creative teams, their screenplays may well have fallen out of the same vending machine.

Cherished landmarks destroyed, gruff reluctant hero, superfluous love interest/hooker with a heart of gold, wacky unstable sidekick, rampant jingoism, everything in the world is filled with napalm, needlessly convoluted subplots, script made from refrigerator magnets...I couldn't even bring myself to just have fun and enjoy the effects. Would that I were as simple as a housecat and easily distracted by bright lights and shiny things, but alas...no.


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