2011 Calvin Awards: Worst Picture
February 16, 2011
BoxOfficeProphets.com
Our most dishonored film this year, Sex and the City 2, is a most-worthy recipient of our disdain. Whatever you might have thought of the franchise before this bloated sequel, it became readily apparent that there was absolutely nothing left to it creatively at this point. Yet there was still money to be made, so – hey send 'em shopping for two and a half hours! That's a movie, right? Thus begins The Adventures of the Most Useless and Shallowest People on Earth.
After discovering that married life isn't all red-carpet premieres and $200 molecular gastronomic meals, and that, OMG, children actually take some time to raise, the four pointless women decide they need time off from their lives and jet off to Abu Dhabi. There, they discover that outside their shell of avarice, there are people who don't look kindly on their lifestyle, and gosh, there are poor people too! Can you imagine? It's at this point that viewers of the film are advised not to have any blunt objects around that they might throw them at the screen. The film reaches a kind of grandness at its conclusion, wherein it's revealed that what really empowers women the world over is designer fashion, and then our heroes scramble to be spared the ignominy of flying coach. It's an ugly, tone-deaf film in all respects and when the aliens come to see how our society crumbled, they can just watch this film, and all will be understood.
I think I know what happened with our second worst movie of the year, Jonah Hex. Judging by what was sent to theaters, I can only surmise that someone accidentally switched the canister containing the film's rough cut and what was actually meant to be the film, and by the time it was discovered, it was too late to fix the mistake. I mean, that's the only logical explanation for why a film this amateurish, this half-baked, this... this barely a movie was released into the wild.
Then again, signs also point to this being a deliberate mess. At 81 minutes in length, it's the shortest possible film that can legally be called a feature (and that's with a longer than usual credits sequence), and includes an animated intro, the same flashback sequence three times and a fantasy climactic fight sequence that runs in parallel with the real one for some unknown reason. And that's without getting into the miserable acting, with Josh Brolin struggling to emote through five pound of makeup, Megan Fox doing her usual Megan Fox thing, and John Malkovich saying “screw it, I'm not doing an accent”. It's such a mess that one longs for the model of professionalism that was Wild Wild West.
Third place goes to Valentine's Day, one of the most cynical releases of 2010. Garry Marshall cements his status as history's greatest monster as the director of this film that seems to have been born simply out of someone seeing Love, Actually and saying “Hey, is that all I need to do to make a movie? Hell, I can do that!” So instead of one romantic comedy plot, we get 12 of them, chopped up and distilled into ten minute sequences, with all the depth that implies. Call it Wuv, Actually.
Then, because they know they've got crap-all otherwise, they load it up with basically everyone in Hollywood, since anyone can spare a week for a shoot (Julia Roberts was on set for a day, maximum, I'm sure). Unfortunately, despite getting what is technically a professional cast, only about half of the people in the movie can really act. That's what happens when you don't give people real characters.
Landing in fourth place, The Last Airbender proves M. Night Shyamalan can screw up other people's material just as well as his own. Adapting a well-known animated series about a world where people can manipulate the elements, Shyamalan decided that the best course of action would be to strip out everything that people loved about the show and apply his own touches to it – like curiously bloodless fight scenes where the choreography seems to have consisted of “You! Do some random tai chi moves at that guy!” Then there's the acting “talent”. Hoo boy. Look, I feel bad at picking on kids' acting, but the group of young performers Shyamalan picked for the leads in this film make Jake Lloyd look like Alec Guiness. It's obvious that Shyamalan stopped caring about four movies ago, but we may finally be at the point where this constant string of failure has eroded his reputation to the point of no return.
Two films tie for fifth, starting with Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland, a triumph of art direction and little else. We've always accepted Burton's strangeness, even found it refreshing at times, but there are limits, and they were reached here. Everyone loves the funhouse, but when they lock the doors from the outside and crank up the calliope music to full volume, eventually you're going to crack. Listen, Burton, you're our resident weirdo, but that doesn't mean you get to dig up the corpse of Lewis Carroll and do all sorts of nasty things to it. Also, plot, in the sense of having one, is kind of important.
Tied with that is Grown Ups, which squandered an all-star comedy cast on puerile antics without a dose of wit. It's obvious that these were a bunch of old friends who figured out a way to get paid to hang around with each other, cracking each other up, and hey, it's hard to blame someone for that. But seriously, guys, next time remember to bring us along for the ride? And Adam – can we talk – it was one thing for you to act like an overgrown idiot manchild in your films in the 20s, but you're 44 now. It's getting a little sad.
Watching the career trajectory of Kristen Bell post-Veronica Mars has been a trying experience for her fans, which includes just about everyone here. For every Forgetting Sarah Marshall, she's had two films like You Again, or this year's seventh worst film, When in Rome. Bell plays a woman who steals coins from a fountain in Rome, each of them who then find her irresistible, pursuing her Buster Keaton in Seven Brides style – except nothing like that. More like felony stalking. Oh, Kristen. Magical realism romantic comedies? Is this the best they're offering you now?
Eighth spot goes to the entirely unnecessary re-imagining of A Nightmare on Elm Street, a phrase that implies that the makers of this film had any particular ideas to bring to the film, other than cranking up the violence and ensuring a bunch of CGI artists stayed employed. Like the remakes of Halloween and Friday the 13th before it, this film exists solely cash on a marketable title. What's next – a reboot of Child's Play? Oh hell, I said that too loud.
Just a few short months after the 3D market was blown open by Avatar, it was nearly strangled in the crib by our ninth place film, Clash of the Titans. If there's a sudden collapse in this projection technique, we'll probably be able to point to this cheap cash-in 3D conversion as one of the touchpoints. A noisy, brash, ugly, muddy mess, this was the year's biggest ripoff.
Wrapping up our top ten is The Back-Up Plan, a vanity project for Jennifer Lopez and one of CBS Films' many terrible films this year that barely looked better than TV movies. Deadly dull, and running completely by the numbers, this was one of the many horrors awaiting romantic comedy enthusiasts (do they really exist?) this year.
Just missing the list by not accumulating enough of our collective ire are “comedies” Magruber and Little Fockers, the last (hope and pray!) installment of the long exhausted Saw horror franchise, the obnoxious war of the sexes action film The Bounty Hunter and the cheerfully abhorrent Kick-Ass. (Reagen Sulewski/BOP)
The Calvins Introduction
Best Actor
Best Actress
Best Album
Best Cast
Best Character
Best Director
Best Overlooked Film
Best Picture
Best Scene
Best Screenplay
Best Supporting Actor
Best Supporting Actress
Best TV Show
Best Use of Music
Best Videogame
Breakthrough Performance
Worst Performance
Worst Picture