2011 Calvin Awards: Worst Picture

February 16, 2011

Wait, did they just call the name of *our* movie?

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.




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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

Top 10
Position Film Total Points
1 Sex and the City 2 99
2 Jonah Hex 74
3 Valentine's Day 60
4 The Last Airbender 55
5 (tie) Alice in Wonderland 42
5 (tie) Grown Ups 42
7 When in Rome 41
8 A Nightmare on Elm Street 38
9 Clash of the Titans 34
10 The Back-up Plan 33




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