| BILL CHAMBERS' BOTTOM 10 |
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10. Napoleon Dynamite (d. Jared Hess)
Compulsively watchable yet
utterly reprehensible, Napoleon Dynamite made me think back to all the "Napoleon Dynamite"s I've known in my day and hate them anew. (What, pray tell, was the point of that?) And how depressing is it that When in Rome's new wave gem "The Promise" is now inextricably linked to something so dispassionately hip? (full review)
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9. Saw (d. James Wan)
As with Napoleon
Dynamite, a large part of why I resent Saw is that so many people bought into it--word of mouth has been spreading like Paris Hilton since it premiered at Sundance last January. The appropriately-named Wan has officially lowered the bar for American horror. (full review)
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8. Blood (d. Jerry Ciccoritti)
A stream-of-consciousness chamber piece in which a brother and sister dance around the idea of sleeping together, Blood is nothing if not uniquely Canadian in its use of sex as a threat rather than as a promise. Not helping matters is a Mike Figgis, let's-see-what-this-button-does aesthetic that so reeks of overcompensation as to end up not only preserving the material's stage roots in amber, but also boring us into a stupor. (capsule review)
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7. Love Me If You Dare (Jeux d'enfants) (d. Yann Samuell)/Bon Voyage (d. Jean-Paul Rappeneau)
With the obvious Breillat/Godard/Chéreau exceptions, it wasn't a great year for French cinema (don't believe the Red Lights hype), but these filmed caricatures--one of Jeunet-style magic realism, the other of Hollywood bloat--represent the nadir of the country's 2004 exports. (Love Me If You Dare: full DVD review; Bon Voyage: capsule review)
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6. New York Minute (d. Dennie Gordon)
5. Resident Evil: Apocalypse (d. Alexander Witt)
4. Garfield (d. Peter Hewitt)
Do we somehow will these kinds of movies to be as bad as they are through our lowered expectations? It's hard to say--I, for one, wanted more than anything to be surprised by at least one of the three, but the Olsen Twins have lived in a bubble too long to be capable of producing inoffensive pop, Paul W.S. Anderson is the Second Coming of Steven E. de Souza, and Garfield as a concept was destined to be neutered as soon as they brought his gelded form into the 3-D realm. (New York Minute: full DVD review; Resident Evil: Apocalypse: full DVD review; Garfield: full DVD review)
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3. A Home at the End of the World (d. Michael Mayer)
So wispy that you feel
compelled to breathe softly while enduring it (lest you whisk it off the
screen), A Home at the End of the World is a movie rife with gay kissing, hairdressing, pot smoking, severing-arteries-by-walking-through-glass-doors'ing, birth, death, and music, all of it miraculously rendered ephemeral by an incompetent theatre director terrified of the one thing that would make this movie stick: conflict. (full DVD review)
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2. Raising Helen (d. Garry Marshall)
Abel Ferrara says he stopped believing in the auteur theory after seeing the credit "A Film by Henry Winkler." It's an enviable crack that would seem applicable to nearly every filmmaker once involved with "Happy Days", but the lesson of Raising Helen is that Garry Marshall makes Garry Marshall films: slapdash, oblivious to class struggle (Kate Hudson's Helen gets a job answering phones at an inner city used car lot for $18/hour), and always armed for emotional crisis with one pop song in the chamber. The worst movie on a resumé that includes The Other Sister--that, friends, takes vision. (full DVD review)
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1. Catch That Kid (d. Bart Freundlich)
Has there ever been a more
morose child actress than Kristen Stewart in a more morose children's movie
than Catch That Kid? This is an appalling, dangerous film that teaches little kids it's okay to steal if you can rationalize it and little girls in particular how to objectify themselves to get their way. (Also how to ensure that males turn misogynistic at an early age.) I do believe my preteen nephew's favourite movies of the year were this and Sleepover; I'm worried about the lad (and somewhat accountable, having furnished him with copies of both), but at least Sleepover showed a degree of self-awareness--and some
jailbait cheesecake. (full review)
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Honourable Mentions: Chasing Liberty, The Clearing, Van Helsing, Twisted, Saved!, I, Robot, Father and Son, Decoys, Home on the Range, Laws of Attraction, Sleepover
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Notably Missed: Shark Tale, Shrek 2, Catwoman, Christmas with the Kranks, Andrew Lloyd Webber's The Phantom of the Opera, Soul Plane, The Whole Ten Yards, Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason, Little Black Book, any Sarah Polley movies that may have played at the TIFF
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January 9, 2005|If, on the one side, the year in film represented the most thematically unified in ages, it represented on the other more of the same in terms of misogyny, racism, homophobia, and general bombastic, laggard incompetence. The newly-minted Culture Wars manifested themselves on our movie screens as Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ, the logical end result of a decade of Michael Bay blockbusters: testosterone operas focused in on hate and violence like the contracting of a pinhole until a two-hour, plot- and message-free gorefest became the highest-grossing independent film of all time. Michael Moore, ostensibly on the flipside and usually positioned as such, used tactics no less dishonourable in his own attack on sense, Fahrenheit 9/11; companion pieces, really, the two pictures treat their audiences like idiots to be sledgehammered into submission by a loop of the same message delivered in the loudest tones with a minimum of what our Grand Old Party has identified this election year as a laughable, weak ideal: nuance.
So the worst films of 2004, as they are every year, aren't those that are predictably bad (Catwoman or Beyond the Sea, say), those that are so sloppy as to inspire resigned sighs of pity and exasperation (The Stepford Wives, Saw), or those for which their badness is their only real torture (Garfield, Van Helsing). Rather, they are the ones that say something especially ugly about either the filmmakers, our culture, or both through their badness. Intention be damned, the cinematic detritus of any year perpetuates the lowest parts of us without remotely offering commensurate insight, self-knowledge, or, that word again, nuance. The dregs are what they are because of the belief, traditionally held by boors and other stupid people, that art exists in a vacuum, neither reflecting nor influencing the way that we don't live up to the standards we set for ourselves as animals aspiring to be more than simply bestial.
Films are never "just movies"--and though a lot of simps take comfort in putting film in a ghetto by itself, isolated from "fine" art like painting, literature, theatre, and dance, understand that film, while incorporating elements of each, has a wider reach than all of the other mediums (save television) combined. A snapshot of the best films of a 12-month span gives us an insight into the character of our culture at that moment in time--a snapshot of the worst does exactly the same thing with, arguably, a comparable level of guile and cunning. Consider what it says when the audience numbers for the worst films is a geometric factor of the audience numbers for the best: Taco Bell ain't the best restaurant in the country because it's the top-grossing one--it's the top-grossing one because it's cheap, convenient, and marketed up the wazoo.
Resist.-Walter Chaw
Notably Missed: White Chicks, Surviving Christmas, Darkness, Fat Albert, Little Black Book
Honourable Mentions: The United States of Leland, Japanese Story, Home on the Range, Spartan, The Alamo, I, Robot, Saved!, After the Sunset, The Big Bounce, Without a Paddle, The Dust Factory, Sleepover, Chasing Liberty, A Love Song for Bobby Long, Incantata, Love Me If You Dare, Andrew Lloyd Webber's The Phantom of the Opera, Paparazzi
10. Christmas with the Kranks (d. Joe Roth)
Endorsed by "The 700 Club"'s film critic (?!) and probably by Larry King, too, Christmas with the
Kranks was cynically marketed to exactly the same people who turned out for
The Passion of the Christ (and to vote, apparently), making this film only the third most egregious result of the normally home-bound flock moved to inflict their blinkered religiosity on the rest of the world. If these folks can be spurred to support crap like this, then be sure that note was taken that the red state's shut-ins are the most mindlessly exploitable demographic since preteen girls post-Titanic. It bodes ill. (full review)
9. Shrek 2 (ds. Andrew Adamson, Kelly Asbury, Conrad Vernon)/Shark Tale (ds. Vicky Jenson, Bibo Bergeron, Rob Letterman)
Farting is hysterical, gangster violence is cute, gays are bemusing... The mutual, ultimate message of this pair of cheerfully uninspired animations is that monkeys have it right in thinking that throwing (sometimes) euphemistic shit and performing pratfalls is the ne plus ultra of wit in children's entertainment. There's nothing
smart about having ogres and sharks recreate scenes from other films, and
there's no excuse for being so out of touch (or so long in production) that
Ricky Martin is cool again (see also The
Spice Girls in honourable mention Sleepover). Bears repeating: why are films the only place where "it's for kids" means that it's worse? (Shrek 2: full review; Shark Tale: full review)
8. Man on Fire (d. Tony Scott)
Mandingo 2004 finds a black man hired by a rich white woman to sacrifice himself so that the last family standing is the white woman and her almost translucent little girl (Dakota Fanning, somehow cast as Marc Anthony's daughter in the pic). Already troubling, to be sure, add to the mix some genuinely sadistic violence and the presence of professional proud black man Denzel Washington and what you have in Man on Fire is a confused,
hateful, xenophobic (Mexico City is Hell, I get it) time capsule from a
confused, hateful, xenophobic age. (full DVD review)
7. The Whole Ten Yards (d. Howard Deutch)/Meet the Fockers (d. Jay Roach)
Sequels to comedies about aging legends and hipsters becoming time-card punching jokes while mortgaging their legacy for a few cheap bucks. The only thing uglier than the spectacles of Streisand riding De Niro and Bruce Willis in a dress? The race-baiting of The Whole Ten Yards and the deadly
improvisational wall of noise in Meet the
Fockers. Both flicks feature pregnant women, one of them treating them like punching bags (see also: Man on Fire), the other finding humor in a mush-mouthed toddler fond of saying "asshole" and ogling tits. No, I don't mean Robert De Niro. (The Whole Ten Yards: full review; Meet the Fockers: full review)
6. Napoleon Dynamite (d. Jared Hess)
Possibly the meanest film
this year--find in the humour of Napoleon
Dynamite this absolute joy in the degradation of outcasts and Mexicans. Black people can dance and serve as fonts of soul for whites, Mexican nationals are gang-bangers, and Caucasian mid-westerners are screaming, moon-booted idiots. Target one scene where our hero Napoleon Dynamite is thrown against some lockers: the bully shares our point of view--and the pleasures we wring from this exercise are identical to those that bullies get from beating up losers. You can laugh, but you're an asshole for doing it. (full review)
5. Soul Plane (d. Jessy Terrero)
With an almost all-minority
cast and crew, Soul Plane justifies Bill Cosby's weekly rants by blithely lowering the conversation. It hates whites, gays, women, and, yes, blacks with an equanimity that feels like misanthropy, but above all, it's the one thing a comedy can't be forgiven for being: boring. Sex jokes, shit jokes, plus that old song and dance in which white people are stodgy, impotent, and poorly hung and black people are soulful, oversexed, and hung like race horses--there, now you've seen it. The only saving grace is that it didn't star Will Smith and wasn't marketed to kids. (full DVD review)
4. The September Tapes (d. Christian Johnston)
One of two remakes of The Blair Witch Project (Open Water being the other one), the
reprehensible The September Tapes makes a bad first-person-shooter out of 9/11 and the subsequent war in Afghanistan. Populist politics screamed with neither basis in fact nor a strong foundation of genuine protest (civil disobedience is more than acting like a jackass) does not a pithy point make, thus the film's amateurishness becomes the only thing of passing interest. Exploitive, ridiculous, and stupid--add to the muck a doe-eyed voiceover and one of the most unforgivable epilogues in history. (full review)
3. New York Minute (d. Dennie Gordon)
An old Chinese woman threatens a dog with a pair of chopsticks--something that mirrors a sentiment Denver columnist and professional dickhead Bernie Lincicomb recently offered: that a South Korean gymnast should trade his medal for something more appetizing--like a cocker spaniel. It points to a general disdain for Asians in American cinema and culture that has remained unchanged since the dawn of the medium and before. (New wu xias from Zhang Yimou, while beautiful, unfortunately add to the stereotyping of Chinese folks as Mr. Miyagis or Long Duck Dongs.) So it doesn't help matters when the Olsen Twins decide to star in a film about cockteasing with Andy Richter playing an Asian hitman. (full DVD review)
2. Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason (d. Beeban Kidron)
Thai women prisoners are better off in Thai prisons away from their pimp boyfriends and learning to sing Madonna songs with our Bridget. Bridget is fat, Bridget embarrasses herself, Bridget is jealous, Bridget is ridiculous, Bridget can't dress--there but for the grace of "What Not to Wear" and "The Swan" goes its entire quilting bee, Harlequin-reading, Phantom of the
Opera-fawning audience. At last, a Napoleon
Dynamite for chicks; how low you have to go to find people lower than
yourself at which to chortle should give a person pause. (full review)
1. The Passion of the Christ (d. Mel Gibson)/Fahrenheit 9/11 (d. Michael Moore)
Films that are music to the ears of a select audience and a cat caught in the wind chimes for anyone else. There's technique to them, no question (a good friend's suggestion that The Passion of the Christ works beautifully as medieval art rings as the only defense I've heard of it that makes any sense), but Gibson and Moore, in 2004, demonstrated that it's possible to be feverish without changing anyone's mind. If there's nothing wrong with propaganda films, per se, positing them as truth unadulterated begins to arouse suspicions of hypocrisy, disingenuousness, and self-aggrandizement. Ugly, divisive, strident: just another sign of these times. (The Passion of the Christ: full review; Fahrenheit 9/11: full review)
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