Tuesday, March 13, 2012

TGT11: The Tattered Trousers of 2011

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The Tattered Trousers award goes to the five lousiest achievements in cinema each year. The worst movies. The ones that made me want to go back in time and nail Louis Lumière's nuts to his workbench. There's no excuse for these things, and y'all should avoid at all costs.

First though, a trio of runners-up: I may have just rewarded Andrea Riseborough's performance in Madonna's W.E. yesterday but the film itself is a travesty; Green Lantern is so ugly and stupid and boring I never even bothered reviewing it, it was best to just forget; and for a movie with so much Anthony Hopkins devouring everything in his path, The Rite is deadly dull. And now, the main crap event.

Priest (directed by Scott Charles Stewart) - I really hoped that Paul Bettany would pull himself out of the action-horror nosedive he was in (Legion won this award last year). He did not. (And as an aside once again his shirtless "scene" is so brief as to be insulting. Why even bother working to keep those abs if that's all you're gonna give us, Paul?) That Christopher Plummer managed to win an Oscar the same year he was in this movie should have thrown the time-space continuum into chaos.

Anonymous (directed by Roland Emmerich) - This one's a cheat because I only made it half an hour into it before giving up, so I haven't seen the whole thing. But man, I never give up on movies. I always watch the most extraordinary crap right through to the end to make sure there isn't some moment of awesomness that I'm going to miss out on, some reason for this thing existing. But I think I fell off the couch and into a week-long depression after 30 minutes of this, so it just had to stop.

Battle Los Angeles (directed by Jonathan Liebesman) - When I think back on the experience of sitting through this movie I imagine myself being forcibly held down on the floor of an Army recruiter's waiting room having had my eyelids taped open and dosed with a fatal amount of amphetamines, in full grip to my death spasms as sheaths of military propaganda tumble about me. (original review)

Giallo (directed by Dario Argento) - It's at this point in writing out this list that I'm starting to feel fucking exhausted. I never want to go into a movie and feel the way these movies made me feel - I want to enjoy them! I love movies! Multiply all that by two when it comes to Dario Argento - I so wanted Giallo to be a return to form for the one-time horror maestro. But at this point it's almost as if he wants to drive his fans away. A truly inexplicable piece of garbage. Just wretched in every way. (Technically this movie was 2009 but somebody kind with very fine abs tried to keep it unreleased; unfortunately for us all it was put on DVD this year - here's my review)

A Serbian Film (directed by Srdjan Spasojevic) - No shitting you, my boyfriend is going to shun me tonight for even being reminded that I made him watch this movie. Whenever it comes up he looks at me with real anger and leaves the room. And I deserve to be shunned. I hate even bringing it up again. I said all I ever really want to say about this movie when I reviewed it. Let me just underline that it doesn't deserve any aura or mystique for being "the ultimate button-pusher" or any of that - like the shitty (pun intended, god I need humor at this moment) Human Centipede: First Sequence (and no, I haven't bothered to see the second one of those, life is way too short) it's a lazy cynical put-on that doesn't earn anything but contempt.
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2 comments:

Rob K. said...

Thanks for putting Giallo on this list. I'm begining to forget that I love Argento as he has put out so much garbage in the past 10+ years.
As for the rest of your list, I already know to AVOID, but I will be showing my BF your thoughts on Anonymous. Maybe it will convince him to send it back to Netflix unseen already!

homeslaughter said...

I can't believe you even mentioned a Serbian Film. Giving it any attention might cause someone to watch it. At a dinner a few weeks ago we were talking about Wolf Creek which I described as the second most disturbing movie I has seen. When pressed I refused to name the first. Now you have made me part of the problem. Someone will read this comment and go out and watch that thing. My mind has been damaged and I don't like it.