Sunday Worst: Bizarro Awards 2023

(Thank you, Dear Reader, for your patience these last few weeks.  I appreciate you returning to read this blog as we continue forward)

 My good friend the Doctor said that I should do a parallel list to my Kal-El Awards that reflect to worst in pop culture from the year.  He suggested that I call them the "Lenny Luthors" after the horrible Jon Cryer character from Superman IV: The Quest for Peace.  The rational for choosing Lenny was that "he is terrible in every way that Superman is awesome."

I liked the idea, but I thought instead of Lenny Luthor we would name the awards after the true opposite of Superman:

Bizarro.

Bizarro is the anti-Superman, literally.  He even maintains speech patterns that are the opposite of what he means.  "Good-bye, me am not Bizarro.  Me like you!  Live!"  said by Bizarro actually means "Hello, I am Bizarro.  I hate you! Die!"

So since Superman is my mark of excellence.  Bizarro will be my mark of utter awfulness.   Unlike the Kal-El awards, these will be focused mostly on movies.  The reason is that serialized work like television and comics require a longer time commitment in order to understand the material.  You may have to watch a show or read a comic for several months before you discover if it is truly bad or good.  It took me a few episodes to understand the logic behind Vincent D'Onofrio's performance in Daredevil.  The investment of time and/or money also precludes a lot of unnecessary sampling, so my exposure to bad material is a bit less.

With a movie, you can have a complete understanding of the product after 90-180 minutes.  So I only have two TV categories:


-Worst TV Show I Stopped Watching
-Worst TV Show I Still Watch

In both of these cases I will be giving my critical condemnation of shows about which I have some significant experience and thus have a basis for calling them critical failures


So now, here are the Bizarro Awards for movies this past year.  (based on the movies I have seen).


WORST MOVIE

Barbie

From my review:

The makers of this movie think that they are smart.  To prove that, they wrote a movie that thinks you are stupid.

...

I've said this many times on this blog that the reason why most Christian movies are terrible is because a sermon is not a movie.  Those movies ignore the most important aspects of storytelling in order to preach a message.  And that is one of the main problems with Barbie.

The writers are completely lost when it comes to telling a coherent story.  I've seen a few of Baumbach's other movies and I am convinced I am correct on this subject.  He projects depth the way a teenager does who first reads some Nietzsche quotes and starts wearing all black.  

One of the biggest tells in the writing is how they never give you a coherent world-view.  Whenever something doesn't makes sense, a character literally will say "Don't think about it too much."  This is way too much of a cheat and speaks to incredibly lazy writing worse than "Somehow, Palpatine returned."  Once you free your writing from reason and accountability, you can basically tell the laws of storytelling to go to hell, which is what this movie does.

For example, the "real world" bears almost no resemblance to a real world.  As soon as Ken and Barbie make it to Venice Beach, people start staring at them as they rollerblade in their neon spandex.  How in the world are they a spectacle at a modern day California Beach?  In a world where public parades have naked people dancing in front of children, I fail to see how our characters stand out.  Minutes after they arrive, a man slaps Barbie on her rear end and then she punches him, causing Barbie and Ken to be arrested.  Again, in full public view a man commits blatant sexual assault and she gets arrested for defending herself.  

You can see this unreality again at the Mattel Corporation.  They portray the board as being all men.  This, of course, ignores the real world Mattel Board of Directors.  But again, the Barbie real world is one that is just as much a fiction as Barbieland.  But the part where I completely checked out was when Barbie tries to escape from the building.  As she runs through the cubicles, an actual chase does not occur.  Instead, a choreographed run between the cubicles takes place like something out of a 1980's music video.  This is not like Enchanted where Giselle makes her cartoon magic overflow into the real world.  In the Barbie real world, everything is fake and hollow.  This is where the writers really talk down to you and think you are stupid.  You are supposed to look at their illusory "real world" and think "wow, that must be how it really is."  But you would have to think that your audience members are true morons in order to believe that.

Why am I harping on this point?  Because Barbie wants to say something about how the real world affects Barbie and vice versa.  But there is no real world in this movie.  There are only the prejudices and insecurities of the writers projected as being the "real world."  Ken's story arc revolves around him discovering the "patriarchy" in the real world and he brings that back with him to Barbieland.   Barbie herself is confronted by a girl she thinks is her owner, Sasha (Ariana Greenblatt), who is a snarky little, cynical communist who tells Barbie that she is a fascist.  Sasha has a TikTok-level apprehension of all of the words she uses and she never quite comes to this realization throughout the movie.  Her mother Gloria (America Ferrera) is a put-upon business woman who is struggling with all the problems of modern life.  

When they all go back to Barbieland, Ken has turned it into a patriarchy with all the Barbies as mindless drones.  We are supposed to be horrified by this, but the movie lacks the basic self-awareness to see that Barbieland is exactly the same as before only with Kens in charge.  To break through the "brainwashing" of the Barbies, Gloria has to give speeches to them about how impossible it is to be a woman.  But again, this makes no sense.  None of the complaints Gloria has like "You are supposed to love being a mother but you aren't supposed to talk about your kids all the damn time."  Nothing about that statement exists in the Barbie experience.  None of them are mothers.  That statement would have the same effect on a group of 10-year-old boy scouts as it would on the Barbies.  But again, nothing has to make any sense.  It is simply a metaphor for how women need someone to wake them up from the bondage of the patriarchy.

The movie also doesn't quite understand that Ken is way more likable than almost all of the Barbies.  Yes, he is stupid, but his entire existence is based on upon Barbie's affection.  That isn't because of some ego.  He is made insecure.  The movie wants to say that men have a natural inclination to dominate.  But what it really shows is that if you don't give men space to explore true masculinity then some will run to an Andrew Tate-like false masculinity.  

I could have forgiven almost all of the above if the movie had one quality: being funny.  In the end, I don't have to agree with your point of view as a filmmaker in order for me to enjoy your work.  But if you are going to make a comedy about the battle of the sexes, then you have to entertain me or you fail.  There are maybe 3 or 4 good jokes in the entire run time.  The reason why most of the jokes fall flat is because good jokes require intelligence, which this script intentionally removes.

TOP TEN WORST MOVIES

10. Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny

9. Fast X

8. What Comes Next

7. Napoleon

6. Pain Hustlers

5. Old Dads

4. Transformers: Rise of the Beasts

3. Dumb Money

2. You People

1. Barbie

WORST ACTOR

Pete Davidson - Dumb Money

I don't know that I've come across a worse actor than Pete Davidson.  His entire stint on SNL was something I could not explain.  His dead-behind-the-eyes stoner schtick just doesn't connect to me in any way.  Even when a leans into a character that is right up his alley, as he did in Dumb Money, nothing he says or does comes off as a believable human being.  To be fair, I heard he was good in The King of Staten Island, but it is not a movie I have seen, nor plan to.

WORST ACTRESS

Zawe Ashton - The Marvels

This is a performance that I cannot comprehend.  I get the feeling that Ashton is a capable actor, but the choices she makes don't seem to make sense.  Every time she tries to be intimidating, violent, or menacing, it feels like she is mugging for the camera in a way that is completely distracting. Instead of projecting power, it feels like she is a child pretending to be an adult.

WORST DIRECTOR

Greta Gerwig- Barbie

Here's the thing that drives me nuts: Greta Gerwig is a talented director.  Here Little Women was one of the best movies of the year it came out.  Even in the Barbie movie, there are 2-3 scenes with some actual potent artistry.  That is why it is so frustrating that she buries her movie in the schlock that is the script.  I heard someone say recently that the director's job is to police the tone of the film.  Because the tone goes all over the place in an incomprehnsible way, Gerwig earns this place on my list.

WORST SCREENPLAY

Greta Gerwig, Noah Baumbach - Barbie

 (See the above on WORST MOVIE OF THE YEAR)

MOST ANTI-CHRISTIAN MOVIE

Wonka

Perhaps it would be more accurate to call this film "anti-clerical" than "anti-Christian."  The faith itself is not directly attacked in this movie.  However, Rowan Atkinson plays a corrupt priest and villains lair is directly under the Church.  The use of the sacred space to be associate with wickedness is bothersome.  If this was a movie made for adults, I probably would have not have been sensitive to it.  After all, there are many religious people who are not living as God wants them to.  But since it is directed towards children, anything that makes them associate the church with evil is something that makes me uncomfortable.

MOST MORALLY OFFENSIVE

Old Dads

I enjoyed the first half of Bill Burr's Netflix movie.  It had a rowdy, rebellious tone to it.  But as it carried on, it began to lose steam and coherence.  And as the main characters spiraled out, they embraced debauchery and violence in a way that made me completely lose interest.

WORST TV SHOW I STOPPED WATCHING

Shrinking

This show was very hard to watch because the main character played by Jason Segal spirals out due to the death of his wife.  He loses himself in drugs, alcohol, and random sex for about year.  What was so pernicious about this is that while going on this self-indulgent form of "mourning," he left his teenage daughter to be raised by the neighbor.

This already made the show difficult to watch.  But because of his debauched background, he fails to give moral structure to her life.  He says there is nothing wrong with the neighbor boy taking her virginity.  He listens to the women in his life who tell him that she should be sexually active.  And even when he tries to be moral, it was so jarring to listen to.  At a party he intentionally gets himself drunk.  When he sees his daughter sneak a beer, he loses his cool on her.  At that point, I couldn't take the utter hypocrisy from such an unlikeable character.  So I quit the show.

WORST SHOW I STILL WATCH

The Flash

Technically, The Flash is cancelled, but I watched it all the way to the end.  The final showrunners said that they wanted to take the focus away from just Barry and on Team Flash.  This would have been fine, except that they could not come up with stories that were anywhere near the level of the first four seasons.  Some characters, like Chester, grew into their roles.  Others like Cecilia never did.  As a result, the majority of the time spent in each episode felt like boring side stories that you had to wade through to get to the main story.  The show is now over, but it should have ended sooner.

Thoughts?