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
A Minecraft Movie
A number of movies this year were boring or unenjoyable. But it is a rare movie that has me actively hating it. And that is the case with A Minecraft Movie.
Now you could make the argument that this movie wasn't meant for me and fair enough. I am too old for the Minecraft craze so many of the film's inside jokes are lost on me. But the movie feels like it is constantly talking down to me. Throughout the whole film I felt the movie saying: "You are so stupid that I am going to spoon-feed you ever part of this inane plot with unfunny jokes and flat characters sprinkled throughout."
A movie like this can work through suspension of disbelief. But everything part of this movie felt so artificial that I was counting down the seconds until it was over.
TOP TEN WORST MOVIES
WORST ACTOR
WORST ACTRESS
From my review: WARNING - SPOILERS
The movie deals with two high concept ideas:
1. "I contain multitudes"
2. The Mystery Room of Death
Maybe if the movie had focused on one or the other, it would have worked. But these two things to do not go together and they really have nothing to do with each other. They never converge in anything close to catharsis.
Regarding the first idea, this comes from a time when young Chuck listens to his teacher read a Walt Whitman poem where he says "I contain multitudes." This means that every person that Chuck has ever encountered or imagined exists in some way inside of him. That's what the entire first act takes place in Chuck's mind. Marty, Felicia, and everyone else are living in a universe of Chuck's mind. Throughout the next two acts, the people of of the first act can be seen as background characters. The movie is saying that when you encounter anyone, you make a little version of them inside of you that lives out an entire life. But Chuck is dying of brain cancer. The words, "Thanks, Chuck. 39 great years," are words that his wife (Q'Orianka Kilcher) says to him in his last moments. The universe is ending because of Chuck.
The Mystery Room of Death is about the locked room in his grandparents' house. This movie is based on a Stephen King story and this is the most Stephen King-esque element. The grandfather has a locked room where he sees people's deaths. You learn this slowly over the course of the movie, but Chuck's curiosity gets the better of him in the end. After both of his grandparents are dead, he goes into the room and sees himself dying from brain cancer. He resolves to live life to the fullest and ends by saying, "I am wonderful. I deserve to be wonderful. And I contain multitudes."
And that is where the movie ends.
This is supposed to be an uplifting message about seizing the day. Instead, it reminds us that the multitudes in Chuck's mind end their existence in meaningless abject horror and then blink out of existence for no purpose. There is a subtle implication that this is happening in all of us or that we ourselves might be part of that multitude inside someone's mind. Rather than being life-affirming, it points us to the meaninglessness of life. It implies that we are not beings of purpose and substance but random, purposeless chance.
The characters in the first act are given no resolution. Their existence is given no greater meaning by learning about Chuck's life. In fact, Chuck's cancer itself plays out like a cruel, nihilistic joke. The fact that Chuck knows he is going to die has no bearing on anything that happens in the entire story. Does he live life to the fullest? I mean... maybe? We know he has a wife and child so that is something important. But we never really get to see his life outside of his childhood and the one day he danced. He doesn't seem all that happy as an adult, so I don't know what the ending is supposed to be saying.
Notice too how the Mystery Room of Death adds nothing to the first act and the characters that you care about. If Chuck knows his death or doesn't, it makes absolutely no difference. The two ideas are so wildly unconnected that it feels like the movie would have been better served if they had taken one out and focused on the other.
And it's not that the movie had to find a super-fun-happy ending for the Act One characters. But the movie never pays off its narrative debt. What I mean is that it gives us characters to empathize with who are going through a crisis. The story owes it to us to give us a proper resolution (even if it is an ambiguous resolution). Instead, it leaves them in total darkness and expects you to forget about their fate by the time the movie ends. It expects you to say, "Well, they weren't really real, so it doesn't matter." But the movie made them real in Act One and you cannot remove their personhood from the audience.
The movie wants to say something about how life is about the moments of wonder. And while that is absolutely a part of the magic of life, it ignores the need for purpose and meaning in order to make life worth living.
In the end, I honestly don't know if this was an intentional bait-and-switch, where we are promised It's a Wonderful Life and are instead given Melancholia or if the film makers honestly don't understand the nihilism that is poisoning their supposed optimism.
Either way, I'd recommended avoiding The Life of Chuck.
(See the above on WORST MOVIE OF THE YEAR)
MOST ANTI-CHRISTIAN MOVIE
Wake Up, Dead Man
I am conflicted about this movie because it has one of the best priests I've seen in movies recently, but it also has one of the worst priests and some of the worst Catholics I have seen. Fr. Jud is accused of murdering Monsignor Wicks. Fr. Jud is kind, patient, and speaks about the love of Jesus in a way that does not ring false. Monsignor Wicks is basically a stereotype of Donald Trump in clerics, who embodies every conceivable wicked stereotype that people have about priests. But Fr. Jud is the opposite. At one point in the story as he is trying to get information to help clear his name, the random woman on the phone is going through a spiritual crisis in the family. I was so so moved when Fr. Jud stops everything to counsel the woman and pray with her over the phone. It was such a fine moment of priesthood on film.
But the movie does not know how the Catholic church works, especially in the area of the sacrament of confession. And director Rian Johnson seems to take too much glee in the destruction of sacred images and objects while his main detective Benoit Blanc trashes the Catholic Church and faith in general.
WORST TV SHOW I STOPPED WATCHING
Stumble
WORST SHOW I STILL WATCH
Saturday Night Live
I still hold out hope that in 90 minutes of television there may still be at least 5 minutes of good humor. But it takes a lot of endurance through horrible sketches to come across a gem like "Crucible Cast Party" or the the Nate Bargatzee George Washington sketches.
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