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 only 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
-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
CATS
A pure cinematic nightmare!
It isn't that it's scary, but that experience is horrifying on an artistic level. Everything about this movie is terrible. Even the potentially good parts like "Memory" are destroyed by the abundance of oozing bodily fluids. I can't tell if this was a failure of vision or if everyone was under a collective delusion that normal people would find this cinematic vomit even remotely digestible. It isn't even that it is bad, but it feels like it is never going to end and you will be trapped in this feline purgatory forever.
TOP TEN WORST MOVIES
10. Glass -Too talky/expositiony, but better than I expected. Willis/Jackson/McAvoy make the movie interesting.
9. Stuber - An average buddy cop comedy with very likable leads. Not bad, but not great.
8. The Public - Like a secular "Christian movie" with heart-felt uplift and 1-dimensional villains. Very odd ending.
7. Late Night - Not bad. But to work, movies about comedians must be extremely funny. This isn't.
6. All is True - Beautiful directing and great acting cannot overcome this terrible, terrible script.
5. A Marriage Story - Shocking! Two self-centered people who don’t understand love/marriage end up destroying their family
4. Ad Astra - A film with moon pirates and space baboons sounds awesome but isn't. Pretentious snoozer
3. Long Shot - With a premise this good and actors this charming, this movie shouldn't be this boring!
2. Booksmart - one of the most vulgar and vile movies I have seen in a long time. If this is an accurate representation of all of America's youth, I would be tempted to ask God to burn the country down and start over.
1. CATS
WORST ACTOR
James Cordon -
CATS
There isn't a single ounce of actual acting in this performance. Cordon is likable enough, but at least other actors like Idris Elba seem like they are trying. Cordon performs in this film like he is doing one of his late night sketches. I suppose I cannot fault him too much since no one comes out of
CATS unscathed. He should be thankful that he is does not have the worst performance in this movie.
WORST ACTRESS
Rebel Wilson -
CATS
This is the worst performance in the worst movie of the year, which Is very dubious honor. Wilson performs her usual schtick of playing into the stereotype while at the same time being gross and horrifying. All of her apparent ad libs fall flat and only serve to reinforce that nothing about this movie makes an ounce of sense.
WORST DIRECTOR
Tom Hooper -
CATS
From my review of CATS:
I imagine that you are supposed to turn off your brain and enjoy the music and the dancing spectacle. But this doesn't work because director Tom Hooper does everything he can to make this movie a disgusting display. There was a great deal of mockery of the cat special effects when the trailer dropped, and rightly so. There is a principle in visual design called "The Uncanny Valley." It refers to a phenomenon where if you make something non-human look more and more human our attraction to it grows until just before it looks completely human and then we find ourselves horribly repulsed by this "almost human" monstrosity. That is what it is like to see the cats in CATS. But it isn't even the design that is the essential problem, but how Hooper presents this horrific world.
WORST SCREENPLAY
- Emily Halpern, Sarah Haskins, Susanna Fogel, Katie Silberman-
Booksmart
This script is dripping with disgust. The whole movie is premised on the ugly sin of envy. For some reason, the writers thought that this was a solid enough idea on which to build their entire story. Our main characters start out in an ugly place and somehow go through their arcs even uglier. That could be interesting, but it is clear that we are supposed to not only sympathize with their initial shallowness but also with their newfound enlightenment.
But worst of all... it isn't funny. As I wrote in my review:
Bad comedians replace humor with shock, hoping that the vulgarity will be so great that it will provoke laughs, like in Borat. But that wears off quickly. I chuckled maybe once or twice in the entire film. Nothing was funny. Each new adventure should have been a ludicrous laugh riot. Instead I felt like Dante going deeper and deeper into the concentric circles of hell.
MOST ANTI-CHRISTIAN MOVIE
Booksmart
I did not see too many movie this year that took direct aim at Christianity. But
Booksmart has a scene where they make fun of Amy's Christian parents. Amy has same-sex attractions. Her parents are Christians. It is clear that they are struggling with this dynamic in their family with their faith. Molly decides that it would funny to make them uncomfortable by implying she is sexual active with Amy. Her parents try very hard to not offend the girls. But this seems to give the girls license to attack them because their faith holds to some unchanging truths about sexual morality. This is a classic bullying move where you take advantage of your opponent's kindness and hit them because you know they won't hit back.
MOST MORALLY OFFENSIVE
Booksmart
From my review:
It is hard for me to describe how ugly this movie is. The characters lack any kind of redeeming qualities. The impetus for the quest is Molly's insane envy. She is completely filled with an inflated pride and it shakes her to the core that anyone could be as smart as her without working as hard. Their success takes nothing away from her own achievements, but she is so enraged by their good fortune. The only reason that you feel even a little sympathetic with her is that all of her other classmates are portrayed as horrid. They are mean, selfish, sexually promiscuous, intoxicated, vulgarians.
...
You could make the argument that a movie like Can't Hardly Wait is morally worse than Booksmart because it sanitizes the ugliness of sin and makes it more acceptable to watch. I am open to those arguments, but Can't Hardly Wait had a setting which is a bit scandalous, but it had a great deal of heart. It didn't seem to revel in the ugliness of the sin and Booksmart does. It wants to be "in your face" and shock you. Writers Emily Halpirn, Sarah Haskins, Susanna Fogel, and Katie Silberman have given us two very unlikeable, lecturing lead characters surrounded by flat, unfunny characters.
WORST TV SHOW I STOPPED WATCHING
The Conners
The
Roseanne reboot was a gigantic hit that looked at all different points of life in suburban Chicago. For that reason it was incredibly relatable and watchable. Once Roseanne Barr was fired, the show took an immediate downturn. The characters were always flawed, but there was something likable came from deep inside. But all of that goodness has evaporated. In a particularly ugly encounter, Jackie ends up slapping Darlene for after she says something potentially unforgivable. This is not longer a dysfunctional family. This is a family in crisis.
WORST SHOW I STILL WATCH
Saturday Night Live
(Below are my comments from last two years, but they still apply to this year)
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."
The show has two major problems in its current era.
1. The Election of Donald Trump. If you watch the skits before the election they were harsh but there was still a great deal that was funny. But after the election, especially after that somber cold open (and it is not an exaggeration to say that it was the most somber cold opening since 9/11), with Kate McKinnon playing a heartbroken Hillary Clinton, something broke in the show. Donald Trump is the president and he models incredibly unusual behavior, so there is fertile ground for jokes. But the writers don't seem to be interested in jokes and are instead only interested in attacking someone they hate. That's all well and good, but you need to at least make it funny.
2. The Anti-Comedy skits. Pete Davidson (who still shows up on the show) and Kyle Mooney seem to be hellbent on making the most un-funny comedy sketches on the show, particularly with their digital shorts. I was never a big fan of Andy Sandberg's digital shorts, but you could tell he was working hard on trying to get you to laugh no matter how silly he was. Davidson and Mooney present sketches that are so odd that they fail to do anything but make you say "What the hell was that?" And that might be their point, but it makes for incredibly bad television.
