Five Reasons the Movies Should Die.

I was going to post the best and worst films of the year in this entry, but a few revisitings (Mad Hot Ballroom, The Baxter, Rize) have caused me to completely rethink the order of my top ten. So, all you get right now are the worst. Here come five movies which made me hate my profession with the fury of a million suns. I promise that the Best Film and Notable Performance Lists will be a bit more cheery than this one.

The Worst Films of the Year 2005 (Or: Fuck These Movies).

5. Rent

Chris Columbus is the worst director in the history of cinema. Ed Wood, Ray Dennis Steckler, and Joel Schumacher at least had passion for their jobs, and it showed in the total calamity of their resulting work. Columbus is just a lazy shmuck; every directorial choice is met with the path of least resistance, and any problem is ignored. There is at least one continuity or factual error in every frame of this film, and there’s no movement by Columbus to fix any of them; I’m sure every member of the cast and crew caught the gigantic “NYC 2012” banner in the background of one scene, but Columbus couldn’t be bothered to shift the camera over five feet to place it out of frame. That’s the pinnacle of awful filmmaking, especially in a high-profile production such as this one. Here’s hoping that resulting financial disaster stops this director’s career in its tracks.

4. War of the Worlds

Shameless, pedantic, and unnecessary, Spielberg throws another H.G. Wells interpretation at us so that we can marvel at just how much this story has to do with our world today. With the George Pal film, the 80’s TV series, and Orson Welles’ incomparable radio drama already on record, did we really need another version of War? Aside from a few terrorist references and some startlingly terrible September 11 imagery, Spielberg’s film gives us nothing that the older films had not already offered. What, then, is the point? In their rush to prove that they could create a film from scratch in under nine months, Spielberg and Tom Cruise never once stopped to think whether this remake was in any way needed. It comes as no surprise that it wasn’t, and therefore leaves us with nothing but a bad taste in our mouths and a memory of Tim Robbins’ career-ending performance.

3. Man With the Screaming Brain

Come on, Bruce Campbell! You’re not even trying anymore. I understand that you’ve made a living throwing yourself around and getting hit in the face with various forms of fake blood and guts, but there’s no reason to keep doing it when you’re obviously so tired of the formula. I know you’re good at other things; Jack of All Trades was a solid program, and your books are absolutely hilarious. Evil Dead is twenty-six years gone, and it’s time that you scrap that tired format and move on. Considering the response this film received, I don’t think anybody will mind.

2. Robots

This film is proof positive that nobody in Hollywood is paying attention to anything around them. If they did, the creative team behind Robots would have realized that their film just wouldn’t cut it in the post-Pixar age. Technically competent but completely lacking in any form of narrative entertainment, Robots is the worst kind of filmmaking-by-committee. We care about none of the characters, nor do we bother to be enthralled by the standard-issue plotline. It’s torpor for adults, and insulting to the kid audience brought up on Toy Story and The Incredibles. That’s an F for effort, Blue Sky. Better luck next time.

1. Crash

Make no mistake, folks: Crash is the worst film of this year. A racist and awful portrait of interpersonal relations in modern-day Los Angeles, Crash hates pretty much everyone and makes it known until it’s blue in the face. Take Ludacris’ character, for instance; after a full minute of condemning the white characters for being afraid of black people, it turns out that (Surprise!) he actually is a carjacker, and we should be afraid of him! Or Brendan Fraser’s District Attorney character, who turns out to hate black people even as he delivers speech upon speech preaching tolerance in the city. At least, that’s what I think his plotline was about; since he’s on screen for about ten seconds, we really can’t tell. When there are a dozen plotlines shoved into a two-hour film, there’s very little time to develop any to a reasonable point. At the end of the film, these clichéd and hackneyed plots have made no impact upon our sense of tolerance and brotherhood, and we may be even worse off because of the negative reinforcement caused by the one-dimensional characters. Congratulations, Paul Haggis; you’ve written a film which makes me hate Asians, Blacks, and WASPs with equal zeal. I hope that was your point.
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Coming Soon: The Women of the "Gay Cowboy Movie," everybody's favorite Baldwin, and the return of Woody Allen.