2012 at the Movies: biggest disappointments

DAMSELS IN DISTRESS

1. I haven’t seen Undefeated, the Oscar winning documentary about an underdog high school football team, or the French political thriller The Minister (L’exercice de l’État )   because – as far as I know – they haven’t yet been released in the US.  How can an Oscar winner not get a release?  You can read descriptions and watch trailers of these films as Movies I’m Looking Forward To.

2.  There was also no US release for the hilarious Norwegian curling comedy King Curling or the creepy Slovak voyeur thriller Visible World.  I think that, given a chance, American audiences would have responded to both of them.

3.  Sometimes my favorite filmmakers let me down.  There wasn’t much to Martin McDonagh’s Seven Psychopaths, which I had been eagerly awaiting for months.

Whit Stillman (Metropolitan, Barcelona) hadn’t made a film for thirteen years and then came up with Damsels in Distress. With the tedious Greta Gerwig.  Really, Whit?

And I thought that Aardman Studios’ Pirates! Band of Misfits was a bore.

Note: I don’t have a Worst Ten Movie list because, unlike professional critics, I don’t have to see every movie.  I do see over 100 new movies each year, but I try REALLY, REALLY HARD to avoid the bad movies.  So my worst movie going experience is always either 1)  on an airline flight when I see a movie that I normally wouldn’t; 2) a hyped art film that disastrously falls on its face and/or really pisses me off (The White Ribbon); or 3) something I find on cable TV while channel surfing (Paul Blart: Mall Cop).  But usually, the culprit finds its way aboard a long airline flight.  Not this year.

4.  That being said,  the worst film that I saw was probably Dorfman, which would have derailed if it had started out on the rails.

 

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