Leap Year

2010 in Movies: Biggest Disappointments

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1. I couldn’t see some of the Cannes and Sundance Festival favorites because they haven’t been released where I live: Poetry, Certified Copy, Uncle Boonmee, Cane Toads: The Conquest, Aurora, The Princess of Montpensier.

2. After director Niels Arden Opley’s super rockin’ The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, the second and third films in Stieg Larsson’s Milenium trilogy were dragged down by plodding director Daniel Alfredson.

3. The 2004 French action movie District B13 introduced us to thrilling parkour and was an original, offbeat spectacle.   But this year’s sequel District 13: Ultimatum was cartoonish and very, very dumb.

4.  Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps:  First of all, I hoped that the movie was going to be primarily about the Michael Douglas characterization of Gordon Gekko – which Douglas knocked out of the park yet again. Will someone explain to me why Shia LaBeouf seems to be a movie star? Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?

Second, the screenplay keeps raising the issue of moral hazard (whether to bail out people from the consequences of risks that they knew they were taking).  Yet, at the end, the two flawed main characters each get exactly what they wanted at the beginning of the film despite making risky or evil choices throughout.  The movie’s payoff (things will turn out OK no matter how badly or foolishly you behave) is exactly opposite of the movie’s sermonette.

5. No one could find a better vehicle for the sublime Amy Adams than the execrable Leap Year?

6.  Pirate Radio:  Has Philip Seymour Hoffman been in a worse film?

7. From the trailer and the buzz, I thought that The Kids Are All Right was shaping up to contend for Best Picture.  It’s a good movie with a wonderful performance by Annette Bening, but  it didn’t fulfill its promise as one of the year’s best.

8. I really wanted to like Ireland’s animated The Secret of Kells, but it was a snoozer.

9. The German comedy Soul Kitchen had a fun trailer (that contained the actually funny three minutes in the entire film).

10.  Shutter Island:  Marty, what were you thinking?

2010 in Movies: Worst Movie-going Experience

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The Tooth Fairy

The Winner: On the same airline flight, I watched the two worst films that I saw in all of 2010, Leap Year and The Tooth Fairy.  I had always thought that I could watch the talented and adorable Amy Adams in anything, but the wretchedly written Leap Year proved me wrong.  The Tooth Fairy is remarkable as an especially execrable comedy in a year of bad comedies.

Runner-up:  Down the row from me at a preview showing of The Town (NOT a bad film), a woman had brought her three-year-old son so he could view the armed robberies, abduction, murders, head shattering battery by rifle butt, spraying AK-47s, the two scenes of sexual intercourse and the threatened rape.  Oh, and how about the castration by pistol shot?  And the car torchings – do you really want your three-year old to learn how to set your car on fire?

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 75-100 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.

2010 in Review: The Year of Lousy Comedies

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It’s not that weren’t ANY good comedies in 2010 – just not many.  And none made my list of the best films of the year.  The funniest movie was Iron Man 2, a comedy masquerading as a super hero movie.

Going the Distance and I Love You, Phillip Morris were good romantic comedies – a particularly meager genre this year.  Going the Distance was a rarity – a sweet, smart, funny and successful romantic comedy for adults.  Screenwriter Geoff LaTulippe tried a novel approach that respected the audience – creating characters like the ones we know in real life, who talk and act like real people do.  Instead of an implausible set-up, the conflict was the real problem of a bi-coastal romance.  The offbeat I Love You, Phillip Morris was a gay version of the con man, prison and rom com genres, and the risk paid off.

Once, we get past the three best comedies, there were the passable (but not especially noteworthy) Get Him to the Greek, Morning Glory, It’s Kind of a Funny Story, Please Give, Get Low, Love and Other Drugs, You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, Youth in Revolt, Cyrus and Death at a Funeral.

The Locksmith, a funny little movie which won the low-budget award at Sundance, didn’t even get a theatrical release.

It was disappointing, because even the good 2010 comedies didn’t match up with 2009’s really funny and original movies:  (500) Days of Summer, Away We Go, Zombieland, The Hangover, In the Loop, Funny People and I Love You, Man.

This year, we had crappy comedies like Pirate Radio, Date Night and Soul Kitchen.   The worst movies that I saw this year were so-called comedies Tooth Fairy and Leap Year – two films that no one thought were good (but that I was stuck with on a long airline flight).   Not to mention that the most reviled movies of the year included the alleged comedies Sex in the City 2, Valentine’s Day, The Back-up Plan, Due Date, How Do You Know, Yogi Bear and Little Fockers.

So here’s the trailer for a non-lousy comedy (a romantic comedy, even), the original and funny Going the Distance.