These are the films that are just below the line. They’re better than meh, but they just really didn’t quite work for me for one reason or another. Often these were movies that had a really good idea but couldn’t quite execute on it – the trailer was better than the actual movie, in effect.
117 – Into the Dark: Pure (2019)
There is some good Earth-Mother, #MeToo revenge stuff in here, but it’s ultimately underplotted and unsatisfying – 75% of the movie is a pretty good tone building and slow burn realization of exactly how bad these dads are, but then a bunch of stuff happens really quick and oh hey I guess the girls are, like, nyads or faeries or something and I guess they kind of have powers, but maybe not really big powers, and the end. The script and acting wasn’t really good enough to demand an additional 30 minutes of run time but it sure felt like it was missing.
Reasonably generic trapped-on-the-ship SciFi. Downgraded for the really poor quality of the CHUDs that were obviously on the ship and the fantastically stupid ending.
114 – The Frozen Ground (2013)
Who casts Nick Cage to play a repressed sullen cop, haunted quietly by his prior failures? I mean, this was 2013 already, it should have been VERY clear that was a mistake. The movie is rather generic generally, spending a *lot* of time on trying to build a case that would stand up in court, but of course we never get a courtroom payoff. This moves up a few spots due to Cusack, who is clearly having a heck of a time playing a terrible, terrible person.
113 – XX (2017)
This horror anthology sadly doesn’t have much going for it beyond its premise of featuring four female directors. They are all well shot and directed, but are almost all let down by their stories and the format – each has enough plot to make for a decent 10-page (or so) short story, but not enough for 30 or so minutes of filming.
112 – Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (2005)
This is what resurrected Robert Downer Jr.’s career? Seriously??
The first ten minutes, establishing the setup for everything, are great. Maybe that’s all people remembered? Easy to believe because the rest of this is utter nonsense with bad pacing, chaotic editing, actors trying way way too hard to be weird, and oh yeah a ridiculous amount of casual homophobia. Ick.
This is a tough category. I have to acknowledge that these five movies are quality films, worthy of respect, and ones which plenty of people adore. But, for whatever reason, they just didn’t really work for me. Unlike the prior categories where I feel comfortable saying that the problem was with the movies themselves, here I have to acknowledge that the problem may have been with me. Maybe I’m just not the intended audience, maybe I was not in the right frame of mind when watching, maybe I just didn’t really get it. I almost feel bad that I didn’t really like these.
122 – The Boy That Harnessed the Wind (2019)
What an incredible inspirational true story about the triumph of ingenuity and the human spirit. Unfortunately, I just could not get on this movie’s wavelength – possible that I just couldn’t get past the misery and injustice portrayed in the first half; it didn’t feel exploitive, but it just made me angry and sad and had me thinking about how much of that terribleness there is out there that is not being addressed. Hard to get into the triumphant mood.
121 – Braid (2018)
History (and other items to come much, much higher on this very list) will show that I have nothing against psychedelic mind-trippy movies. But, as the placement of two of those types of shows in the category will attest, I also need characters that make sense even in that context.
One of the three main characters in Braid is “insane” but only in that bad-Hollywood way that means that they act randomly with no apparent consistent motivation from scene to scene, not that there is an actual recognizable disorder of any kind. Another flips back-and-forth-and-back-again from going along with it to shouting about why they’re in the house at all. The third is mostly just passive.
Apparently a lot of people think this is some kind of feminist parable which, hey, entirely possible that I didn’t get it right? But boy did I not pick up on that at the time.
120 – Shaun of the Dead (2004)
I like Simon Pegg and I appreciate Edgar Wright and….I just didn’t find this particular funny. Maybe it’s my longstanding dislike of zombie movies (they always get to me in a way that no other horror genre does), maybe it’s that a decent amount of the humor is based on interpersonal discomfort, and I never really find that to be very funny. I thought this was fine, but not anything better than just fine.
119 – mother! (2017)
A brilliant allegory / biblical retelling. But it never for a moment felt like anything more than an allegory. These aren’t actual characters having actual experiences, but a reframing of a different story. I’m not a good enough writer to truly explain the difference between that and, you know, every other fiction movie, but it just did not feel like an authentic experience and that kept me apart from truly caring about what was happening. Stuff happened because it was preordained to happen, and none of the characters actually felt like *characters* (let alone feeling like real people) other than the mother. Even *that scene* at the end was only interesting to me in an “oh, that’s how they’re handling that” way.
118 – It Comes At Night (2017)
Yeah, no.
The writing is good, the acting is good, the direction is good. The story is SO. DAMNED. OVERWHELMINGLY. DEPRESSING. I don’t need a light happy story to enjoy a movie, I don’t even need things to end well, but this story about everyone in the world dying slowly (quicker in some instances) was too much for me. Honestly, I wish I hadn’t seen it and don’t want to continue to think about it.
Up Next: Misfires / Better Ideas Than Execution (19! – Getting to the middle of the bell curve!)
It’s not that Armie Hammer and Henry Cavill aren’t good actors and they’re obviously handsome and, um, well put together. But it seems to me that they are missing the true movie star charismatic presence. Look at Mission Impossible: Fallout – being right next to Tom “Star Power Defined” Cruise really made Cavill look shallow and uninteresting. Hunky dude, obviously having a great career, and for all I know a friend to children and animals. But ultimately it’s just not there for me.
This film was meh and forgettable. They would’ve been much better off with putting Alicia Vikander and Elizabeth Debicki in the leads.
128 – In the Tall Grass (2019)
Classic Stephen King – creepy interesting setup, but in the end it’s just some kind of ancient monolith demanding sacrifices.
127 – Corporate Animals (2019)
Fun in its way, particularly a game Demi Moore playing the worst version of the self-absorbed guru small-business owner. Ultimately more of a slight series of jokes than anything terribly interesting though.
126 – Blackway (2015)
Julia Stiles tries, which is more than can be said for Anthony Hopkins or Ray Liotta. Motivations are exactly as complicated as “Good Guys Good, Bad Guys Bad.” No reason why Liotta is so transparently scummy or why everyone else let him get away with it for so long. No character has any emotional depth (maybe Hopkins’s could’ve if he had been awake during shooting).
125 – Oblivion (2013)
Okay, so not everything Tom Cruise touches turns to gold. There is just no saving a plot this formulaic. The “twists” are obvious, the “lesson” is trite, the characters uninteresting. Good F/X though.
124 – We Have Always Lived in the Castle (2018)
Tone can be an incredibly difficult thing to get right in a movie, and this is just a miss. If it had played things more straight it could’ve been a taut psychological thriller or a depressing tale of a doomed family. If it had leaned more into the weirder aspects it could’ve been a kooky romp. Instead you never really get comfortable knowing how you’re supposed to take things on the screen and it results in an emotional disconnection. The film also never seemed to make up its mind on what the deal was with the older sister – is she just craving some kind of normalcy in a world out of her control or is she scarred and/or disabled?
123 – You Might Be the Killer (2018)
I so so so wanted to like this. I’m a big fan of Fran Kranz, I followed the germination of this story through Chuck Wendig’s twitter feed, I adore tributes old ’80s slasher flicks, and I yield to no man in my affections for Alyson Hannigan (how many of *you* have an autographed picture of her in your office?).
Unfortunately this really showed its “slapped together over a weekend” roots. The decision (presumably due to budget / time constraints) to never have Hannigan and Franz in a scene together, instead basing movie around their phone calls….well, yeah, that works exactly as well as you would expect. I’m glad this movie exists, and I’m not sad that I saw it, but I could not recommend it.
The prior 14 movies sucked. You can have a contrary opinion, but your opinion would be wrong.
We are now into the group of films that I didn’t particularly like, but they aren’t necessarily terrible, they just were….well, fine. There’s nothing wrong with fine. I would love to make a movie that was fine. But I’m not going to recommend them.
137 – The Thomas Crown Affair (1999)
You’d think that a heist movie with Pierce Brosnan and Rene Russo would be snappy fun, but they really should’ve done a screen test or something because there is anti-chemistry here along with a far-too-slowly-paced script that makes this the kind of barely adequate filler that you don’t remember anything specific about fifteen minutes after you’re done.
136 Koko-di Koko-da(2019)
Swedish films, man. IMDB describes this as ” a maelstrom of psychological terror and humiliating slapstick.” Okay, sure.
135 Perfect Bid: The Contestant Who Knew Too Much (2017)
The classic documentary where the subject (and the filmmakers) think it’s much more interesting than it actually is. Is it pretty cool that this guy could memorize the prices of items used on The Price Is Right to the extent that he could determine the exact price on a sweepstakes showdown? Absolutely. But there is not 75 minutes of story here, and the stretching shows. Should’ve stayed a nice anecdote.
134 – Assimilate (2019)
Did we need what was effectively a remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers? No we did not.
This also wins the award for most blatant Magical Electricity since A Quiet Place. Who is keeping the lights on while the entire planet is being taken over and the aliens mostly just want to shuffle around aimlessly?
133 – The Hole in the Ground (2019)
Child stolen by mysterious forces is saved through the magical power of digging. Ok, sure.
Much less to say about this tier of films.
132 – The Numbers Station (132)
I like the idea of John Cusack as a disgraced black ops agent, but this story just isn’t enough. I found myself speculating on what he did to be disgraced in the world of black ops instead of concentrating on the movie, which itself feels more like a pilot episode for an X-Files wannabe.
131 – The Canal (2014)
A grab-bag of supernatural horror tropes that can’t decide if it wants to be about a vengeful spirit or a man’s decent into madness.
Geez, re-reading that it makes the movie sound much more interesting than it actually was. I couldn’t decide which option it ultimately went with, but that was due to inept storytelling and characters that I just plain wasn’t interested in, not because they cunningly left it open to interpretation.
130 – Circle (2015)
No, not The Circle, but a punitively scifi movie featuring an entry-level Philosophy course level of discourse on who deserves to live. It moved up several spots due to a quality heel turn at the end, but there just wasn’t enough going on or a high enough level of thought happening throughout to keep my interest.
While still comfortably fitting within the “Waste of Time” category, these 5 films each had something going for them that separated them from the prior 5, whether it was production value, a decent acting performance or two, or the glimmer of a decent idea. But don’t get me wrong – they were still very, very bad.
142 – Wounds (2019)
Dark Cthulhloid monstrosities are all well and good, but geez let’s have *some* plot or character consistency or a scipt that followed basic logic or something. Maybe give Zazie Beetz something to do (although this is obviously mostly an ongoing Hollywood problem generally).
It occurs to me that these rankings point out one of the interesting features of Sundance – you can see some great stuff and be truly surprised by it, but you can also see a fair amount of dreck (151, 147, 146, and 142 on my list thus far – yikes!)
141 – Awake(2019)
Hooo-boy. Half-baked intrigue (it’s obvious who the secret bad guy is the first time you see him), poor performances, uninspired directing, character motivations that switch on a dime only because the script requires it. Netflix original movies you haven’t really heard of – not a good idea.
140 – Don’t Knock Twice (2016)
First off, there is only one Baba Yaga, and his name is John Wick. So cut that crap out right now.
More significantly, this desperately needed a script doctor. The kid hates her estranged mom….but immediately runs to her when something bad happens! Nobody in the mom’s prior life knew about the estranged kid….but the mom’s sculpting model just happened to be the one person who needed to have a kill of or by the kid (I think? It wasn’t exactly clear) to transfer the curse. Ugh.
139 – Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald (2018)
Another one from the “A Bunch of Stuff Happens Because It Would Be Cool To Look At” files. There is little believable action from an established character standpoint – our main characters just bounce around reacting to one thing after another.
The movie really suffers, however, from two cardinal sins: (1) Surprise, Credence is Aberforth Dumbledore! Of course we’re surprised, since that makes absolutely no sense whatsoever from the HP books and movies. (2) Turning Queenie into a freaking fascist who would rather have a slave than a husband and has no problem working with someone who murders a bunch of people in front of her face.
For some reason this angered me less than Rise of Skywalker – maybe because I have no special love for the HP movies (as opposed to the books). But this was still just terrible.
138 – Along Came a Spider(2001)
Look, dammit, surprise twists aren’t inherently great. Sixth Sense was awesome because the instant the reveal happened you think back and it was obvious – all the clues were there and things that happened actually made *more* sense in light of the twist. When you don’t bother setting up that the cool junior agent, who has been crucial to moving the case ahead before now and who has such a great empathetic touch with the kids, is actually a demented murderous sociopath, it’s not a big WOW moment when she flips the switch. Did *she* know that she was the kidnapper? Because if so she really should’ve done a lot of things differently early on in the movie.
This grouping is the films that were not worth the effort to hate but which I would’ve preferred not to have watched. Hopefully after a little bit I was able to multi-task or at least scroll through twitter or something. Definitely not recommended, but it’s not like I’ll have to report you to the authorities if you watched them.
147 – The Infiltrators (2019)
Sundance’s NEXT category is an odd duck – sometimes you get an atmospheric stunner like A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, sometimes you get the I-Hate-The-Audience anticomedy of The Entertainer, and sometimes you get an extremely Meh offering like this. This story about immigrant detention centers, based so closely on a true story that it’s effectively a recreation, would have been a fascinating documentary. But the choice to use untrained (and uncharismatic) actors makes it mostly a slog.
146 – The Wolf Hour (2019)
Nothing Happens: The Movie.
Seriously, I do not understand the point of having made this film. Set during the NYC garbage strike and Son of Sam murders, neither event adds much of anything to the happenings other than being endlessly discussed, mostly in the background while our hero smokes and sits alone in her apartment.
If there is an attempt at atmosphere or character development (a highly debatable notion), it fails to make a mark. I could’ve had a had a nice nap during this time.
145 – High Life(2019)
There were a few movies where, based on early word of mouth, the people involved, and what little other information I had in advance, I expected to love. I would go into the theater (or start the streaming) for these, consciously telling myself to be open to the experience and the possibility that I would be seeing my favorite movie of the year.
High Life, obviously, was the biggest disappointment. Rarely does a movie with so very little to say try so hard to make a big statement. The insights are pedantic, the pace is slow to the point of distraction, the style is bizarre to say the least. Maybe if you really need to see Juliette Binoche have….um….intense sex with a machine/robot/box, this is a movie for you. It was not for me.
144 – The Polar Express(2004)
The uncanny valley of the animation has been discussed to death, so I’ll just say that I agree it was highly disturbing to see these…things…acting like people. But even worst to me was the way that our protagonist, an empty vessel everyboy audience stand-in, is the focal point of the movie, getting the grand rewards and in-movie attention that by right should’ve gone to the Hero Girl (no, really, that’s the character’s only designation), who is the one who actually takes action. It’s a much worse demonstration of Derek Zumsteg’s Hermione the Hero situation, where Harry is even more of a do-nothing twit. Having a boy on the spectrum provide comic relief was also pretty gross. Do better, even in 2004.
143 – Under the Silver Lake(2018)
The writer/director of It Follows chose *this* as his next project? Boy, I really need to not assume that everyone who does something great can do more good things. This movie was desperately trying to be weird and funky, but it just got completely lost in itself. I am informed that this is chock full of deep symbolism and clues lurking at the back of every frame, and, look, I don’t want to disparage the legwork involved in that, but the point of seeing a movie is not to stop-motion it frame by frame to try to decode everything. I also don’t mind an unlikable protagonist but Andrew Garfield was so flat-affect that it made caring about any of the craziness happening to / with / around him highly difficult.
Some movies can be transcendent experiences, or overwhelmingly joyful, or empathy machines. Most movies are at least worthwhile experiences – something somewhat interesting to pass the time or at least fine to have on while folding laundry or working out. But every now and then you come across something so bad, so offensive, so utterly irredeemable that it truly warrants your hatred. These are the four movies I saw in 2019 that made my life actively worse for having seen them.
(As an aside, I know I just said in the last post that I am going to try to keep these short. I expect that this entry will likely be the longest per-movie ranting of the series – one tends to have more to say about things that they had a strong negative emotional reaction to….)
151 – The Nightingale (2019)
There are some things I just don’t need to see, ever, in a movie or otherwise. And an infant being brutally murdered is at the top of the list, particularly when it’s in service to a particularly bloody vengeance fantasy that had no other redeeming qualities. In one sense, it may not be fair that I’m ranking this movie at all because my screening stopped roughly 2/3 of the way through due to a medical emergency in the audience. But upon reflection, I had been on the verge of walking out on this garbage for some time anyway at that point, so pan it I shall.
The first half of the movie was misery porn showing, in grisly detail, the full and complete destruction of everything the protagonist could possibly ever care for, merely to set up the second half of her detailed painstaking and bloody revenge against the perpetrators, which itself is more a joyless chore since life is already devoid of any meaning.
There were quite a few films this year that were the second major offerings from a director/writer who had a first effort that I thought was excellent (this one by the director and writer of the splendid The Babadook). Among other things, 2019 taught me that just because an artist had one great concept inside them, that didn’t mean that the follow-up should be an automatic viewing.
150 – Await Further Instructions (2019)
This lowest category is generally reserved for movies that were actively trying to hurt me. But every now and then, if you’ve been very, very bad, you stumble upon a film that is just so stunning in its fundamental incompetence that there is no choice but to give it the worst possible ranking.
Particularly frustrating is that a perfectly serviceable idea (a family is mysteriously trapped in their house Christmas morning with no outside information obtainable beyond occasional cryptic instruction from their TV) was turned over to a disinterested class of high school Sophomores to craft the dialogue, was left almost entirely devoid of actual plot outside the basest stereotypes, with flat acting performances, slipshod editing, an ending that reduced whatever meaning had come before utterly barren, and the worst stop-motion animation I’ve ever seen (seriously, it looks like what I could’ve personally done in a couple of hours with my iPhone. And my phone is several generations old.)
149 – Nocturnal Animals (2016)
Hey, it’s Amy Adams and Jake Gyllenhaal, that means it has a floor for how bad it can be, right?
Noooooooooope. Another important lesson: Jake Gyllenhaal picks projects for reasons that I cannot possibly understand. Amy Adams likes to work generally. Tom Ford is a fashion mogul, not an actual director. Fascinatingly, in light of that, the style/fashion choices (particularly those set in the art world) are not noticably more outlandish than the parodic ones in Velvet Buzzsaw. I’m not sure what to make of that beyond it being incredibly distracting and occasionally off-putting.
Once again, we have horrors almost beyond imaging being portrayed…..because reasons? They certainly don’t advance the main plot or lend meaningful insight into the characters (such as they are – characterization of Adams’s character is at best inconsistent and for most other characters it’s nonexistent).
This is better than The Nightingale only because much of the worst is left offscreen. Avoid.
148 – Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker (2019)
My hottest take of the year: This worthless garbage is worse than the prequels.
The Last Jedi was fun, not great, with some interesting ideas and benefited from some new thinking on the subject. Rise of Skywalker essentially boiled down to a responsive tantrum, with its core theses being “NUH-UH!” and “BECAUSE I SAID SO!”
So, I guess that Jedi and Sith are just gods now, capable of resurrecting life and blasting lightning into the sky at hundreds of spaceships simultaneously? Kyle Ren knows exactly where (and when) to find Rey at the ruined Death Star because a lightsaber battle would be cool? Chewy was on a *second* transport that had to be right next to them that was never seen, heard, or sensed by any of the many force-sensitive observers, because it would be, like, totally metal to make people think he was dead? Every Star Destroyer (which were secretly constructed by the thousands because who would notice?) is also a Death Star now, but is otherwise utterly defenseless against any small fighter and incapable of raising shields in atmosphere because f**k you, that’s why (and obviously they need to leave them all somewhere defenseless under those conditions – how dare you even ask?).
Of course, those and so so SO many other problems are not even in the top level of issues. Palpatine is the Big Bad now, and was all along, which you could definitely tell because there wasn’t the slightest hint of it being the case in advance of his re-introduction here via the initial text scroll. But don’t worry, that just means that the catharsis at the end of Return of the Jedi was a fake-out.
I could (and have, to many people in person) go on and on and on and on. But the reason why this is worse than the horrible prequels, with their terrible writing and worse acting, is the active contempt shown here for the audience just in basic, fundamental storytelling. The prequels told a story, badly. In Rise of Skywalker, stuff happens in a largely incomprehensible manner, edited too quickly to even feel like a narrative, without worrying about silly things like whether any of it makes any sense whatsoever.
Oh, and if you’re one of the trillions of people in the Star Wars universe that isn’t from one of *TWO* families, you’re not actually important. Great lesson. Good work, everybody.
In the final tally, I saw 151 movies for the first time in 2019. That seems like a lot, but considering that I saw 21 of them over a 5-day period in January the remaining pace is somewhat less impressive. (Impressive? Depressing? Obsessive? Whatever)
Anyhoo – I’ve long been frustrated by year-end lists, particularly those of movies, as release schedules and the demands of the holidays and year-end work schedules mean I never get to see many of the movies making the lists during the calendar year (eg Little Women and Uncut Gems this go-round).
So this will be my ranking of every movie I saw for the first time in 2019. So that’s a fair number of actual 2019 releases, plenty of mid-to-late ’10s, and so on, going back to at least one flick from 1958. Only shows that I hadn’t seen before so that my rewatches of Spider-Verse don’t occupy spaces 1-4 of the list.
As is inherently true of all rankings, these are of course opinionated and idiosyncratic, based almost entirely on their effect on me personally while watching them (and in some unusual cases when I kept thinking about the experience thereafter). I know you would not expect any less.
I acknowledge up front that there is only so much of my (*ahem*) pointless blatherings that people can stand, so I’m generally going to be keeping these short. Be assured that I would be only too glad to ramble on and on for anyone with questions, objections, mockery, or a firm handshake of agreement. All feedback very welcome of course.
Okay, so, look, I know this was deliberately created to be a fun little trifle genre picture, but this movie irritated me so damn much. When I want a horror movie, I’m looking for scares and spooks and supernatural hoo-haw, but I’m not looking for situational embarrassment and things I don’t want to watch because they’re just uncomfortable social situations.
Also, I totally get that most horror movies are “bad things happening undeservedly” – you know, those teens didn’t typically do anything worthy of being cut into fifteen equal sections and flambee’d. But that’s different from this movie where our heroine is damned to hell for all eternity, and treated like she deserves it, for failing to risk her career for what appears to be a demented old woman she’s never seen before. Bit of a dick move on her part? Sure. A sign of something profoundly wrong with our system? Absolutely. Worthy of being repeatedly attacked and then ETERNALLY DAMNED? I mean, come on, the old gypsy woman is clearly the bad guy here. Harrumph.
I Would Recommend This Movie To: Meh, I can’t think of anyone appropriate. Not scary enough, not silly enough, just irritating. Maybe someone who thought Raimi’s early stuff was great (there is some of his customary gross-out stuff here) but should have more misplaced judginess and squirming discomfort.
What a delight. I knew this was a big Think Piece movie for professional scolds and “the moral fabric of our nation is decaying” types, but I didn’t realize just how out-and-out funny it would be. Christian Bale’s voice in the first half when he’s basically pretending to be a human being is perfection, but what really slayed me was the way that director Mary Harron and crew shot the various exchanges of business cards as high-tension life-or-death horror scenes, while the chopping up of bodies and whatnot are more like live-action cartoons.
I am honestly puzzled at people who think that Patrick Bateman was actually murdering a bunch of people. I thought it was rather obvious that the whole thing was a psychotic break – they set us up early with Bateman “saying” things on the screen that were clearly only impulses in his head and not what he was saying in the reality of the movie. At most there was one actual murder portrayed (the homeless man), but I think it’s highly unlikely that was real either given how primed we are to be aware that he’s an unreliable narrator. I guess some (lots?) of people will get upset about anything if they want to.
I Would Recommend This Movie To: Anyone with an even remotely wicked sense of humor.
