It’s that time again. Time to make a list of the worst movies I saw in a theater in 2011. I plopped down my $10, bought my popcorn and expected to be entertained, or enlightened, or afraid, or pensive. Good movies make you feel something. They connect you to the time, the story, the characters — even if that connection is based on revulsion like in the case of Anthony Hopkins in "Silence of the Lambs." I saw 36 movies on their opening weekend last year. Below are my choices for the three worst movies — they missed the mark on all levels.
No Strings Attached – It’s rare that actors as talented as Natalie Portman and as charming as Ashton Kutcher would make me want to knock both of their heads together, but there you go. This was marketed as an adult romantic comedy — probably with the mistaken impression that the label (and the R rating) would keep young, impressionable junior-high girls out of the theatres. Of course, as every 13-year-old will tell you, there are ways around the R rating limitation. And what message were these young girls, and the rest of us, given as a result of watching this movie? We learned that “hook ups” are perfectly acceptable, and generally preferred by career driven women, than the more conventional method of actually at least having a fondness for someone first. We were also reminded that women lay around wearing sweats, crying and looking for chocolate at least a few days out of every month, and we need a man to calm the salvage beast. Uggghh. It makes my skin crawl all over again.
The Change Up – I’m sure that the PTB (Powers To Be) were encouraged by the overall success of the similarly themed movie “Freaky Friday” or others in that genre. So, let’s make a movie with Jason Bateman and Ryan Reynolds and have them switch bodies, learn life lessons, and switch back. Except the same PTB also spent 2010 watching the cash registers ring at the box office for a movie like “The Hangover,” so they thought to add in some raunchy scenes as well. It will be the best of both worlds! Except it wasn’t. It wasn’t acted convincingly, it was more cringe inducing than funny, and the Ryan Reynolds character didn’t have any life lessons that I could see. There are good actors here, but they are wasted in this movie, and I blame the formulaic and lazy script. If you spent $1 renting this at Redbox, you might want to join me in a class action suit to get your money back.
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Tween Movies - I have a daughter that goes with me to most movies, and sometimes I’ll let her pick the flick. Consequently, I’ve seen more than my fair share of tween movies — you know, take some star off of a Disney or Nickelodeon channel, write a script in an afternoon, and make tons of money while every 8- to 13-year-old girl grabs her allowance and gets dropped off at the mall theatre with a group of friends. I grade these movies on a curve, obviously, but I’ve also seen some pretty good “tween” movies over the years. “Easy A," “Bring It On," “The Princess Diaries” and “Bend It Like Beckham” are just a few of them that come to mind. Unfortunately, this field was pretty dismal in 2011. There were a lot of mediocre tween movies — not bad enough to warrant a failing grade on their own, but when reviewed together as a genre, the considerable lack of effort involved across movies warranted a “needs improvement” for the category. “Prom” is a movie that was so mundane that all I remember about it eight months later is that it involved that high school dance ritual. “Beastly” was a teenage version of that Disney tale with those talking candlesticks, but this version had such a rigid storyline there was nothing intriguing or unexpected on the way to the entirely routine ending. “Monte Carlo” was laughable in the attempts of the one lead character to fake an accent that ebbed and flowed based on the syllabic content of her dialogue.
A note to movie makers everywhere — do better. You’re involved in a medium that holds so much power to move us, to make us laugh, to make us want to be better people. Take that responsibility seriously and I’ll reward you with my hard-earned dollars at the theatre.
