DAJKS's (And Everyone Else's) Worst of 2014 (baumer starts pg 6)

[baumer]

Godzilla is almost as bad as I, Frank but a masterpiece compared to Tammy.

[Empire]

Godzilla is almost as bad as I, Frank but a masterpiece compared to Tammy.

I still need to watch Tammy just to see how truly horrible it is.

[baumer]

Since no one else is doing this, I'll do mine now.

[baumer]

15) The Expendables 3:  Yes, it pains me to put this on my worst list, but unfortunately it's there.  I can't deny the complete fuck up that Stallone and company did with this one.  Blessed with a terrific cast, a decent script that gave some funny one liners to some of the characters and some decent action, it is all wasted as Stallone forgot what made the first one so good.  Instead he gave us a bunch of "kids" no one cares about and it seems he did so just so that he could get some Rambo jokes into the film.  And the biggest mistake he made was under utilizing Mel Gibson, who is clearly the best part of the movie.  If fact, he basically under utilizes everyone in the film.  If you want to read the note that I wrote to Stallone, and posted it on his twitter feed, here is the link:  http://forums.boxofficetheory.com/index.php?/topic/15745-the-expendables-3-2014/

 

Fun fact:  When Stallone and Ford first meet in the movie, Harrison is in a Ford automobile.  

 

[baumer]

14) The Babadook:  This is the most I have been disappointed in a film in a long time, even more than Expendables 3.  Now for those of you who have not seen this and want to, please be forewarned there are heavy spoilers here......ok, good.

 

I think films like this are too pedantic for their own good.  When you start asking the audience to figure EVERYTHING out, and not offering up any answers at all, you have gone too far.  In this film, we are supposed to understand that all of this is in the protagonist's head.  We are supposed to understand that she has been traumatized by the death of her husband 7 years ago, that her son is a living nightmare and her sister is so much of a cunt that she manifests the Babadook in her head.  The book, the nightmares, the images, the sounds, all of it is just her imagination.  Then at the end she uses Nancy's Freddy Krueger diss and tells herself that it isn't real and then everything goes back to normal.  Sorry, but not quite my tempo.

 

Fun fact:  Among the high profile supporters of the film is William Friedkin, director of the Exorcist, who is quoted as saying, "I've never seen a film more terrifying than the Babadook."

 

[baumer]

13) The Giver:  I have no idea what this film is trying to say, nor do I care.  It's something about repressing your memories because they are too difficult to deal with and because of this, humans are better off without knowing the truth.  There's all kinds of metaphors here and all kinds if "hidden meanings" and all of them are a bunch of bullshit.  I'm not sure when Jeff Bridges began to sound like the Emperor after he kills Mace Windu in Revenge of the Sith, but he sounds like this in every movie now.  This is the same guy who played the Dude.  Now he grumbles and gurgles every word.  I walked out of this film thinking the actress was hot and Meryl was horrible.  I've only thought Meryl was horrible in one other movie and I blame that on her trying acid for the first time so she could dance around like a hick in Osage August County or whatever the hell its called.

 

This is the first film Bridges and Streep have worked on together.  

 

[Ethan Hunt]

The Giver is probably the worst book I've ever read. Never saw the movie for that reason.

[baumer]

12) Maleficent:  Another film just not quite my tempo.  A fairy tale with the Dame Jolie in the title role. Too many films this year have taken stories we all know and then tried to put their own spin on them, three of them made my top 15 worst of the year.  The only good thing about this is Angie hamming it up and Elle Fanning being a better actor than what she should be at her age.  The rest is hooey.  Didn't like the characters, didn't laugh, really bad example it tries to set out for all the young girls watching and ultimately a boring mess.  

 

Fun Fact:  Richard Zanuck, of JAWS fame, was offered to produce this film before his death in 2012.

 

[baumer]

11) Oculus:  This should be higher on my list, but there are some really bad films ahead of this one.  There's one great scene at the beginning of the film where it shows how much research the main character did to discover that the mirror is evil.  It was fascinating and she told it perfectly.  It's all down hill from there.  Here's another film that never really tells you why the mirror is evil or why it can do what it does.  There's really no logic or reason for it.  It just can because the script needs it to.  It's contrived (which is fine, all stories have been done before), and worse than not really making any sense is that it's not scary.  This is a bad year for horror.  Oculus is one of the main offenders.

 

Fun Fact:  During the auction where the mirror is sold the auctioneer mentions that the mirror was acquired from the Levesque Estate. WWE Superstar HHH's real name is Paul Levesque and WWE Studios is one of the producers of this film.

 

[baumer]

10) Exodus:  Oh boy.  150 million dollars of what?  I'm not sure what they spent the money on.  This is another story that takes liberties with the source material and tries to make their own spin on things.  There is one kind of redeeming thing in this film and that is John Turturro's hilariously bad performance as Seti.  He will part of some kind of drinking game in the future.  And it's not his fault.  This film is just a mess and it starts with the director and the story.  It's so bad that Sigourney Weaver shows up for about 2 minutes and her only lines are about wanting Moses dead.  Then she's never heard from again.

 

Fun Fact:  Banned in Morocco and Egypt

 

Here's one scene Sigourney is in....there aren't many others:

 

[baumer]

9) Lego Movie:  Another film that is just too clever for its own good.  Fast, silly, boring and relentless is what comes to mind when describing this film.  You get to laugh when you see the cameos.  But that's all it has going for it.  I'll leave this one alone as I know most of the dear readers love this film.  But it was a terrible experience for me,

 

Fun Fact:  Han and C3PO make an appearance

 

[baumer]

More later.

[Blankments]

Like your list so far except for one film but you probably predicted that lol

[baumer]

8) Noah:  WTF were these film makers thinking this year when they took well known Biblical stories and not just put their own spin on it but turned the stories completely upside down.  In this film, director Darren Aronofsky turns Noah into a psychotic, raving lunatic.  He is not a sympathetic character and he essentially turns into a murderer, even going so far as to wanting to kill his own family.  Then Anthony Hopkins shows up as a wizard who lives in the mountains who can make young women who were once infertile, fertile.  It's a total mess.  The one and only good thing about the film is the work from Hermoine.  She's fantastic.  

 

Fun fact:  Emma Watson and Logan Lerman previously appeared together in The Perks of Being a Wallflower (2012). Emma Watson, who is British, had to speak in an American accent for Perks. Logan Lerman, an American had to speak in a British accent for Noah....even though this doesn't take place anywhere near Britain, apparently everyone was British in this version of the movie.

 

[baumer]

7) Paranormal Activity:  The Marked Ones:  I understand the business side of Hollywood.  I understand why trilogies become 4 movies when the last book or story gets split in two.  I understand why WB took a 300 page book and made it into three movies.  I understand why sequels are made and I understand the need to make more Paranormal Activities.  But the game is up.  The first two PA's were brilliant.  They scared the hell out of me.  The third was still good.  But the fourth ran out of ideas and at the end they introduced witches to the story.  Now we have plutonium introduced, a Delorean as well.  It's time to end this.  If they promised me that the next film would be the last one and that the Hunter story would be explained, I'd gladly plop down ten bucks to see it.  But this film series has run out of ideas and they have run out of steam.

 

Fun Fact:  The only Paranormal Activity film not to open in October.

 

[baumer]

6) Think Like a Man Too:  Or, also known as, "The film series in which Kevin Hart was a supporting character, not a main one but they changed that to capitalize on his new popularity."  But that title was too long so they scrapped it.  There is so much wrong with this film.  The original was funny and it had characters we could relate to and it had a strong story and it gave plenty of opportunity for all the characters to tell their story.  This one simply focuses on Kevin Hart.  It forgets about the other guys, you know, the ones that we all loved from the first. I believe Hart is on borrowed time.  I mean, everyone has a shelf life in Hollywood, but Hart will be forgotten about in five years.  He's a funny guy but he makes a lot of bad movies.  This is one of the worst of the year for him, but not his worst.

 

Fun Fact:  Filmed on location in Caesar's Palace:

 

 

Edited January 4, 2015 by baumer

[baumer]

5) Ride Along:  See the comments for Think Like a Man Too.  Just one bad joke after another.  Ice Cube plays Doughboy in every film he's in now.  The police captain in 22 Jump Street?  Doughboy.  Lottery Ticket?  Doughboy if he lived to be 70.  Ride Along?  Doughboy if he had a sister.  Just a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad movie.

 

Fun Fact:  Third time Cube and Laurence Fishburn have worked together.  The first two were on Boyz N The Hood and Higher Learning.  

 

[baumer]

4) Godzilla:  I wanted to put this as number one....I really wanted to.  But the number one film is so much worse than this, it's like it's got its own category of bad films.  But onto Godzilla.  

 

I'm just going to repost what I said about it in the summer, there's nothing more to add.

 

The reason why Jaws works so well is because even though you don't see the monster, you know he's there and then when you finally do, in that iconic "bigger boat" moment, from that moment on, you are in a little bit of shock at the shear size of the shark.  But to make a monster movie work, you need strong actors, a strong story and people you care about.  Godzilla had none of that.  I can't believe they killed off Binoche and Cranston so early.  Cranston was at least interesting with his conspiracy theories and his wining and wailing.  When he died the film went downhill.  It became boring.  

 

Aaron Taylor Johnson was horrible.  He was really good in the Kick Ass films so I blame this on the director and the script writer.  They just gave him nothing to work with.  And Ken Watannabe just stared off into space the whole time, he looked confused or constipated the whole time.  Every shot his mouth is wide open, like he's discovering a new breed of dinosaur.  

 

The destruction is nothing new.  We've seen it all before in films like Transformers and Avengers.  You can do anything now on computer so it wasn't impressive.  And the base jumping scene needed some Michael Bay stuff.  There was just so much the film could have done better.

 

The plot of the film is pretty flimsy and all that's left is three monsters.  The battles between them were really tame.  There were some good things that happened, like when Godzilla breathes fire or whatever into one of it's mouths.  That was cool.  But when you have a film called Godzilla, I expect it to have a lot more of Godzilla in it.  This film was about characters I didn't care about, it had military psycho-babble, a father/son relationship that went nowhere and to make matters worse they killed off their best character 30 minutes into the film.

 

 

 

Fun fact:  Godzilla is so bad that it is rated a 6.6 on imdb.  It's obvious Satan has something to do with the making of the film.

 

 

[baumer]

3) Transcendence:  HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.  That's all.

 

Fun Fact:  Ewan McGregor, Tom Hardy and Kate Winslet all turned down roles due to "Scheduling conflicts".  I think they read the script and then ran as fast as they could away from this project.

 

[baumer]

There's a special place in hell for these next two films.