The Big Picture's Ten Worst Films of 2008

There were more bad movies than good ones in 2008. Usually, the scales aren't that weighted. And just so you know how I come to rank movies one way or another, I begin right in the middle with Three Damn Dirty Apes. Most movies are slightly below average to slightly above average.

So, Three Apes is a good place to start. When the opening credits roll for anything, it's a Three Damn Dirty Ape movie. And then as it distinguishes itself or doesn't distinguish itself, the grade rises or falls. In most years, there are about the same Zero Damn Dirty Apes movies as there are Five Damn Dirty Apes movies. We don't give out too many Five Ape ratings, which would be an A+ or 10/10 on other scales. That's because there really aren't that many movies in any year that exceed the work of their own genres and achieve absolute greatness on every level. If it's a ten out of ten, there's nothing about it you'd change. It's "perfect." Well, I can think of things I'd change about most movies, so we reserve the Five Apes for special ocassions. Over the past two years, only five movies have hit that mark: Slumdog Millionaire, Frost/Nixon, Zodiac, The Bourne Ultimatum, and The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. Wouldn't change a stitch about any one of them. Conversely, a Zero Damn Dirty Ape movie means it's essentially an F-, or a 0/10. For a movie to have not one redeeming quality, not one scene that borders on entertaining, not one funny line of dialogue, nor one interesting camera angle, is very hard to achieve, as well. And we don't even dip to Zero Apes when those standards are met, if that's the right phrase. We look for movies that are in some way both incompetent and repugnant, films that lack any substance and professionalism and then on top of that are wrongheaded. In the past two years, we've had six movies that failed to register a single ape: Over Her Dead Body, Disaster Movie, The Love Guru, Redacted, I Think I Love My Wife, and The Condemned. So there's symmetry at the extremes, but where the awful films of 2008 take over is in the intermediate levels of hell; there are much fewer very good to great films from the past twelve months as there are very bad to awful. In other words, we saw more D- and F films than we did A- and A films. Our list of the worst of the year begins at the bottom of the barrel and works its way up through the sludge.
1 - Disaster Movie Where to begin? How about with the fact that this is the worst thing I've seen in ten years as a professional critic. The race for worst movie of the year isn't even close. This is in its own category. The only thing that comes close is Freddy Got Fingered, but since I walked out of that about 20 minutes in, I can't actually say it didn't get better. Devoid of humor, intelligence, story, and character development, Disaster Movie also has the worst possible pacing for a movie like this. Rather than getting in the "jokes" and moving on, this thing draws out what's supposed to be funny, perhaps because it knows that at first blush, nothing in this movie is funny. Why more of the unfunny is better than less, I have no idea. We've heard a lot of talk over the past week about Wall Street ponzi schemes. This entire collection of Movie movies is the Hollywood equivalent. The men and women responsible are con artists, selling you a bad bill of goods. The studios and filmmakers responsible don't give a continental damn about you. They don't want to entertain you, they don't want to engage you. They just want to steal your money. There are bad movies all the time, and some miss the mark while others are simply insipid. This is neither of those things. It is designed to be the least amount of movie it can be, drawing you in with appearances of spoofed movies in the trailers, when in fact, everything you see in the trailer exists in the movie for exactly the same amount of time. If Disaster Movie were attempting to be a satire, that would be one thing. All it's trying to do is rob you blind.

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Box Office - 'Dark Knight' Passes Half a Billion

The big story in a little weekend at the box office is once again The Dark Knight. In a mere 45 days, the film has made $502 million, according to new weekend estimates by Box Office Mojo, meaning it is only the second film in U.S. history to gross that much money. Titanic, of course, tops the list, nearly $100 million ahead of The Dark Knight.

It seems that whenever we mention to astounding success of this film, the most common reaction we get is, "But if you adjust for inflation..." There are several reasons that's not a valid argument. Look at the competitive landscape now as opposed to ten years ago when Titanic was making headlines and compiling records. Actually, you can't look at the competitive landscape then: As we've pointed out before, in the six months following Titanic's release, only five movies made over $50 million, and not one of them made $100 million. Titanic made $600 million because there was nothing else anyone wanted to see. Now, contrast that with The Dark Knight. By the time mid-September gets here, it will have faced four $100 million movies in less than two months, plus there's the carryover from Hancock ($50 million since The Dark Knight was released) and Journey to the Center of the Earth ($60 million since July 18th). Suddenly, it becomes abundantly clear that the Batman movie is, in fact, doing something that's never been done before. Consider that it will make close $100 million more than any summer movie in the past 10 years, and you'll begin to see how unprecedented this all is.

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IMDB Says 'Disaster Movie' is the Worst Movie of All Time

After sitting through over six years of awful movies, never moving from my stance that Swept Away was the worst I'd seen in years, I changed my tune this week. You see, I saw Disaster Movie. There had been many contenders, some unprofessionally made garbage, others completely misguided major studio fare, but neither Gigli nor Catwoman nor Pluto Nash nor Son of the Mask nor The Love Guru could reach the highest of lows. There is something different about Disaster Movie, which appears to purposely avoid being funny or perhaps more accurately, appears to purposely choose to be unfunny. There's no story, no good performances, no imagination, just a downpour of bad celebrity impressions - all of which have to be introduced to the audience - and the occasional nod to a disaster movie, which never amounts to anything. Finally, I had a new answer to the question, "What's the worst movie you've ever seen?" I can't count Freddy Got Fingered, because I walked out, the only time in my career I've made that statement. Outside of that possibility, I can say that in the past decade of reviewing movies, nothing I've seen touches Disaster Movie. And now IMDB voters are backing me up. The movie soared to the number one position on the Bottom 100 list on its opening weekend, surpassing the likes of Who's Your Caddy, Zombie Nation, and previous title holder, Ben & Arthur, whatever that is. Not counting my yet-to-be-cast vote of zero stars, Disaster Movie currently has an IMDB ranking of 1.3, which is fairly generous. Here's a look at the revised top ten: Let's keep it in its rightful place; if you've got an IMDB account, vote with your heart. I'd never ask you to manipulate your vote, but if you've seen it and if you thought a 1.3 is being too kind, let 'em know.

Box Office - 'Babylon A.D.' Barely Leads the Weakest Weekend in Five Months

It's been a while since we've seen numbers like this: The top five movies at the box office on Friday combined to make $13 million. That's all five of them. We discussed the Labor Day weekend and Hollywood's aversion to put out quality on the last unofficial weekend of summer in our Fearless Forecast on Thursday. These numbers back up our argument: If you release a Tropic Thunder here or a Step Brothers or a Mummy on Labor Day, do you think they'd make money? As it is, the race for the top spot is too close to call. After Friday's estimates, according to Box Office Mojo, Babylon A.D. leads Tropic Thunder by a mere $30,000. I think that will turn in favor of Tropic Thunder, because in its third weekend, that film should be more stable and consistent over the four days. The $3.1 million Babylon A.D. earned is the spike, the curious crowd. The House Bunny appears to have a better chance of holding down third place, with $2.6 million on Friday. There's some distance between that flick and both Traitor and The Dark Knight, which are trying to lock in a fourth place finish. Kudos to Anna Faris, who deserves better material after this. Death Race has plummeted to seventh place, while new release Disaster Movie appears headed for a four-day total in the $10 - $12 million range, which is $10 - $12 million more than it deserves. It's the worst movie in at least six years. How will these paltry numbers look after the four-day weekend? I still think Tropic Thunder will finish on top. Babylon A.D. might make a bit more money on Saturday than it did on Friday, but it will tail off sharply after that, and as I said, Tropic Thunder is steady, and shouldn't have a big dip or big gain over the next three days. The Dark Knight should edge out Traitor - it only trails the Don Cheadle thrilla by $10,000 after one day - for the same reason. Disaster Movie could sneak into the top five, but the bad reviews and the beaten dead horse will probably catch up to it and keep it where it is. What about The Dark Knight's total? Still going to hit $500 million this weekend, maybe $505 million after Monday. Worldwide, the summer's box office king will eclipse $900 million and might be in the top seven of all time internationally in another couple of weeks.

Disaster Movie

Starring Matt Lanter, Vanessa Minnillo, and Crista Flanagan
Directed by Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer
Rated PG-13

As a critic, sometimes you can treat a movie more harshly than it probably deserves. That's not possible with Disaster Movie. I may have a hard time describing how unmistakably and unrelentingly bad this motion picture is. In a weird way, I've been waiting for Disaster Movie for years. I can say without hesitation that it is one of the very worst movies I've ever seen, and the worst example of the medium I've reviewed since Swept Away back in 2002. It's probably worse than that film, in fact, because while Swept Away had terrible acting, a script that went nowhere, and a very questionable morality, at least it seems to be unaware of how bad it really is. Disaster Movie, on the other hand, comes across as almost proud of its lack of entertainment value and original thought. I do not share its pride. Spoofs have fallen off in recent years. When you look at the best comedies ever, three of them are outright genre spoofs - Blazing Saddles, Young Frankenstein, and Airplane! This generation is stuck with the Movie movies, a collection of lowest common denominator efforts like Epic Movie and Date Movie that send up particular films in their chosen genres and take aim at the fragile nature of tabloid celebrity to fill the gaps. But Disaster Movie isn't about disaster movies. The first "disaster" happens 25 minutes into a 90 minute film. (That is, if you don't count the existence of this movie as a disaster on its own.) Instead, we're...uh...treated (?) to a parade of unfunny movie and pop culture references, with everyone from Amy Winehouse to the Sex and the City girls being lampooned. Iron Man, Batman, The Incredible Hulk, and Indiana Jones get pie in the face, too, none of which, of course, has anything to do with the story. To be fair, there's no story to have anything to do with. Hannah Montana falls victim to this movie's dulled wit. Why 32-year-old Crista Flanagan is playing a 15-year-old is a reasonable question; couldn't the casting director find an affordable teenage actress to read those insipid lines? Elsewhere, Flava Flav, Jessica Simpson, and Dr. Phil are dressed down, and you know it's Dr. Phil because the actor providing the really awful impression of the TV counselor introduces himself as "your old friend, Dr. Phil." A tip for young comedians out there: If you have to introduce your impression, try selling real estate or something instead.There's no effort to weave these celebrity appearances into the story; they're simply being piled on top of one another, I guess, so you can see that this movie reads The National Enquirer and watches movie trailers. Somehow, that's a methodology. It's embarrassing that Lionsgate chooses to release these films. Do they feel good about it? I can't imagine anything but a very cynical production meeting in which it is decided to keep churning these things out every four months because someone with a corner office is reminded of the P.T. Barnum quote about a fool being born every minute. This is a movie made for idiots. Smart people won't enjoy it. They couldn't possibly. How can it be that something is this unfunny, this anti-entertaining? It's almost as if the filmmakers are purposely removing better material in favor of the kind of longwinded, outdated, imbecilic garbage served up in Disaster Movie. Vote with your wallet; don't see this damn movie.