Saturday, January 07, 2023

10 Worst films of 2022 (Ann and Stan)

At the end of last week, Stan's "2022 in film (Ann and Stan)" and Ann's "2022 in film (Ann and Stan)" went up at their sites.  This week, they looked at the worst, see Ann's "Worst films of 2022" and Stan's "10 Worst films of 2022" below:



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That's  Isaiah's THE WORLD TODAY JUST NUTS "THE PEW loses it."   Ann and Stan here with one more joint-post following up on our "2022 in film (Ann and Stan)" is their annual look at the best in film. and Stan's "2022 in film (Ann and Stan)


 We offered  with out look at the year's finest in film.  However, a few of you e-mailed asking about the worst because we had floated the idea of doing our picks for the top three films and using the rest of our space to go over the train wrecks.  Well here are the ten worst films of 2022.


10) HALLOWEEN ENDS.  

Hideous film.  It was supposed to be the end of the series and the ads promised you a confrontation between Jamie Lee Curtis' Lauri and the monster Jason.  Instead, the film was about Jamie Lee's granddaughter falling in love with a bad boy who was more evil than Jason and who torments Jason.  The big confrontation for Laurie comes in the last 20 or so minutes of the film.  Throughout, you are strung along waiting to see what you paid to see but being forced to endure one dull courtship scene after another that played out like a really bad teen soap opera on THE CW.  And insult to Laurie, an insult to Jamie Lee and one of the worst films of 2023.

9) LIGHTYEAR.

There is only one Buzz and it's Tim Allen.  DISNEY tried to deny that they weren't punishing Tim but they fired Roseanne Barr for her politics (don't e-mail us 'racism, we're both African-American and we don't see her joke as racist) and they dropped Tim's hit show LAST MAN STANDING.  It didn't take Patricia Heaton calling DISNEY out for everyone to realize that Tim was pushed aside because of his politics.  LIGHTYEAR didn't just flop.  It left a bad taste in the mouth that has seriously effected other DISNEY animated releases.  They need to address that issue and they need to stop hiring people based on political stands.  We are not calling on the corporation to change their guidelines for employees and the workplace.  We actually applaud those stands.  But we are saying that it was a mistake to deny Tim the role he made famous and it is a mistake to hire or not hire based on someone's politics.  If they're right for the role, they need to be cast in the role.

8) THE FABLEMANS.

After the bomb that was Steven Spielberg's WEST SIDE STORY, you'd think the great Spielberg would come back with something strong.  Instead, he offers this nonsense.  Michelle Williams gives a lousy performance, looks lousy on the screen and is a case of Jew-face.  We don't approve of Black-face.  Why would we approve of Jew-face?  Look her up, his mother looked nothing like Michelle Williams.  Why did he cast her?  If he saw his mother as beautiful, that's fine.  We're all allowed to see our parents in our way.  But if he saw her as beautiful, he should have cast someone like Nicole Kidman.  By 2016, Michelle's looks were gone.  And so were any surprises she might deliver.  Her performances have become a standard cliche.  She draws attention to herself as if to say, "Look at me, I'm acting."  Well, she's trying to at any rate.  Awful film sunk by an awful actress -- a deserved box office bomb. A big stinking bomb.  

7) AMSTERDAM.

AMSTERDAM was another big box office bomb.  And let's make a point here. BROS was the best movie of 2022.  When it wasn't selling tickets, the right-wing was screaming bomb and cackling with glee.  It ended up making back over half its production budget (14.8 million ticket sales).  Seven weeks after it was released, THE FABLEMANS still hasn't made that much in ticket sales nor has AMSTERDAM. And those two films had production budgets much higher than the $20 million for BROS.  They have not made back half of their production budget.  These were true bombs.  And these films deserved to bomb.  A<STERDAM,  from rage-a-holic David O. Russell, was supposed to be about the attempted overthrow of the US government -- a plot Smedley Butler exposed (see his book WAR IS A RACKET) and one that British outlets (including the BBC) will note Prescott Bush was a part of.  But David makes a dull film that rewrites history and turns  As C.I. noted, everything about it was off including the dialogue which in no way reflects the period and goes to what a poor writer David is.  Speaking of bombs, if you're looking for BABLYON, you won't find it on this list.  Why?  Like most of North America, we avoided the film.  We're only detailing films we actually saw. 


6) THE BANSHEES OF IRISHERIN.

Sadly, we saw this.  At least we caught it on HBO and didn't waste money on tickets.  It's the tale of ended friendship and, honestly, if we were Brendan Gleeson and had to endure all those cow eye moments from Colin Farrell, we would have ended the friendship as well.  What might have made the film work?  Uh, maybe if you set the film in 1923, the people act like it's 1923.  You don't impose the present upon 100 years ago.  It could have been a modern film.  But artiste Martin McDonagh chose the setting (he wrote the script, he directed the film) and there's no reason for it.  He brings nothing of 1923 to the film.  A huge waste of time.


5) TOP GUN: MAVERICK.

For years, Tom was groomed by older men.  Robert Duval in DAYS OF THUNDER, Paul Newman in THE COLOR OF MONEY, Dustin Hoffman in RAIN MAN . . . Paul Rudd once compared these men to Walter Brennan during his hey day.  And now?  Tom has become Walter Brennan.  And grasp that by the time Brennan was making John Ford's MY DARLING CLEMENTINE with Henry Fonda, Brennan was only 52.  That's eight years younger -- younger -- than Tom Cruise is right now.  Letting the US military dictate the script, Tom was able to get the aerial footage that is the film's only selling point.  A woman's in the cast (Jennifer Coolidge) but Tom was more convincing back in 1986 pretending to be attracted to Kelly McGillis.  It's really something to grasp that the only woman Tom ever had chemistry with onscreen was Rebecca De Mornay.  Even sadder, the only person he ever seemed to be in love with onscreen was little Jonathan Lipnicki in 1996's JERRY MAGUIRE.   He's the male Joan Crawford whose hung in by his teeth and nails for five decades of stardom.  A real shame that he has so little to show for it.  Tom's lucky that AVATAR: THE WAY OF WATER was released so late in the year.  Otherwise TOP GUN: MAVERICK would not be the biggest moneymaker of 2022.  Released in the US on December 16th and the film now has a global box office of $1,401 million.  $1,488 million is how much Tom's movie grossed -- and it took a month after its US release for it to gross a billion world wide (14 days was how long it took AVATAR: THE WAY OF WATER to reach that mark).  (Both films were released earlier outside the North American market.)  


4) THE WOMAN KING.

Everything about this film was false -- including the 'heroes' of the film who, in reality, were capturing Africans and selling them off into slavery.  False is also the notion that fatso Viola Davis could be a warrior with that pudgy body.  Angela Bassett, in BLACK PANTHER: WAKANDA FOREVER, looked formidable.  Viola?  She just look fat.  And squat.  And lazy.  And that kind of describes her performance as well.  The film never reached 70 million in ticket sales in North America.  A woman who looked like a warrior might have delivered at the box office.  Oh, well, maybe Viola can find work in one of Tyler Perry's films.


3) TILL.

Grandma Whoopi Goldberg just knew she knew what kids today wanted and it was a bad film about Emmett Till.  In her ivory castle, Whoopi doesn't know about any events impacting African-Americans that took place after the 60s.  Corn on the Boomer!  So she took time off from attacking the Jews to promote this bad film she produced and tried to act in.  One critic, you may remember, felt her performance would have been more convincing without that fat suit.  This resulted in our favorite movie moment of 2022 that was not in a movie: Whoopie fuming on THE VIEW that she wasn't wearing a fat suit.  Oh, Whoopi, next time just say "Thank you" and be grateful that most people haven't seen you in over a decade and have no idea just how overweight you've become.  The film's a bomb.  9 million world wide in ticket sales. 


2) DON'T WORRY DARLING.

It's a story as old Hollywood, a young ingenue puts out for a director with the hope of a film career.  The only twist?  The director was a woman: Olivia Wilde.  The ingenue?  The hairless like a sphynx Harry Styles.  Harry, next time you fork it over for a role, have a talented director mold you.  Olivia is not a talented director.  She's now demonstrated that with two films -- two films that North America has largely ignored.  Even when she posed -- what director doesn't -- for the cover of VANITY FAIR with her ass exposed and in the air.  The good news is Harry's dumped her.  The bad news is that MY POLICEMAN goes a long way towards arguing that Harry's best filmwork just isn't up to speed.  

1) MARRY ME.

We both, wrongly, thought this was the film Armie Hammer got replaced on.  That, we felt, explained how the dud that is Owen Wilson ended up in this romantic comedy.   He offered no chemistry.  He's a bad actor.  And no one wants Jennifer Lopez to end up with someone so milquetoast.  However, this bad film is far worse than we realized.  SHOTGUN WEDDING is the film Armie dropped out of.  That film will debut on AMAZON at the end of the month.  So that means this film got a greenlight by an idiot who wanted to pair Jennifer with Owen.  By the way, grasp that 2022 was the year we found out that Armie's wife was working with the women floating allegations against him and her messages that have now been published show her orchestrating the whole thing to get custody of the kids.  It's past time Hollywood stopped ostracizing Armie.


This is C.I.'s "Iraq snapshot:"