Critically Loved Movies (That I Hate): American Beauty

American Beauty (1999) is the winner of five Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director (Sam Mendes), Best Actor (Kevin Spacey), Best Original Screenplay, and Best Cinematography. Additionally, it was nominated for Best Actress (Annette Benning), Best Film Editing, and Best Original Score. It boasts an 88% Fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes.  

Can a movie be narcissistic? I don’t mean the director, screenwriter, or actors; I’m talking about the movie itself. If the answer is yes, then surely American Beauty is the most self-obsessed movie in existence. Every single element is deeply in love with itself. Sam Mendes, not a bad director by any means (I’m the biggest apologist of Road to Perdition in North America), frames each shot as if he’s making the most important film in cinema history. While the direction is certainly overwrought, it’s near the bottom of the shit list in terms of American Beauty’s crimes. More problematic is Alan Ball’s screenplay, which flaunts itself as the cleverest American satire since Mark Twain put pen to paper, but is in fact full of grindingly obvious clichés. The problems begin with the premise. The ennui of the upper middle class is a topic that has been flogged far past the point of redundancy; it’s not beating a dead horse, it’s beating the bones of that horse’s distant descendants (Absurdly, Sam Mendes revisited this theme in Revolutionary Road, another film that spends its runtime groveling for an Oscar). Every aspect of the plot unfolds with equal parts pretentiousness and dullness. This is a movie that has a character unironically pontificating about a plastic bag floating in the wind. This is a movie where a middle-aged man’s sexual fantasies about a teenage girl begin and end with her covered in falling rose petals. This is a movie where a virulently homophobic Marine is revealed to be – gasp! – a self-loathing gay man himself. 

The 5 Worst Superhero Movies of the Modern Era

This summer will see the release of the two most hyped superhero movies since the genre re-exploded over a decade ago. The first, May’s The Avengers, is the culmination of five movies released over a four year period. The other highly anticipated release, July’s The Dark Knight Rises, is the final entry in Christopher Nolan’s acclaimed Batman trilogy. The previous entry, The Dark Knight, is one of the highest grossing films of all time. In addition to these, this summer also features the completely unnecessary Spiderman reboot as well as an equally unneeded Ghost Rider sequel. As mentioned, the superhero dominance of the world’s cinemas began over ten years ago, starting (in my estimation, anyway) with 1998’s Blade. Since then, the superhero genre has produced a handful of gems, innumerable mediocrities, and a few piles of kryptonite-studded shit. This post details the worst superhero movies squatted into theaters since 1998, the ones whose origins include getting bitten by a radioactive turd and gaining all the abilities thereof. 

The Worst Characters in Fiction: Mike Teevee

This past holiday season offered an opportunity to re-watch a classic of children’s cinema. As part of their Christmas programming (which begins around October and ends sometime in February), ABC Family recently aired Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, the timeless tale of a filthy urchin’s adventures in an insane child murderer’s whimsical confectionery emporium. Unlike many comparable kid’s movies from the same era, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory remains mandatory viewing even today. There are a number of reasons for this: the awesome soundtrack, Gene Wilder, the unbridled imagination, dwarfs covered in toxic body paint, etc. One element I’ve always been particularly taken with is the characters. In addition to being generally well-acted (especially for child performers), the characters are fully realized in an economical fashion. Nearly every kid character is introduced via news clips, and these scenes tell us everything we need to know about each character. But even their names give insight into their personalities and attributes, giving us an accurate impression of them before we hear them speak or see them act. Take “Charlie Bucket”, for example. “Charlie”, rather than Charles, is causal and unrefined, indicating that he comes from an underprivileged background. “Bucket” is a tool used by painters, construction workers, and other blue-collar types, further establishing him as financially disadvantaged. As a final example of the name’s powerful symbolic value, a bucket is also an object that Charlie and his kind are accustomed to bathing/defecating in. This unnecessarily dedicated analysis of names can be applied equally well to most of the other kids. Augustus Gloop is a morbidly obese Hun; his name sounds like the noise ice cream makes when it falls off the cone onto the sidewalk. Violet Beauregard is destined to become purple (well, blue actually, but whatever), and Veruca Salt sounds like the name of a greedy, rude bitch. None of this is especially subtle or clever, but it gets its point across. However, there’s one character whose name and personality overstep the generous boundary established by the movie’s surreal reality. I’m talking about Mike Mother Fucking Teevee. 

Ffffffffffffuck Mike Teevee

The 6 Worst Songs of 2011

On my previous, now-defunct blog, I used to write a monthly series that saw me brutally eviscerating or mildly praising the current chart toppers. Due to the untimely demise of that blog, I missed out on profiling the various and sundry terrible songs of 2011. This post is a roundup of the most atrocious songs of the year, organized in no particular order.

Note 1: The two criteria for this list were 1) the song must be irredeemably bad, and 2) the song had to enjoy the bulk of its popularity during 2011. So, for example, even though #6 was released as a single in 2010, it received most of its airplay in 2011, making it eligible for inclusion (it’s also fucking awful, fulfilling the other requirement for this list).

Note 2: I had originally planned this as a top 11, but since Clear Channel only plays approximately 40 unique songs per year, it was somewhat difficult to come up with a comprehensive list. I ensured that each artist only appeared once, for maximum variety (otherwise, this list could have exclusively been Rihanna songs). If an artist (like Rihanna) released multiple bad songs over the year, I tried to select the song that best captured that artist’s overall awfulness. There are some horrible songs missing from this list because I couldn’t think of anything funny or interesting to say about them. “Party Rock” by LMFAO is a war crime put to music, but I really can’t articulate why I hate it beyond that. 

Without further ado, I present to you, dear reader, the absolute worst songs of 2011: