The Worst Movies I've Seen

Absolute worst movie of all time, and I've seen about half of the movies on the Bottom 100. It doesn't know what tone it wants, what audience it wants. Hans Zimmer's score is so cheesy and melodramatic that it's practically out of a soap opera. By far and away his worst score. It's over long. Characters motivations and arcs switch on a dime. History is ignored for sake of shallow jingoism. It's a movie I hate so much, that just the thought of the movie, the slightest thought, will put me in an uncontrollably bad mood. It's actually fascinating how pissed off this movie can suddenly make me.

If you don't know anything about this, Ralph Bakshi wrote a script that was supposed to be a hard-R rated horror film that mixed animation and live action about a half-toon/half-human monstrosity that goes on a murderous rampage. However, when he came to the set first day of filming, he found that producer Frank Mancuso, Jr. had the script secretly rewritten behind his back to become some "fish out of water" crap that was watered down to PG-13 and forced him to use this script. The script has nothing that connects, nothing is motivated. Things just happen randomly. Often we'll suddenly follow unfamiliar cartoon characters we haven't seen before or since while they do any random thing Bakshi could think of that the producer would let him do. The world building makes no sense. Brad Pitt, playing a WW2 veteran, accidentally kills his mother in a motorcycle accident, and is suddenly brought into the cartoon world for almost no reason. Then, we meet the main character in prison 50 years later drawing that world. But how could the world exist if he hasn't created it yet? Not only that, at one point, they mention the main character killed someone, and no one ever mentions it again. At the end, he suddenly turns into a cartoon superhero out of nowhere. Pitt dies, but that suddenly means that he turns into a cartoon as well. Not even the animation's good. Most of the cartoons lack shading, so they never blend in, and they don't match any of the live action materials or lighting. Often, crappy animation will suddenly play out in the middle of a scene in an attempt to make drawn out scenes feel like something's happening. Needless to say, Bakshi proceeded to punch Frank Mancuso, Jr. in the face. Honestly, the fact that he didn't kill him for using a script like this is charity. It didn't make things any better when Kim Basinger decided that she wanted this to be the kind of movie she could show children she visited in hospitals, and forced them to tone down things even more. Bare in mind, this is a movie where she grinds her ass right against Frank Sinatra, Jr's genitals and becomes human after having sex with Gabriel Byrne. Bakshi's never directed any theatrical film since, and has only done a couple of animated shorts and a live-action Jared Leto-led TV movie. I don't blame him. Apparently he's trying to get another project done, even though as of writing he's 79. Good for him.

The pleasure of bad dramas is that they go so over the top you can laugh at them. A bad comedy is worse because it's trying to be funny and you're just bored. I hate Richard Kelly. He's so overblown and manipulative it feels like if Michael Bay tried making a David Lynch film. That's why I hate Donnie Darko. And before you defend it to me, I guess I understand it as much as one could, but the thing about that movie that it's defenders don't mention or even realize is that it's first and foremost drying to be Regan-era satire. No one ever brings it up because it's so insignificant and shallow that it only amounts to "those Republicans, amirite?" Southland Tales is a movie where that was the only thing he had going through his mind when writing it, and he seems to think that that gives the movie any quality it needs. It's told in chapters, and starts at chapter 4. At first, I thought this was a joke at Star Wars, but no: the first three are told in a separate graphic novel that apparently your supposed to read beforehand. This movie is narrated by Justin Timberlake in this horrible southern accent that not only doesn't work for narration, but it's so clearly there because no one could figure out what was going on. And the message amounts to "Republicans... uh... Bush... Iraq.... OIL..." It's mostly a pastiche of those kind of stereotypes that about every middle school kid at that time tried to make because they remember it from "South Park," but don't know exactly what it means. A major plot point in the movie revolves around a Prop 69. Ha. The Script feels like some try hard mess written by that one kid in film studies who isn't a major and is just using this for an easy credit and remembers something about his professor saying something about "political relevancy" or whatever. At the last act, there's a flood of sudden plot exposition that has become legendary in how last minute it is. There's some fruition of a prophecy they've been talking about the whole movie, but suddenly it becomes about a second dimension and two beings meeting each other, and... wait, isn't this how Donnie Darko ended? Kelly seems to have added this element after Donnie Darko's success, either as an attempt for some sort of self-dignified "auteur stamp" or at the request of investors for something in the vein of Darko. It doesn't help all this that Kelly doesn't know how to write dialogue. It doesn't sound like what people would say, but he also can't write it awkward and precise enough that it's intentionally funny and interesting like David Lynch can. It's stiff and awkward like it's trying to be that, but fails. Examples: "Teen horniness is not a crime." "Pimps don't commit suicide." "If you don't let me suck your dick, I'm going to kill myself." "You're such a fuck-ass." "You can go suck a fuck." (okay, those last two are from Donnie Darko) And before you say, "but the movie's message... it's satire," let me tell you that messages aren't movies, and satire is the weakest defense for a bad movie. Movies have messages. But concentrate on what I'm saying -- MOVIES. HAVE. MESSAGES. The first word in that sentence is Movies, and the last is Message. The movie itself comes first. Any message is secondary, and the film making techniques are atrocious. All the performances shallow, stiff, and directionless, but almost every shot is horrendously over-exposed (funny enough, one of my complaints about Donnie Darko is that it's under-exposed). The CG is atrocious. All of Richard Kelly's movies are like this, and it feels like pandering to kids who want to feel like they're deeper than they actually are. My biggest pet peave is a filmmaker or producer or studio who don't respect an audience's intelligence, or their familiarity with other movies, or their emotions. However, I don't think his movies make sense to anyone but Richard Kelly himself. It feels like an autistic kid who paints scribbles that only make sense to him. And before you start spamming me, yes I have seen the Cannes Cut. It's much the same problem, only instead of being infuriatingly bloated and edited by a blender, it's a boring, soulless, pretentious behemoth that inhibits no emotion whatsoever. It's said when the theatrical cut is the preferred version, because at least that gets some sort of emotion out of me, even if it is seething rage. The Moby score's nice though. And the camera is in focus. Mostly. So, I guess that means it earns a 1/10.

I have so many problems with this that, honestly, everytime I've sat down to write them out, there's too many that I'm convinced that I'd have to write an entire book about it to properly cover everything wrong with it.

This movie is somehow more racist than "Birth of a Nation." Hell, it's probably more racist than "Triumph of the Will." To who? Well, pretty much everyone involved. I don't think there's a single race here that isn't reduced to the most bitter stereotype imaginable. And the fact that it's deliberately this offensive and yet still tries to be cloyingly sentimental is somehow the most disturbing thing about it. Most comedies that try to be offensive as possible still have this sense that they're exaggerating and they don't really feel what they're saying. "South Park" comes to mind, particularly because of how it uses extreme stereotypes to comment on society as a whole, but even something like "Freddy Got Finger" is just blind antagonism that just wants you to get mad more than anything. This, however, is an entirely different story. Trying to add a sense of sentimentality to this story implies sincerity on the parts of the filmmakers, and that makes this movie come off as the genuine and true emotions of the filmmakers. This is how they feel about Asian people. This is how they feel about black people. This is how they feel about white people, Mexican people, old people, young people, fat people, skinny people, people who just want to look at things. It's probably just a shameless corporate product meant to manipulate the lowest common denominator into having an emotion, but even if this is inadvertent, it makes me feel like I'm looking into the darkest a man's soul could hold.

This isn't solely why this is a bad movie -- it's a 1/10 purely for being the cheapest of comedies that can't even be saved by Rick Baker's make-up -- but these reasons are why the is the worst Eddie Murphy movie, and by a mile at that. If there was ever a movie that could lose someone an Oscar, it'd be this.

This movie is incomprehensible nothingness, like the closest someone has come to making something that looks, smells, and quacks like a movie without actually making a movie. It is a jumbled series of scenes loosely strung together with the faintest pretense of being surrealist in a vain attempt to hide the fact that no one associated with this had any ideas to begin with. It's a plot that was like if someone took the story synopsis of "Lost Highway," cut out a few words, and decided to play Mad Libs with it while on a crystal meth binge. I wouldn't be surprised if there was another script in place for another movie with the same cast and crew, but something happened at the last minute that caused that to fall through and they decided to throw something together as fast as they could with the locations they had secured. Even if they knew it wasn't going to be good, the thought must have been "at least we have proof that we can make a movie, and that'll help us with getting a job later." Except they made this, and it won't. If I can say one thing about this movie, the DP actually has a flare for lighting night scenes, and those aren't easy to do. However, he does struggle quite a bit with day scenes being over-exposed and looks like he didn't color grade it at all.

I have a friend that's worked on the selection board for a few festivals. This movie was submitted, and in all his years of doing that, this is the only movie they gave up with when they realized that there was 20 minutes left in this 75 minute film. Absolutely no one in the room wanted to take it anymore, not even out of courtesy to the filmmakers as it was that infuriatingly boring. Now, I should probably talk about the story. There isn't one. A guy kind of likes playing video games and taking a nap, his wife is a little mad at him, so he acts like a kid and decides to leave them. Honestly, that sounds a lot more interesting than what actually happens. It's a whole lot of nothing. And before you say, "that's what they intended, to show how he's wasting his life on nothing," let me ask you, do you want to spend 75 minutes of a guy doing nothing? This movie not only has very little happening, but any big parts of the story (a man leaving his wife) happen off-screen and we're watching a lot of the director "shooting the rodeo" (filming a lot of nothing happening for the sake of filling a feature runtime). There is a point where it looks like the main character is about to rape a woman (spoiler: he doesn't), and the sick thing is I was intrigued that I would have a real feeling of hate towards this guy because it looked as though the director was trying to elicit an emotion from me that wasn't shear boredom instead of doing the bare minimum for making a movie. But, no, nothing happened, and I'm left watching a character study of a man with no character other than he's a 40 year old brat with no personality. Whoopie. The directing to this has no craft. It's exclusively singles with heavy bokeh, every character lopped off into one shot, and not once do we get a proper wide shot. It's lazy directing that essentially is forcing the editor to do the real work since he's absolutely clueless. There is no spatial relations, and it's claustrophobic in the absolute worst possible way. I was convinced this was a senior thesis film for film school. Even on that scale, I couldn't see this getting any better than a C+. I went on the director's IMDb, and found that he's directed one other movie, and it sounds EXACTLY the same as this movie, only replace Video Games with struggling animator. He's a one-trick pony if the one trick was him asking you "Is this your card?" And it isn't. The infuriating part is that at one point, Matt Johnson (The Dirties, Operation Avalanche, Nirvanna the Band the Show) shows up in a bit part, one of my favorite directors working today, one who is actually interesting with a style that is equal parts intriguing, entertaining, and even revolutionary, making me outright regret choosing this over watching anything by him.

Talk about a movie with no respect for its audience. "Patch Adams" still stands among the most cloying movies I've ever seen in my life. The worst film I've ever seen is "Pearl Harbor," which I hate because nothing connects tonally or logically, even consecutive lines in a scene that make it a saccharine, disjointed mess. "Patch Adams" is much the same way, though not as aggressive as that movie. I have no grudge against "Based on True Story" types that stray from fact as long as it adds to something and represents the essence of the subject in the proper manner. Everything they do in this movie not only heavily deviates from Patch Adams' life, but makes him out to be one of the most irresponsible, worthless, criminally insane jackasses ever put to screen -- and we're supposed to like him. There's a "heartwarming" scene where we're supposed to be charmed by Patch and his friends stealing supplies from a hospital, because they're sticking it to the man... by preventing trained professionals from properly treating their patients. The movie also has a notoriously phony love story where Patch has a love interest waaaaaay below Robin Williams' age who has some tragic backstory involving child molestation, and in one scene she suddenly gets killed by a mad patient with a shotgun. Now, that did happen... to Patch Adams' MALE best friend who he was not romantically involved with in any way, and this situation leads to a crisis of faith with a scene that so cheesily tries to rip off the end of "Forrest Gump" that this film should be classified as an expired dairy product. But, what really gives me a grudge against this movie is Robin Williams -- ideally, this should be the role he was born to play, but not only does he lay it on so thick, this type of movie was so misguided that I kind of hated Robin Williams for a couple of years. In fact, for two years, I deliberately avoided watching anything with him in it because I felt that betrayed by him. Then he died, and started to give him a second chance -- and all this fantastic work I missed because of this one terrible decision. Is that my fault? Sure, but if you get burnt by a stove, you're going to be sticking to the microwave for a while. This is the kind of movie that people who hate "Forrest Gump" think that movie is. It lays it on thick, has no sense of serious drama or how to effectively deal with any of the comedy. It's the worst comedy Robin Williams has ever been in, it's the worst drama he's ever been in. It's the worst movie he's ever been in, and easily one of the ten worst I've ever seen in my life. This movie is more disgusting to me than any single one of the "Saw" films.

"Quintet" is such a failure of a movie that it's the first time I've ever watched a film wishing it was pan-and-scanned.

I was once told that Robert Altman made no "okay" movies -- they were either good, or they were utter dogshit. "Quintet" is a movie so blatantly misconceived and bloated that from the first shot, it plays like a producer's nightmare. A miscast movie star without the benefit of charisma to save him, elaborate production design, and a freezing cold set. In fact, if you listen carefully to the score of this movie, you may be able to hear the sound of some poor executive screaming his lungs out in the distant Hollywood hills.

Oh, and add to that list of conundrums some of the worst cinematography I've ever seen, some so bad it could only have come from the late '70s. Now, I'm not one for pro-mist filters -- they're those camera filters that give that blurry, "soap opera" effect that makes it look like you've had one drink too many -- but this entire movie was filmed with this strange, distorted vignette around the frame that I genuinely wishing I found an old pan-and-scanned VHS, so at least I wouldn't be seeing it all the time. The closest thing I can compare it to is "Battlefield Earth" and its dutch angles. A couple are cool, but after the realization sets in that the entire movie is going to be like this, it wares off quick and only gets annoying. It makes the entire movie look like a flashback from another movie.

Now, about the plot -- there are genuinely few movies where I can't really tell you what happened, but "Quintet" might be the first where I never even bothered to pay attention. Not only is the sound mixing so grainy that the dialogue is at times incomprehensible, but so many lines are mumbled or delivered through thick accents that most of what I got from the movie was by visuals only -- the movie seems to be a "Children of Men" story set in a post-apocalyptic future where a new ice age has set in and Paul Newman is helping a traveling pregnant woman as he makes his way back to some city, there's an explosion, some tournament.... some things happen. And that's about all I can remember.

"Quintet" is one of those movies that's so boring that you begin to forget about it as you're watching it. It doesn't help that you cast Paul Newman, one of the most charismatic movie stars of his time, or any time for that matter, only to give him few lines and no personality whatsoever. This is not a movie you watch to revel in how bad it is, nor is it one you watch to brag that you lived to tell the tale. The boredom is so thick that it really feels as though the life is being physically drained from you as you watch it. And yet, the worst thing about the movie seems to be that in spite of all this, Altman seems to be trying to tell a story about the importance of entertainment to distract us from disaster -- I'm not sure if this movie could be a bigger "fuck you" if Altman just came on screen and flipped us off for two straight hours.

The only redeeming things about the movie is some of the inspiration with the production design, and maybe parts of the score, parts where it seems to get experimental, only to quickly fall into one of those stock '70s sci-fi scores. And even then, any goodwill those bought the movie is fading on me real quick. The rest of the movie is so crushing that giving this movie any higher score would be an insult to every other movie I've ever given a 2/10.

I tried so many times to write this review, trying to explain just how utterly betrayed I felt by Jason Reitman, but ultimately, this entire movie can be summed up by this --

There's a character in here who's making actual child pornography, and instead of going to federal prison like they should, they're expected to just learn from that and suddenly be a responsible parent. It writes off a serious felony like that, and doesn't even begin to understand how truly terrible this character is.

That character, played by Judy Greer in one of her few bad roles, is just one of many poorly written characters in this movie. Every person in this movie is an idiot, and not even a consistent one at that. That character is supposed to be a functioning adult, but seems to have the intelligence of Paris Hilton. She acts fairly normal in public, but then takes risqué photos of her underage daughter and sells them on the internet. We get hints of a backstory that this may have something to do with her being sexually groomed by her daughter's father, but that's about as shallow as a puddle, and makes even less sense why she didn't understand the ramifications of her actions.

This movie fills itself to the brim of people who can act, have talent, and rarely fuck up, and just about every single actor in this gives a career-worst performance so bad that it feels like they were a person who worked at the school they filmed this in and that the director decided to cast "for realism's sake." Ansel Elgort, who I've seen carry a movie against way more experienced actors than this, spends every second of his screentime like it's his first time in front of a camera. He's supposed to be this former quarterback jock, and yet not only is he not remotely built for that, but he behaves like the quiet, introverted kids who would be playing Magic the Gathering at lunchtime.

This is one of those movies with several different intersecting storylines, trying for what I can only guess is something like Magnolia, but landing nowhere close. It's evident that the novel this is based off of is one of those books where the author didn't have one concrete idea, so he took several half-baked short story ideas he had and tried creating an omnibus narrative that was supposed to be some grand statement on every facet of the internet age...

Any writers or wannabes reading this -- DON'T DO THIS. You don't need to create some grand statement with just one movie or story. This never works. It just creates pretentious messes with no structure whatsoever. You could just mine those ideas for separate stories on their own and create an oeuvre that addresses those concerns, but when you try for something that sums up everything, you only end up saying nothing.

This movie is no better example of that. This movie has characters that will turn on a dime just to suit their misguided stories and have some poignant ending that if I called "half-assed" would be an insult to all the hard hours my rectum has put in for me. It's nothing but deus ex machina after deus ex machina, trying to act like these characters learned something when really, all of them are disgusting morons who have no idea what's really going on, who never realize how awful they are, and it's just as evident that the writers don't know that either.

This movie doesn't understand anything about the internet -- hell, it's a classic case of scared parents trying to get their torches and pitchforks together and blame all the problems with their children "on that evil internet, that confounded contraption of the devil!" It has all the writing talent and understanding of a Lifetime Original Movie. It even has an ending similar to the infamous ending of the notoriously awful TV movie Cyberbully. Walking away from this thing, it's bewildering that anyone associated with this had any sort of talent whatsoever, let alone accomplished anything of worth.

Jason Reitman, you directed Thank You For Smoking, one of my favorite movies and what I consider to be one of the best scripts ever written. But, when I finished this, I sat there, stunned for about five minutes in pure silence, until my lips were finally ready to admit "goddamn, t-t-that was one of the worst movies I've ever seen." The whole time I was watching this, I had a minor headache forming, as if even my brain was physically struggling to make it through this.

Also, J.K. Simmons is bad in this movie, and there's a special level in Hell for people who fuck up that bad.

William Eggleston is probably one of the most influential photographers of the modern era, and I was really interested in seeing a movie documenting his process....

I still want to see that. Someone make that movie. This was just a bunch of camcorder shots of him wandering around, most of the time never saying anything (and in a couple notable sequences, you can even hear the cameraman CHEWING HIS FUCKING GUM. This is the first time I've ever been so offended by a flaw in a movie that it genuinely made me punch my wall.).

Occasionally, they cut away to biographical rundowns that feel like a community college film studies professor reading Eggleston's Wikipedia page.... If the guy's right there, clearly you have access to him, why not, at the very least, have him tell his own life story? Why do you have to be the one to narrate the movie?

But no, instead of interviewing him about his work, instead of focusing on his process, you force me to watch a scene that runs for eight whole minutes as he argues with his drunken friend, neither of whom I can hear because a) she's sucking on a lollipop, and b) they're listening to R.E.M. loudly blaring in the background and Eggleston's across the room. (They subtitle him, but not her, so I can still barely follow what they're talking about)

Hell, even when you actually see his photos, because the rest of the movie was shot in like 360p, it has to be edited at that resolution, so you're seeing some of this incredible work at some of the lowest bitrates you could find right now.

This actually most resembles raw behind-the-scenes footage studios release for journalists to edit as B-roll, except those would make for a better movie because those are a bunch of directors and actors trying to create an exciting scene, not an old guy quietly looking through a camera. I have learned more about this guy in ten minute YouTube videos that this 83 minute long "professionally-made" documentary film. This movie is so desperate for filler to even get up to that runtime that I'm absolutely staggered that none of this was done. The closest we get to any of this is when we finally meet Eggleston's wife (67 minutes in to this 83 minute long movie) where she brings out a bunch of old photos of him and they start talking about people he knew over the years. So, of course that scene lasts five minutes, three minutes shorter than the R.E.M. scene.

And I've seen movies from this director that I've liked! He did a pretty good movie about Stanley Milgram that had some interesting style to it. This guy has a head on his shoulders. What made him think this was okay?

On the bright side, it does have the distinction of being the first documentary I've given a 1/10. Honestly, I was gonna throw it a bone and give it a 2 because it at least tried to tell me about Eggleston's life, but then the gum thing happened and it threw all my goodwill out the window. (Seriously, it's not just that you were chewing gum right next to the microphone, but also that you chose to keep all the audio from those scenes instead of replacing it with one of your voiceover bits, or just cutting them out)

First and foremost, this """"""very serious movie"""""" about aborigines, white indoctrinism, and government sanctioned kidnapping has the exact same title card as "Kangaroo Jack." Baz Luhrmann thinks you're an idiot, and this is not an exaggeration. If you've ever watched Mark Cousins' "The Story of Film: An Odyssey," one of his interview subjects is Luhrmann himself and he specifically goes off on how "it's important to constantly remind people what's going on because then they don't have to waste brain power remembering what's going on in the plot." That's a paraphrase because I couldn't find the immediate clip without rewatching the entire fifteen hour long documentary, but the point still stands that he thinks the audience isn't smart enough to keep basic track of the plot and if anything, this bullshit philosophy leaks to every single goddamn aspect of his filmmaking style. He thinks you're too stupid to pay attention, so he cuts about as fast as you can blink in a way that almost completely obliterates the pacing and makes just about every conversation impossible to follow. And yet, even though he cuts about as fast as a blender, he's so desperate for attention that he crams as much information into the frame as he possibly can even though he doesn't hold on the shot long enough for you to begin to notice any of it, which is really unfortunate because one of the few things I appreciate about his movies is that they have really nice lighting. I would say it's style over substance, but it's not style. It's fetishistic excess being passed off as art. He's what Danny Boyle must look like to snobs who fundamentally think that "the MTV style" is toxic filmmaking. If you don't believe that, look at this movie, a """serious""" """""film""""" about aborigine culture about two white people who really want to fuck. And they try to rescue an aborigine kid and his grandfather from the government. This is one of the most basic white savior narratives I could have seen, and even then it's portrayed in such a goofy manner that one of Nicole Kidman's first scenes has an entire conversation where she says nothing but over-the-top, "why I never" gasps. It is then followed by a scene where she gushes over seeing a kangaroo for the first time, only for it to be shot in front of her and she then proceeds to scream straight into camera in a wide angle close-up. Practically every scene has a new tone, most of them directly conflicting with the tone of the last. No character is filled out like a three dimensional person. If they're not an archetype, they're an outdated racial stereotype, and even though Baz is a native Australian, most characters in this either talk like Crocodile Dundee or the Crocodile Hunter. The worst movie I've ever seen is Michael Bay's "Pearl Harbor." There's about twenty different reasons I could list on why that's the case, but I only bring this up because "Australia" basically fails on most of the same basic levels, it's just this doesn't come off nearly as infuriating. In short, both are historically inaccurate Oscar Bait films made by a director who lacks any basic respect for an audience's intelligence and thus presents a film with a deathly serious topic in which just about every scene is a tonally inconsistent nightmare that instead of trying to mimic the prestige pictures they so want to be, they instead choose to rip-off stupid, mainstream blockbusters to simultaneously have as much mainstream appeal as possible. "Pearl Harbor" wants to be "Saving Private Ryan," but tells it like "Top Gun" meets "Days of Our Lives" meets "Armageddon" meets "Braveheart." "Australia" wants to be "Dances with Wolves" for Australians (which I honestly don't think is fundamentally a bad idea, at least if you want to present this era of history to a world who won't know much about it), but tells it like "Moulin Rouge," or more so like "The African Queen" meets Nicholas Sparks meets Michael Bay Super Bowl ads meets the really racist parts of "Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom" meets "Gone with the Wind" meets "It Happened One Night" meets the shittier parts of Peter Jackson's "King Kong." It's one thing to make a stupid movie. It's another thing to make a movie for an audience who you assume is stupid. It's a whole other thing when you try to make a movie trying to teach a very serious subject, and you not only tell it to me like I'm five, but to feed it to me like it's McDonald's that's been blended into sludge. "Green Book" is not a good movie and "Avatar" is just okay, but this is the kind of movie that some people have made those other two out to be, and honestly something like this is more worth the fight. I also want to mention this; I don't fundamentally think Baz Luhrmann is a filmmaker who lacks any talent whatsoever. I think he's a really promising filmmaker with an extremely toxic attitude towards audiences and that's polluted every aspect of his work. The problem with him as a director stems from a lack of discipline, a lack of introspection, and just a lack of respect. He's the kind of guy that if he just shut up, sat down, and thought about his movies for a good ten minutes, then he could completely revamp his style in a way that actually works, or at least forge some new disciplines to work by that could help him improve in the future. I actually think the biggest thing holding him back is that he actually does have a fanbase who want movies like this, and much in the same way that's polluted Tim Burton for the last 25 years, he's not a director who makes films, but a brand that manufactures things.

Season 4 (remix) Yes, this is kind of a cop out, but seriously, this is quite possibly the worst season of television I've ever seen. The first three seasons might possibly be the best show ever on television. Season 4 came way too long, and the only real writer to come back was series creator Mitch Hurwitz. Hurwitz may be the person least responsible for the series' success. The style of the show was Ron Howard's idea, the directing was developed by the Russo Brothers, and the labyrinthine writing structure was really the result of that exact writer's room. There was one quote from film school that really stuck with me. My film studies professor was talking about George Lucas, and "Apocalypse Now Redux," and warned all directing students that sometimes, you understand your creation the least. The fourth season alone is one of the most disappointing things any fan could ever receive. The episodes were too long, long stretches of it became boring because there weren't any proper b-stories to cut to when one story got weak, and their solutions to the aging were ridiculously cheap, I don't even think they tried to cover up Michael Cera's blatant age difference, Jason Bateman became fervently unlikable, and of course, I hated the cliffhanger ending they gave the season instead of trying to tie off the loose ends they set up in the original series in some vein attempt for a movie. There's a phrase for this: "counting your chickens before they hatch." Even though I consider this season a massive disappointment, there were still episodes I liked. The Gob episodes were really good, and the one episode they gave Maeby was great. In my mind, I would give the season a 4/10, but actually tallying it up episode by episode, it would be a 6/10. Then came the remix. I was excited because this would fix my issue with the lack of b-stories by editing the stories along each other, and it is by far and away one of the worst things I've ever seen made by people who call themselves professionals. The editing is atrocious. It is so brutally obvious that they either: a) didn't have access to the original footage, or b) they were too damn lazy to actually go through the footage. So, it's edited from what they already had assembled from the original episodes, which is no better than a fan edit. However, in the way they strung the stories together, it is the kind of job that would flunk a first year editing student. There's no stories for the episodes. There's no point A to point B. It's a "series of scenes happening," and several times do scenes lose all meaning because their context has been completely removed. And, the fact that the show's on Netflix makes the re-edit even more insulting, because they edited it in a way that it would if it was on network TV, so Ron Howard's constantly reminding us of stuff that happened in the previous episode even though this is a season you're supposed to binge, so it ends up incredibly insulting to the audience's intelligence. They shot the fourth season on the RED, in 5K, but I imagine like usual they did the Intermediate in 2K as it was going on Netflix anyway. This is especially worrying because they decided to do these godawful digital pan and zooms that are completely useless, especially compared to the original footage. You can easily see the pixels blowing out, even if you don't usually notice that sort of thing. There is a part in the new first episode where Henry Winkler is in it, and though my memory is pretty fuzzy, I'm pretty sure he wasn't originally in there because I can clearly see the greenscreen lines around him, the shades of green reflected in his costume (by the way, you can easily color correct that out), and of course, the fact that he's unnaturally in focus. But, this doesn't even compare to the blatantly insulting ADR that doesn't have any mixing, any attempt to sound natural. Most of the time it's from David Cross, and it will instantly cut to a shot where you can't see his mouth moving, but can clearly hear the hard echo that makes me assume they just called him at home and recorded it on an iPhone in a room that wasn't soundproofed at all. There are movies I've seen on Mystery Science Theater 3000 with more competent dubbing. This is godawful to say, but I genuinely mean this: if anyone was actually paid to put this together, I may slice open a wrist, because there's no justice in this world that people are desperately trying to get into this business, and work this amateurish is passed off by a major company. Mitch Hurwitz is the George Lucas of television, except there actually exists a competent re-edit of "The Phantom Menace." The difference is that was done by a fan who didn't release it until it could be compared to an actual Star Wars film, while this season feels like it was done by Hurwitz over a month by himself on FCPX the first time he ever used it, and had blindly convinced himself that it was actually good. Much like the Cannes vs. Theatrical Cuts of "Southland Tales," it takes something that is convoluted and soulless, albeit more coherent, and turns it into a blended mess that only inhibits seething rage.

Duh.

Wes Anderson really ruined an entire generation of indie directors, didn't he?

I've seen a couple people call this "anti-humor" -- just because something has no concept of comic timing, delivery, or pacing doesn't mean it's anti-humor. Anti-humor still requires timing, it requires exaggeration for it to come around and be funny again. This isn't even trying to be anti-humor. It's just not funny. Honestly, it's so unfunny that I'm partially convinced anyone in charge of this movie has never heard a joke in their life.

Part of me wants to say this isn't that bad looking of a movie, but the direction is is mismanaged, the blocking is so static, the pacing is so malformed, and the performances are so tired that not only does this genuinely feel worse than a student film, but honestly......

Fuck it, this might be the first movie I've seen where if I sat for the entire runtime having a migraine while staring at a blank wall, then I would probably enjoy myself about as much as I did when watching this film.

And yet a lot of the lighting is pretty good. But, then again I like or even love most of these actors, and almost none of them feel like they know what they're doing in their scenes. This movie feels so devoid of talent that whatever talent it somehow got its hands on is completely squandered.

Garfield does a lot of good work preventing this from taking the number one spot by a landslide.

This is the most forgettable movie I've ever seen and some of the most incompetent camera direction ever put into a movie.

Close to being the worst horror movie I've ever seen. It's at least second to "Ice Cream Man" now.

Kevin Smith is the Al Bundy of directors.

I wish the "Good Will Hunting 2" scene wasn't actually funny so I could give this the 1/10 the rest of it deserves and rank this so much higher. Hold on to your inner child, don't desperately cling to your lazy teenage side.

Probably one of the top 4 worst directed movies I've ever seen.