In addition to reading books, I like to go to the movies. And while I’ve seen some great movies this year – Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, The Social Network, Kick-Ass – I’ve seen some real stinkers too.
Here they are, in no particular order, the stinkiest movies I saw this year.
The Lovely Bones. A HUGE disappointment because I loved this book so much. I was getting ready to have to watch an incredibly difficult scene, and the movie just totally glosses over it. One moment the girl is entering the murderous pedophile’s shack, the next she’s in heaven. Not that I need to see the scene in gruesome detail, but something like that can be done without showing much but still convey the horror.
Then the whole rest of the movie was basically the girl running around in heaven with other murdered girls, whereas the book focused a lot more on how her family dealt with her death.
Enter the Void. Boy’s on drugs in Tokyo. Boy does a drug deal. Boy gets killed in drug deal. Boy dies. Boy becomes ghost-thing that floats all over the city watching his sister have sex. Boy-ghost-thing keeps floating over city. And floating and floating and floating. He watches other people have sex. He enters a vagina. We see a giant penis. The End.
Monsters. Perhaps the least stinky of the stinkers. A promising premise: six years ago a NASA ship on its way back with alien life forms crashes in Mexico. The life forms propagate and take over that part of the country, now the Quaruntined Area. A man and woman need to cross the Quaruntined Area to get back to the U.S.
But! Why where they there in the first place? Why are we spending the whole movie listening to them talk? WHERE ARE THE MONSTERS? This movie is called Monsters and expect to see some monsters, goddammit! Oh, there’s a monster, and another. Attack, monsters, attack! No, they’re just getting it on. The End.
Prince of Persia. This literally stank because we sat near someone who had smelly feet, but the movie itself was pretty odoriferous too – from the extremely un-Persian Jake Gyllenhaal, to the lack of build-up or suspense, to the lame love story and cringingly awful banter, to the time traveling cop-out. Prince of Persia had it all – all that was bad.
Here’s hoping 2011 will bring far fewer stinkers (though they are fun to rant about).
i love your year in reviews! is there a music edition coming?
re: _lovely bones_, i was delighted that they glossed over the rap scene, b/c i find them especially troubling, and was more disturbed [spoiler alert] by the changes that were made to the timeline, with regard to when the mother left, and the fact that, in the film version, the asian girl turns out to be his other victim.
oh yeah, you’re totally right. there were big changes regarding the timeline as well, which i can’t remember now. i do remember going to the bookstore and glancing through the book to see if i was crazy for remembering it a different way.
i probably won’t do a music one as i barely know what’s going on in music. i may do a TV one though. :)
Agree also on Lovely Bones, but I disliked it more because of the ridiculousness that was all color and pretty and heaven. It reminded me too much of that Robin Williams suicide movie (see all I remember are colors and pretty and not the name of the movie). Plus Marky Mark as the dad drove me nuts.
i’m with you on that ridiculous heaven, and Marky Mary as the dad was weird. Rachel Weisz was underutilized. they left out that whole part in the book where she has an affair with the police guy too.
I refuse to see Lovely Bones. From what I’ve heard from everyone, it isn’t worth it. And I don’t want to ruin the book for myself.
I was so disappointed with Prince of Persia. I’ve been playing that game since I was a kid.