Wednesday, December 31, 2008

Top 5 Duds of 2008

I guess the title of this post is self-explanatory. This is a year of many duds, but to save some of the other atrocious films the blushes, as per my tradition here, I'll only list down the worst 5 of the lot with no redeeming features. Watching paint dry would be more interesting than watching any of these dishonourable mentions in reverse chronological order:

5. Meet the Spartans / Disaster Movie
Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer. They should be banned from making another comedy, because it has been proven that they know nuts about bringing on the laughs, and are actually quite lazy filmmakers too. I wonder either they have an enormous trust fund to continue making movies, or these 2 duds of 2008, would already put investors off. Save film! Don't let them at it! Unless of course you want your intelligence to be insulted for 90 minutes (wait, they don't even last that long!)

3. Shaolin Girl
For starters, never get the cast to speak in a language they aren't fluent in, unless the story deliberately calls for it. Otherwise trying to pass someone off as conversationally sound, would become an unnecessary laughing stock. Once that tone is set, everything else goes downhill, as in this film. The icing of the cake is of course the ridiculous buildup and story development, and even more stupid is the ending, which challenged Chen Kaige's 2005 stinker The Promise as one of the most absurd, ever!

2. Linger
I guess Johnny To would also have an off day once in a while, and one would reckon that he'd probably needed to pay the bills which resulted in picking this film up for direction. The story's plain ridiculous, and save for the fans of Vic Chou who might still be stuck in the denial stage, this is something that's best not to allow to linger in your mind.

1. The Spirit Compendium
OK, so first films could be the learning ground where one could use to hone skills. But this film, even as a first film, was incredibly bad, with no sense of direction, a storyline going nowhere, insipid acting, and a WTF homo-unerotic moment thrown in just because. You might want to lambast me for being too harsh on a local movie and a director's first attempt, but my challenge to you would be to sit through this, and see how well you respond to it. And there's no refund on the minutes of you life ticking away...

No comments:

Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger...