Thoughts from the Usher Podium: Why Some of Your Favorite Movies Suck

About a month ago I audaciously, bravely, nay heroically divulged some of my Guiltiest Pleasures here on this very blog. I gave my dedicated readers (hi mom!) a Top Ten list of decidedly bad movies that nonetheless I enjoy and am willing to support. Now, as if my reputation weren't sullied enough, I think it is time to do the opposite (and piss off the rest of you). I shall give you a list of Top Ten movies everyone seems to like except me. Whatever dictum applied to my Guilty Pleasures, the opposite now becomes the rule here. These are films that are well loved by critics and audiences alike and are largely Box-Office successes.

10. Risky Business (1983)
Oh Tom Cruise, you were such a heartthrob when you started your meteoric rise as one of Hollywood's most bankable stars. Risky Business is fondly remembered as the star's breakthrough performance, a rich high school student with a penchant for listening to Bob Segar's Old Time Rock and Roll while in his underwear. What we often don't remember about this movie is the entire plot revolves around Cruise turning his parents' house into a brothel for a night.

Behold the face of total lack of self-reflection

There is certainly some unsavory gender politics in this film including the objectification of Rebecca De Mornay who at first seems to be in charge but is twiddled away by Cruise's advances and pimp Guido's (Joe Pantoliano) machinations. The satire (and yes it supposed to be a satire you cretin) is sharp but is wholly undone by the typical Hollywood happy ending. Finally while many remember the Soundtrack fondly, the Tangerine Dream bits by today's standards, now sound like you're playing a Sim City game with it's pulsing, mundane, New Wave vibe. Face it, unlike Tom Cruise, Risky Business simply hasn't aged well as entirely represented by our protagonist sitting in the middle of a Princeton interview spouting "sometimes you have to say what the f**k" is if it's a nugget of well-worn wisdom. Thanks the 80's; for giving an entire generation the collective attitude of Gordon Gekko.

9. Big Hero 6 (2014)
Big Hero 6 is a well beloved recent classic to be sure, yet the lesson it should have taught and was well on it's way to expounding was completely thrown out like yesterday's bath water halfway through the movie. Allow me to explain; in the beginning of the film our hero...Hiro is spending his days fighting robots instead of doing his homework and thinking about his future. His brother Tadashi convinces him he should put his mind and skills to better use by introducing Hiro to his friends at the University robotics center. Hiro is convinced he can do a lot of good by going to school and joins in on the Science Fair with his nano-bot technology. Message: become an engineer and save the world...then comes the next act.

On this scale, the level of disappointment is at about a 9

Tadashi dies and Hiro vows revenge on the mysterious man who started the fire that ended his brother's life and stole Hiro's technology. To do this he takes his brother's surviving research (a medical robot named Baymax) and turns him into a killing machine. Let me repeat; Hiro takes a robot meant to help people, a robot that is basically his only lasting connection to his deceased brother and says "bring the pain." Not only that, Hiro co-opts Tadashi's old friends, who likewise have incredibly useful research of their own and they all decide, being a superhero is more fun.

As you can imagine the lesson of the movie morphs into "revenge is bad, let go of your pain," but the superhero theatrics and the lack of resolution when it comes to Hiro returning to the University just takes away from actual friggin' heroes i.e. engineers. Engineers are people who dedicate their lives to inventing and improving on technology that actually benefits mankind. Leave it to Disney to completely ignore that aspect of the story and placates to pre-teens with dreams of one day becoming Batman.

8. Wanted (2008)
Speaking of pedantic wish fulfillment porn; let's talk about Wanted. In it James McAvoy plays Wesley a desk drone who discovers he has an interesting family history. Like his father before him, he joins a fraternity of assassins who kill based on the weaving of a supernatural loom (odd I know). The loom gives the assassins names of people who would potentially bring harm to the world and therefore must be destroyed. While reluctant at first, Wesley is convinced by the fraternity's leader Sloan (Morgan Freeman) and perfects his special abilities of superhuman strength, speed, and perception.

It's mind-blowing how bad this movie is!

This movie plays around with a hypothetical I'm sure we've all heard, if you had a time machine, would you kill Hitler? It's an interesting topic which unfortunately is completely undone by director Timur Bekmambetov. Have you never heard of him; just think Russian Michael Bay and that pretty much sums up his filmography which also includes Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter (2012). His frenetic, dynamic camerawork and distracting over-reliance on CG-effects is so incredibly annoying that it's nearly impossible to enjoy this movie. Even with the inclusion of Angelina Jolie, Common, Terence Stamp and Chris Pratt the entire thing falls flatter than a Waffle House pancake.

Is this Shakespeare or a Sublime album cover?

7. Romeo + Juliet (1996)
I promised myself only one Baz Luhrmann film and while Moulin Rouge! (2001) is more popular I despise Romeo + Juliet just a smidgen more. Part of it has to do with Hollywood's insistence that they modernize Shakespeare to unabashedly pander to the MTV generation but mostly it's the frenzied, hyper-delirious, hyper-hectic, hyper-hyper editing that can make any unwitting audience member fall into an epileptic seizure. While never updating the dialogue, Luhrmann decides to trim the fat of the play by allowing no one to enter or exeunt in any scene ever. Instead they say their lines and we cut to the regular progression of the play without any understanding of time or the space.

What's wrong with that exactly? Well concentrating every dose of drama without defusing the tension or allowing the material to breathe insures that nothing and I mean nothing sticks with you after the credits roll. For example, Leonardo DiCaprio's overwrought reaction to Mercutio's death is immediately followed by Claire Danes singing a tune and laying in bed. There's no context or dramatic pause, just members of the audience relieving their own tension with unintended laughter. Romeo + Juliet isn't a movie; it's a race to the finish line. It's a huckster trying to sell you something with you not realizing until it's too late, it's something you can live without.

Ferris Bueller: doing stupid things while driving before cellphones

6. Ferris Bueller's Day Off (1986)
The eighties wasn't a very good decade for popular teen movies; There I said it. We look on with rose-colored glasses at the works of John Hughes but even his seminal classic The Breakfast Club (1985) has aged into a listless melodrama. Still, I have reverence for the man. He did give a voice to teens when no one else was really engaging them. Yet despite this Ferris Bueller's Day Off I simply cannot give a pass to. Those who remember my Muddled Movie Morals article will know that my hatred for this movie has gone back quite a ways. Here's the excerpt from that article:

Ferris Bueller (Matthew Broderick) is probably one of the most gleefully egocentric main characters to ever exist in mainstream cinema. On the surface, Ferris is just a upper middle-class white boy who wants to have some fun. Nothing wrong so far except the fact that he's a psychopath. What really gets to me is his complete disregard for his friends; his lady Sloane (Mia Sara) and the deathly ill Cameron (Alan Ruck).

The day starts after Ferris pretends to be sick then calls Cameron who is at home bedridden. He doesn't want to go on an excursion which is reasonable given the fact he's white as a sheet, but Ferris basically bullies him into not only going, but boosting his dad's prized Ferrari. Sloane (yeah I didn't know that was her name either) is a bit more willing but certainly didn't have plans to skip school on that fateful day. She was likely shoehorned at the last minute because Cameron was too much of a damp towel to let loose in Chicago. You basically know the rest of the story, they go to the city, con their way into a four star restaurant, ruin a parade, total the car and Ferris gets away with everything. So the lesson is essentially, its okay to run amok and treat your friends like s**t; so long as you have a good time doing it.

5. Kingsman: The Secret Service (2014)
Kingman: The Secret Service is the story of a British hood named Eggsy (Taron Egerton) who is given the chance to prove his mettle as a member of an elite secret service organization. Colin Firth plays his mentor (codename: Galahad) because years ago Eggsy's father saved his life during a mission. While Eggsy is in training, an eccentric tech billionaire (Samuel L. Jackson) is in the final stages of his nefarious plan to stop global warming. Can the Kingmen stop him before he submerges the world in chaos?

Kingman is an overloaded male fantasy with a fatalistic view of human behavior and an insultingly out of touch, Anglos-know-best mentality. The action, while occasionally cool to look at, can't hide its hatred filled heart and its attempts at parody of the James Bond Series are, at the very most half-assed. Everyone seems to ignore the fact that if the events of the movie transpired, most of the world's leaders would be dead as would, like maybe a fourth of humanity. Yet all people ever seem to know or care about is the fact that they're coming up with a sequel. Oh please, dear God no!

Please no! Make it stop!

4. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974)
I make no secret of my distaste for horror movies. It's really a lose-lose in my book, either they don't scare me and I hate it because it didn't live up to its promise or, I am scared and I hate it because I don't like to be frightened. That said, I do watch some of the "classics" and always manage to find a few scenes I enjoy. Not so in the case of Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

The movie takes it's time to build, providing a passable pod of teenage characters we care for more than your average teen-slasher flick. Problem is all of them are terrible actors, I mean truly abysmal. Then within a single fifteen minute time-frame all but one are, well, massacred. Then we are left with Marilyn Burns whimpering while the sounds of animals bleat before their demise. The family perpetrating the massacre look on with excitement.

Texas Chainsaw Massacre marks the first time the feeling of disgust was purposely added into a movie with reckless abandon and in that regard the movie is an unbridled success. Yet even for using so little actual blood, the movie was just a foul experience worthy of a post-cinema house shower. With today's blood-filled shock horror dominating every corner of the genre, Texas Chainsaw Massacre is quite frankly too tame for today's audience, worthy only of a look-see to those who take the history of horror seriously.

3. Madagascar (2005)

Most movies have an inner logic to them that dictates the progression of the plot. Even movies with a man in a flying suit of iron and another in star-spangled spandex can't help but at least try to make sense to the public. That's why movies like the Madagascar movies (2005-2014) are so bloody annoying! They break the rules of their own inner logic so many times that you might as well just give up on paying attention and let the stupid sink in. There are plenty of examples though the most egregious involves Madagascar 3: Europe's Most Wanted (2012). In it, the principle animals, who mind you are still struggling to get back to New York City, make it from the Serengeti to Monaco in a single screen dissolve. No explanation on how they got through the Sahara or the Mediterranean Sea.

Answer to everything...snorkels

The first one, while not as ambitious as the others is still a grand waste of time. In it the animals are stuck on the island of Madagascar surrounded by lemurs. The villains are a pack of wild felines who do absolutely nothing of consequence and the character resolution of Alex the lion (Ben Stiller) is so patently lazy that you hardly need to bother. Who knew that a movie with such an interesting premise could ultimately lead to the moral: don't eat your friends. Good job movie, good job.

2. Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (2007)
Yes it's Johnny Depp once again teaming up with Tim Burton. Yes it's atmospheric and brooding like the goth kids in high school who used to smoke beneath the Football stadium bleachers. Yes it's got a great performance by the late great Alan Rickman. Here's a question for fans though; do you remember a single song from the soundtrack? Seriously, even the underwhelming Princess and the Frog (2009) had a few good tunes that stick with you; not so much with Sweeney Todd.

Sondheim-ize the crap out of the audience!

Sweeney Todd on stage is notoriously hard for professional singers. First it has the longevity of an opera yet the strong muscular tones of a Broadway show. There are a lot of leitmotifs throughout the movies and there are a lot of very interesting discords. I'm not knocking it, it's just very un-commercial to take this many risks with your material so you should probably get some great singers to pull it off. Unfortunately Johnny Depp and Alan Rickman are terrible singers. Helena Bonham Carter and Sacha Baron Cohen fair a little better but in reality no one and I mean no one can capture the fidelity Sondheim would have been looking for.

HAHAHAHAHA (facepalm)

1. Step Brothers (2008)
Seriously people, can we stop thinking Will Ferrell movies are funny? He made one good anarchistic comedy in 2004 and has since milked his Anchorman (2004) success into a cottage industry of utterly pointless low-brow comedies. More often than not Will Ferrell comedies seem to forget that the reason dialogue is funny is not because the words sound goofy but because whoever said them is a goof. The step-brothers in Step Brothers aren't funny, they're not interesting nor people we should root for; they're mean and stupid. The victims of their insufferable stupidity don't deserve them as a part of their lives; not the mother, not the father, not the annoying "grownup" step-brother with his seemingly perfect family.

I'm far from a prude too, I like vulgarity if it serves a purpose but in Step Brothers it's just there like a fox in a hen house. This movie is just a collection of mean taunts and ridiculously broad improv setups meant to be quoted by neanderthals by the company water-cooler (no doubt to block the realization that their own meaninglessness is a farce). If you want to watch a good movie with a similar conceit watch What About Bob? (1991), or Orange County (2002) or better yet just put a bucket over your head and have someone strike it repeatedly with a hammer. I'm sorry, was that too mean; so is Step Brothers!