What was your worst movie of 2009?

I thought they at least gave the chief-of-staff (the most conservative character) a fair say and some reason. For instance, when it's revealed that those who were going to reveal the disaster have been killed by the government, he argues very logically for doing so.

I find it especially funny that after the scientist's empassioned plea to open the boats--over the reasoned objections of the chief-of-staff--and let the people on, the boat DAMN NEAR SINKS and is only saved because of forces completely beyond the scientist's control. I would've loved a final shot of the boat going under and the chief-of-staff giving the scientist a long, hard glare...

Oh, don't get me wrong. I saw all of those defects as well. But one doesn't see a movie like 2012 for those reasons. One sees it in order to watch a spectacular movie about the (near) end of the world. And on that score it definitely delivered.

P.S. I love it that, if you do the math, the continent of Asia must've moved eastward at something like 1000 miles per hour in order to meet the Antanov halfway across the Pacific.

Agreed. There was no acting, there was no emotion. The plot was absolute shit. "Hey, the world is ending, but my ex-wife, she is so hot!" Gimme a break! Worst movie of the year.

I did not care for The Men Who Stare at Goats. It was funny for about 45 minutes and then took a sharp turn for the worse.

Worst of the movies I've seen this year:

Knowing (Space Angels? Really?)
Terminator Salvation (Utterly Pointless)
Inglorious Basterds (Flame me all you want, I was underwhelmed)
2012 (or as Mrs. Plow calls it, "Cuss at your kids: The Movie")

I didn't see New Moon because I'm not a 13 year old girl.

Yeah, that Inglorious Basterds was great!

My favorite comedic scene was when Aldo (Brad Pitt) explained that he spoke the best Italian of the Basterds, then the German actress explained how Germans don't have an ear for Italian, and then when at the theatre Aldo proceeds to demonstrate his Italian with "bongiorno" with such an obvious and awful American accent in greeting the "Hunter" (Landa) who proceeds to speak in what sounded like perfect Italian.

Bon-Jour-No.

Almost farce. Comedic gold, imo. Great stuff, and it finally vaulted Pitt to the top of pile of my faves ('vaulted' is probably an overstatement since he's been near the top since 12 Monkeys anyway).

While certainly not among my favorite, I don't think it was that bad... but I can see how some may think so.

Really? that was one of my favorites. I'm not shocked because I've heard this before, but I just don't get it. I thought it was great regardless of it's flaws. It's not as great as T2, but certainly better than T3 or many more recent summer action flicks.

I liked Salvation enough to make it my first ever Blu Ray purchase.

Yes, I also liked the "Italian hand gesture" that was made by the other two when they were introduced. :santa_grin:

To me, Salvation was just epic disappointment. I really like Bale's work, but he totally mailed it in for this flick. He even slipped out of his accent several times, which is unusual for him. Speaking of slipping out of accents, so did the other guy playing the terminator with a heart.

The sad part is that I can understand why Bale was so lackluster. The script marginalized his character (the most important character in the Terminator universe) in favor of a nobody playing a tired gimmick (the "good" robot). It just wasn't what I was expecting and hoping for and I can never forgive it for that.

This is true... The movie is more about Sam Worthington's Terminator than John Connor, but I'd hardly call him marginalized... It makes total sense when you consider the original ending that was changed at the last minute. I hope at some point, we get to see the original ending.

I really enjoyed Wolverine...though the graphics weren't that great at all.

When he was in the bathroom at the old couples house and his claws grow from his hand....aghh...I cringed in that scene. They couldn't have feathered his claws a little better than that? come on.

I liked Wolverine, too. Especially his woman.

My problem with the adamantium claws is that they are so perfectly shaped as actual knife blades, when they were evidently formed over irregular bone claws. How the fuck does that work?

I didn't get the hate for Wolverine; I thought it was terrific.

Well then, allow me to retort.

I have made no secret that the "old warrior redemption" story is one of my favorite dynamics. There have been some classics in the genre, I'll cite Shane, Man On Fire, and Gran Torino as some of the best examples. They all share certain characteristics.
First, that protagonist carry some dark burden, some past sin that haunts him to this day. Shane was a gunslinger of mysterious motivations. Denzel's character (Creasy) was a CIA operative, and of course Walt Kowalski was a war veteran, decorated for reasons he found repugnant. If we can't see their sins in action, it has to be spelled out for us somehow, so that we understand the depth of their fall from grace.
Second, the protagonist must find some sort of happiness, some karmic MacGuffin that a measure of happiness to our hero. It can be of the romantic sort, for all my examples it was a child.
Finally of course our heroes must be redeemed, in part by the very sort of actions that led to their dishonor in the first place. There has to be that moment when they stand at the precipice, and make peace with the fact that they are killers, that they are bad men, and only through their sins can they save/avenge whatever it is that has brought the sunlight back into their lives.

Here's my problem with Wolverine, we never saw his sins. Yeah, we saw a fun montage of wars, big deal, heroes fight in wars. He was always on the right side too. Why not put him in an enemy uniform, his brother was leading him around wasn't he? Hardly a moral role model. We saw him balk at slaughtering an African village. So what? Are we to believe that in the decades of shady government service that this was the first time Wolverine refused to slaughter innocents? What made this one special? Why not speak up when he was knocking off Central American freedom fighters the week before? No, all we see is noble Wolverine, fightin for right and kickin ass. Then five minutes later he's got a woman and a chainsaw. Now it's Sixpack Wolverine, fuckin chicks and cuttin trees. He's quickly redeemed for whatever past sins he was responsible for. We never saw the sins! They're really not even alluded to. In fact other members of the team seem just as likable and happy go lucky as Wolverine. Heck, where was the sometimes unlikable bitter asshole from the first X-men?

A redemption without sin is no redemption at all, just a fun story of some kickass dude with claws in his hands. Ash hated Terminator Salvation, I feel just as betrayed by this. Now with Logan's memory wipe, and the confirmed sequel which deals with Wolverine in Japan, perhaps we will get some sort of Seven Samuraiesque story of how Logan rose from an amoral man to the eventual hero of X-men 1, at least I'm hopeful.

^Though I find so much of your post agreeable, I have to take issue with one thing: no one said that the Wolverine story was required to be one of redemption. I'll agree that it may have made for a deeper movie if it was, but it wasn't.

I'll agree, and came to the same point typing that response. But I was led astray by an awesome trailer, which to me showed much more pain and strife, much more back story, and more context for Wolverines life before the adamantium injection.

[YT="All the things in your life...."]LPmbGzQaOCs[/YT]

Some of the Wolverine story apparently came from the popular 6-issue Marvel miniseries called Origins that finally gave backstory to what basically started out as a minor character introduced in just another Hulk comic.

I never read Origins (though I do remember his start from Hulk 181) so I can't speak to how much of his backstory is driven by redemption, but I get what 'flow is saying because Wolverine's story as founding member of the new X-men was partly shaped as that of a potentially vicious murderer trying to fit into the CCA Marvel-world where killing the bad guys isn't an option.

[And the Disney takeover of Marvel took effect yesterday so now Wolvie's going to have to go Impact (or whatever the mature Marvel line is) if he's gonna want to keep on killing.] I'd have graded Wolverine Origins movie a B+, I liked it.

Can't look past Surrogates, with Bruce Wilis, for the worst of the year.

I didn't see a whole lot of movies in the theater last year. Of the ones I did see, Terminator Salvation was the worst. I actually fell asleep in the theater.

Of course, part of that might have been the theater. I was out of town and I saw it in an "adults-only dinner theater." Your chair was a super comfy leather recliner with a fold away table. The food was good and it was actually very reasonably priced.

I got a movie, an appetizer, an entree (meat and two veggies), a small popcorn, two beers, and a coke for $30+tax and tip.

I don't know about 2009, but even I thought that Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle was pretty bad.

:flow2:

The film paramount accuses of being Star Trek.

Terrible rape of a once great fictional universe.

^I know I'm going to regret asking this, but where was the 'terrible rape of a once great fictional universe'?

There were certainly bits I wasn't too impressed with - Scotty's little Disney-pal, Kirks immediate ascension to Captain at the end - but there has yet to be a film of any franchise that could be described as perfect. By and large I found it to be a fun movie, on a par with TVH, and pretty much in the spirit of TOS with a bit of wacky science, a bit of action, some warmth and shot through with humour.

It was, quite simply, the best STAR TREK movie in years and exactly what the franchise needed if it wanted to stay alive.

ecky, been there and done that and I'm not going to try to educate a person who sits in the class with his fingers in his ears.

we are borg, it aint alive - it's become a zombified corpse so disfigures, it barely resembles what it was in life.

I just don't get the hate - I was very wary of the movie, and went in fully prepared to hate it, but it won me over.

Seems to me a lot of Trek fans look at TOS with rose-tinted specs, and the entire fandom has been squabbling over which version is 'valid' since TWoK came out.

It was a film that didn't know what it was, either a reboot or a continuation within an alternate reality. It was 2 hours of abhrams trying to justify its own existence sheltered behind the cloak of a badly written action adventure story featuring all those old crutches that B&B used to lean on.

About the only good thing about it was the younger actors portrayal of Spock.

What set real Star Trek and its 3 spin offs apart from other science fiction was that it treated the audience as if they had brains, that they could grasp something more than your typical star wars type adventure. The writers told engaging stories that were thoughtful and contained something for the audience to intellectually chew on.

It was that which made Trek so unique, a cult following and was the main factor that inspired people to actively save the show from the scrap heap.

Okay so you may just want to be entertained, fair enough but Trek was more than just entertainment, now its just another soulless franchise exploited for greed.

It was a reboot using an alternate reality. I'd have preferred a proper reboot too, more clean, but what we got was fine.

Now that about Trek treating it's audience as if they had brains isn't entirely true is it? Yes, you had some real top notch tales, but then we also moments where we led around by the nose - Yangs and Kohms? That was treating the audience as if they were dense! You had your Space! Monster! Of! The! Week! moments - salt vampires, giant amoebas... Not exactly 2001 A Space Odyssey are they?

Yes, Trek has had a lot of thoughtful storylines, but it's also had a lot of bunk in all it's incarnations.

Oh, and as for it being 'soullessly exploited'? What do you call Roddenberry writing lyrics explicitly to take money from Courages theme? That was from the start!

A reasonable percentage of Trek is intelligent sci-fi, but a larger percentage is out-and-out entertainment. If you want to cast that aside, even TOS would only contain a season of episodes in your 'personal canon'

Oh, I'd also argue that the new film was 'dumb' - it used the time travel element from 'Tomorrow is Yesterday' - amazingly TOS managed its fair share of time travel stories without B&B doing the writing - the timeline changes discussions we saw in stories like 'City on the Edge of Forever' (what do you know, another time travel story!) and action like we saw in... Well, pretty much every TOS episode. How many ripped shirts did Kirk go through again?

Pretty much every negative aspect I hear about the new movie can be easily pointed at TOS too if you want to get choosy...

Funny, I went in expecting/hoping to love it and it just left me :santa_shocked: at just how silly it was. It was the characters of Star Trek put into a big dumb Transformers-bad story.

What, like travelling back in time to grab some whales?

Or finding some aliens who've stolen your first officers brain?

How about being transported to Robin Hood Universe by a demigod?

Maybe being going all Fantastic Journey and zapping some Jem'Hadar in your suddenly shrunken starship?

Or even walking through a giant stone ringpiece into the past?

Silly like that?