Saturday, January 11, 2020

Dan's 2019 Movie Rankings: The Bottom 10

2019 is officially in the books. You know what that means: it is time for my end of the year movie ranking! You don’t have to hide your excitement: I know that this is something that everyone has been waiting for with bated breath. Since I am a lazy son of a bitch who doesn’t feel like taking the time to individually rank all 97 movies I watched in 2019, I am going to take the easy way out and just do a bottom ten and a top ten. I hope you’re okay with that because that is what I am doing and nothing is going to change my mind.

We’re going to start at the bottom with the ten worst movies I watched in 2019. These aren’t necessarily movies that came out in 2019, but they are movies that I simply watched at some point during the calendar year. For suspense’s sake, I am going to do my ranking from #10 to #1, with #1 being the worst movie I watched of the year and #10 being the least offensive of the 10 worst movies I watched. Now that we have that cleared up I am going to begin. Okay?



#10: A Silent Voice


I’m not going to knock this movie too much, since I feel that I didn’t give it a fair shake. Most people I know really like this movie. I came into it with an open mind. Based on the description of the movie and the fact that many people say it is emotionally hard-hitting, I expected to love it. I don’t know what happened, but my interest in A Silent Voice waned just a few minutes into the movie and I found myself looking at my phone, browsing Facebook and playing games while the movie played in the background. Seeing as how this is a subtitled film, it would be an understatement to say that I missed a LOT of what was going on because I wasn’t reading what anyone was saying.

I will give this movie another shot at some point in the future, because I do feel as if it is something I would enjoy. But as far as my 2019 viewing experience goes, this was one of the more forgettable films I watched all year.


#9: Apostle


This movie falls under the same kind of generic umbrella as A Silent Voice. Cool concept. I’d heard a lot of good things about the movie. I came into it with high hopes and expecting greatness, but instead found myself losing interest and looking more at my phone than the movie itself. This isn’t necessarily the movie’s fault that I didn’t have a good time with it. My attention span is notoriously short, and I should have done a better job at following things, but for whatever reason, I did not. Could be because the movie sucked. Could be because I wasn’t in the right frame of mind at the time to watch it. The only way to find out is to watch it again at some point in the future. Will I though? I don’t know. Life is too short to waste on something I didn’t even enjoy the first time around.



#8: Tomb Raider


Now that we’ve got a few movies I can’t remember out of the way, time to move on to things I actively didn’t like. While this movie is certainly better than the Angelina Jolie movies that came out in the early 2000s, that doesn’t mean it is any good. I wouldn’t even say Tomb Raider is necessarily that bad, just disappointing. Being a big fan of the video games, I was looking forward to Tomb Raider’s turn from the ridiculous to the more realistic. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work. The movie comes across as generic, uninspired, and terribly boring. I found myself struggling to power through this movie. I ended up pausing it a bunch of times while I went to the bathroom and did things around the house. A movie should have taken me about two hours to watch ended up getting stretched out to about four hours. How sad. I had heard good things about this movie and was looking forward to a decent game-to-movie adaptation for once. Guess I’ll have to keep waiting.


#7: Under the Shadow


I’m all for new experiences and the premise of this movie had me intrigued. It is a supernatural horror story set in Tehran, the capital city of Iran. A woman and her daughter are haunted by a supernatural entity while the city is being bombed. Sounds interesting right? Turns out that the movie is horribly, horribly boring. Nothing scary happens. Nothing exciting happens. I watched this movie with a glazed over look in my eyes, waiting and wishing for something, anything to happen. It never did. Seriously, I almost died watching this movie. I now know where the term “bored to death” comes from. From people who watched Under the Shadow!


#6: I Spit on Your Grave 3: Vengeance is Mine


I thought the first two movies in this series were great, which is what makes the third installment such a disappointment. I expected dark, gritty, and horrific from this film. What did I get? Stupidity. Sure there are some cool deaths in this movie, but after the over-the-topness of the first two films in the series, they seem tame in comparison. Why make a movie like this if you aren’t going to try to outgross the one before it? Failure! Even on its own merits this doesn’t stand as a decent film. I repeat: Failure!


#5: The Dark Crystal


I absolutely loved, LOVED the Dark Crystal Netflix series. When I finished the last episode, I sought out the movie to watch it immediately. I mean, I’d seen the movie before, but it was a while ago and I knew absolutely nothing about the world of the Dark Crystal back when I first watched it. Truth be told, I didn’t like the movie the first time I saw it, and even now I still don’t like it. In fact, I may like it less now than I did the first time! What happened? I don’t know. I think it is the tone of the movie. The show is a lot more bright, colorful, and optimistic, whereas the movie is all doom and gloom. I was not a fan of the shift in tone. What the heck happened between the events of the show’s season 1 finale and the movie??? Clearly, the Skeksis won the battle.

As a movie, it really isn’t that exciting at all. The storytelling of the film is quite poor actually, and pales in comparison to what you see on the show. Things look cool, but aside from the visuals, this is actually a pretty terrible movie. What a disappointment after I loved the show so much.


#4: Zombi2


I’m a weirdo who likes uncomfortable things that make your skin crawl. In fact, the main reason I watched this movie is because I’d heard it was gory and disturbing. No one told me it would be cheesy, boring, and awful. I must have sat there with a WTF is this shit look on my face as I watched Zombi2. It is sincerely one of the worst things I’ve seen in my life. The storyline is incomprehensible, the acting is terrible, and absolutely nothing that happens onscreen is enough to hold my attention. Most B movies at least have the courtesy to realize they're B movies. Never happens with Zombi2.

If there had been some gross, disturbing stuff (as advertised!) perhaps the movie would have kept me interested. Maybe back in the 70s I could see why this would be controversial, but nowadays you’re going to have to do better if you want to shock me. This movie is extremely dated and just flat out bad.


#3: Ma


This movie started out okay, I guess. I kept holding onto hope that it would improve with time, but just the opposite happened. The twist of the movie: stupid. The acting: bad. Few movies make me shake my head in disbelief at their stupidity like Ma does. The whole thing is just pointless and DUMB. It’s like the makers of the movie had an idea of what they wanted to do, but failed miserably at the execution. This is a complete waste of time. Do not watch.


#2: Velvet Buzzsaw


On paper this sounds like an entertaining movie where haunted paintings torment people in an art gallery. Cool cool. Why not give it a shot?

The movie itself, however…. dear god it is terrible. The people in this movie are horrible, pretentious, and almost comical in how awful of human beings they are. I sympathized with no one in this film and was actively hoping for all their deaths. Which is one of the big problems with this movie. It is too much setup and not enough horror and mayhem. I kept thinking “when are people gonna start dying? When is the killing gonna start? Why are these people still alive?” The beginning part of the movie is dragged out for SO LONG!! Well over an hour. Too long, if you ask me. I just wanted these awful people to die and instead the movie kept forcing us to spend more time with them and their awfulness. I will never watch this movie again. I advise you to stay away as well.


#1: The Fountain


Here it is: the worst movie I watched in 2019. Visually, this movie does a lot of things right. There are some cool special effects and some nice outer space segments to look at. That’s the only redeeming thing about this movie, however. The plot is completely incomprehensible. Nothing makes any sense. There are three different storylines going on at the same time, but the connection between these stories are never explained. Is this the same guy? Is there some kind of reincarnation thing going on? What’s the deal? Don’t know, because it is never explained. It’s like the people who made this movie decided to just throw a bunch of random unconnected crap at the viewer in the hopes that some gullible-ass people would eat it up. And those people exist, too. They sit around and theorize about the movie. They sing its praises because of how "artistic" it is.

Well guess what? That doesn't fly with me. Make some damn sense. And if you aren't going to make sense, at least be exciting or entertaining. This movie is neither. I was bored to tears watching it. A complete and utter waste of time.






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