Get the Golden Raspberry Award polished and ready. We have a frontrunner that’s going to be mighty hard to beat. I’ve seen some poor movies this year. But the absolute most disappointing mess of all has to be The Truth about Charlie.
Bad Acting:
Marc Wahlberg is just plain awful. He’s neither believable in the role nor interesting on the screen.
Tim Robbins gives his worst performance in my memory— though to be fair he had nothing to work with whatsoever.
Thandie Newton is nice to look at. Her character is painful to watch.
Bad Plot:
Ok, For some reason or another this “Charlie” sells everything he and his wife own and buys rare stamps-- but we don’t know this for a while. Charlie is murdered and the police are somehow unable to discover that this major financial transaction occurred and so are out looking for both murderer and money. Naturally, they send Wahlberg undercover to hit on the new widow. Then there are some diamonds that Charlie stole from someone or another in a poorly explained war situation. I guess somehow it makes sense to transfer your money from diamonds to stamps…but it was lost on me. What follows is one plot lapse after another building to a climax that had me sitting on the edge of my seat. Of course, I had been on the edge of my seat halfway through this picture in order to be the first one out the door when the credits began rolling so as to purge my mind of this banal, boring story. And the real villain…only a big surprise if this is your first “suspense” movie.
Suspense:
I’ve seen more suspense on an episode of “Underdog”. In order to have suspense you need a finely crafted story and characters you care about. Not here.
Art:
Sadly, this seems to have been the true motivation for the movie. Unfortunately, odd camera angles and stop and go sequences do not in and of themselves make art. Nor does rain.
The truth about Charlie is this: His movie is the worst of 2002.
I did not see The New Guy —but I don’t see how it could be worse than TTAC. I did not walk out, though. Somehow I feel that to walk out on such a bad film would let the guilty movie people win. No…if you get my money then BY GOD you and your crew are going to have to have your incompetence displayed and disected in its entirety.
This also reminds me again: If I have not read the reviews I should not go see the picture.
Some movies you know are going to be bad (example: Adam Sandler’s new movie), but the really deep disdain should be for the movies where the potential is high, yet the result is so very low. I didn’t think Tim Robbins would ever involve himself in a film as awful as TTAC. Wrong.
Men in Black II and Reign of Fire need to be remembered. Amount of money spent to produce a really crappy movie should be part of the factoring process.
Triple X was the worst I’ve seen this year, though I haven’t seen most of the others mentioned here. I like Vin Diesel. I really enjoyed Pitch Black and even The Fast and the Furious had its good points. But Triple X was just so stupid.
K19–The Widowmaker was a huge disappointment. Liam Neeson and Harrison Ford were totally wasted in it. It also made no sense for Russian people on a Russian sub to speak to each other with Russian accents. The story was loaded with cliches, the characters were dull, and I couldn’t wait for it to be over.
Didja see her on Letterman last week? She looked pretty good (sadly, married, though), and she told Dave that the director wanted to get as far away from Charade as possible. Letterman’s response: Mission accomplished!
Supposedly, she’s the daughter of an Englishman and an African princess.
Is that 35% who thought it was terrible, or 35% who liked it? 'Cause I thought Punch Drunk Love and One Hour Photo at least looked promising, unlike many others on that list, and they seem to have the highest percentages.
The percentage is simply how many of the reviews on RottenTomatoes (RT) were “positive”. So if a movie scores 70%, that means 70% of the reviews were positive.
It’s not a foolproof system. For one thing, it has the usual problems with any binary system - where do you draw the line? In addition, I find RT’s criteria for ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ in a review to be questionable. There have been many reviews labeled positive that actually ripped into the film, and vice-versa. However, the sheer number of reviews in one place is usually good enough to give a fairly accurate overall impression. And it’s a safe bet that if nobody out of 70 reviewers had anything remotely positive to say about a movie, it’s probably not worth seeing.
I included One Hour Photo and Punch Drunk Love simply because they were mentioned in the thread - I personally haven’t seen either and don’t intend to. (For the record, I haven’t seen any of the movies mentioned in this thread yet, and I attribute that largely to the fact that I actually pay attention to reviews and word of mouth.)
Oh, ok. So 70% means 70% of those who responded gave it a positive review. What made this confusing was the fact that it’s a site that delves into the bad films; therefore I thought maybe positive in this case indicated “positively bad”.
Ok, For some reason or another this “Charlie” sells everything he and his wife own and buys rare stamps-- but we don’t know this for a while. Charlie is murdered and the police are somehow unable to discover that this major financial transaction occurred and so are out looking for both murderer and money. Naturally, they send Wahlberg undercover to hit on the new widow. Then there are some diamonds that Charlie stole from someone or another in a poorly explained war situation. I guess somehow it makes sense to transfer your money from diamonds to stamps…but it was lost on me. What follows is one plot lapse after another building to a climax that had me sitting on the edge of my seat. Of course, I had been on the edge of my seat halfway through this picture in order to be the first one out the door when the credits began rolling so as to purge my mind of this banal, boring story. And the real villain…only a big surprise if this is your first “suspense” movie.
Well, actually, that was part of the original “Charade”, and makes sense if you think about not wanting to have anything obviously valuable on your person if you’re being chased by people who want the money. I refused to see this movie on principle (“Charade” being one of my favorite films of all time), but if you thought that this was a plot hole, you probably wouldn’t enjoy the original either. Pity, because the original is quite the charming film. (of course, having Audrey Hepburn and Cary Grant as your leads helps with that.)
Death to Death to Smoochy! Let the master print be burned, and let the ashes be incorporated into food for a civet. Let the civet then be fed coffee beans in order to produce kopi luwak. Let the kopi luwak then be brewed and sold to Danny Devito, who will be required to pay large amounts of money to drink coffee made from shit made from his own shitty movie.
It’s only a plot hole if the film doesn’t explain the event in any credible way. Alas, I have not seen “Charade”, but I plan to rent it — after all, the reviews I’ve read are very positive. However in TTAC, the situation makes little sense. Wouldn’t the seller of the stamps notice that the buyer had been murdered and contact the police? Such rare stamps…the previous owners would have to be fairly well known. And the film is set in current times where such a sale could not easily be kept from the police. I especially like how, after discovering the stamps’ value, Ms Newton’s character is able to make perfect copies of the stamps and give a short speech about the significance of each when she has no money to buy such duplicates nor time to research the history and value of the stamps. She was constantly being followed by one person or another, yet is still able to do all this with NONE of the pursuers noticing.
