This is a companion to Marley23’s thread on the best of 2004. What movies should be avoided like the plague when they turn up on HBO.
First candidate Thunderbirds
the worst not the best :smack:
If nothing else, stay the hell away from <a href=http://imdb.com/title/tt0381707/>White Chicks</a>. That movie would make Tom Servo himself leave the room in disgust.
Grr.
At this point in my life, I admit I don’t know: I make a point of avoiding movies I think are going to be bad. I don’t even watch them on cable. I have two small children and the time I can devote to watching movies is so small that I try to make the most of it.
Resident Evil: Apocalypse
Walking Tall
The Whole Ten Yards
These are the worst I saw in 2004 anyhow…
My wife and I don’t see many movies, so when we do we try to pick carefully.
That’s why I’m surprised I can contribute to this:
A Series of Unfortunate Events
Man, my wife and I wanted to love this movie. We were prepared to love this movie. We gave it every break we could. We loved the art direction. The characters were perfectly cast. There were some cute bits. We even liked Jim Carrey’s Olaf.
It even had Catherine O’Hara, for chrissakes!
But this movie dragged so much it confirms Einstein’s theory of relativity by itself. I swear it went on about two years too long. Civilizations rose and fell during its running time. During one section, time moved backwards.
View the trailer, then read the books. You’ll enjoy the movie better.
The worst movies I saw this year:
Eurotrip
Shrek 2
Ocean’s 12
Home on the Range
The Terminal
Two get special mention.
Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow was an enormous dissapointment. It would be lovely as a series of still frames, I felt that as a movie (you know conveying a story) it was a disaster. Everything looked and felt unreal to me. The CGI was masterful, but there was something off that took me out of the story and gave the film an artificiality that ruined it. The acting, especially Paltrow’s, was clearly done against a blue screen and was abysmal. The story was forgettable and hearkened to early science fiction that I never particularly needed to see revived. In the first half hour I was doing that jerking awake thing and I looked over to see my wife’s eyelids drooping as well.
Meet the Fokkers wins as a truly despicable movie. I would far rather see **White Chicks ** in a 24 hour marathon than that dreck again. Meet the Parents walked the line of funny and embarassingly over the top. **Meet the Fokkers ** was nothing but embarassing. It was just painful to watch and stripped its characters of any redeeming characteristics. De Niro turned in his worst performance as a despicable human being that would belong in prison if he existed in real life. The scene where he jabs Ben Stiller with a needle is just disturbing. All of the comedy relies on making the viewer uncomfortable, or on wildly improbable situational comedy. Babs is given nothing to do, and Ben Stiller’s character has become an unmitigated weenie.
I could replicate the experience of **Meet the Fokkers ** by watching the worst episodes of the following three sitcoms and it would probably be a more pleasurable use of ninety minutes.
**Full House ** - Take an episode when the Olsens were young. Here we see the enormous comedy potential of babies making cute faces and getting their caretakers into hilarious scrapes.
Three’s Company - Any episode will do. There is a misunderstanding involving all of the characters. Someone is also keeping an improbable secret. Much stumbling and bumbling ensues.
I Love Lucy - The lead character is a bumbling idiot. Ladders fall over, causing a chain reaction and chaos. Physical comedy hearkening back to the worst of vaudeville causes hysterical laughter. In case you can’t tell I hate I Love Lucy.
Damn that movie sucked, sorry to be long winded about it, but I have wanted to unload for a while now.
I really really did not like Ocean’s 12.
I really really really really really really really really did not like Resident Evil: Apocalypse. (Note that I did not actually pay money to see it.)
On the other hand, I thought Eurotrip was perfectly entertaining for what it was.
The Day After Tomorrow was rubbish. Yes, I know, and I KNEW, but I was dragged to it by friends.
Van Helsing COULD have been a lot of fun if it was a truly scary horror movie, a period adventure film like Indiana Jones, or a tongue-in-cheek comedy, but it tried to be all three and wasn’t any good as any of them.
Shrek 2 and Ocean’s 12 were all hype, no substance, completely forgettable and skippable.
I mentioned Ocean’s Twelve as the one bad movie I saw this year - I’m good at avoiding crap - so I’ll say it again: it was lazy. You watch it and think “If they didn’t feel like putting an effort into the movie, why did I pay to see it?” Also, I’m not sure the plot made sense, and the big coincidence went far beyond lazy and was absolutely terrible.
2004 was a year of many, many bad films to avoid.
Van Helsing
Alexander.
Taking Lives.
The Ladykillers
Suspect Zero.
King Arthur.
By all accounts, Catwoman, and anything with “Christmas” in the title should fall into the above list as well.
This was the only one of the movies you listed I didn’t avoid. It wasn’t up to the Coen brothers’ usual standards, but it wasn’t awful. It did have some things going for it, at least, which I doubt you could say about many of the others you mentioned.
Hey! A fellow Evanstonian! Hi! <waves from front window>
I mean the following question in the most unsnarky way possible: what redeeming qualities did you see in The Ladykillers? I thought it was so eye-bleedingly awful that I almost left the theater part-way through (which I almost never do), but hung on in the mistaken belief that with that much talent both above and below the line it HAD to get better…
All the good stuff happened after you left. We had a party. 
I liked Tom Hanks in this movie, and there were a few good characters and some good lines and jokes. And I liked the setting. That was about it. Nothing great, and the okay stuff was mixed in with the lousy - like Irma P. Hall and Marlon Wayans, who were pure stereotypes - in a way that brought everything down.
**Cheaper by the Dozen
Soul Plane**
Any of those Princess/Cinderella teenage girl movies starring Hillary Duff or the like.
**Christmas with the Kranks
Van Helsing
Along Came Polly**
Cheaper by the Dozen came out in 2003.
It just seemed like it took two years.
I thought it was fun to watch, but there really wasn’t much of a movie behind it. Definitely a “disengage brain for 90 minutes” film.
And I’ll add Shark Tale to the list. Badly-rendered CGI fish with human faces? Ewwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww!
By the time you’re done watching that one, you feel like you’ve lost two years of your life. I see Steve Martin made $10.5 million dollars for the movie. Do we have any ambulance-chasers in here who can tell me how much of that I’m entitled to?