Hey Hollywood, there's a reason why few are crying over your lost pirated money.
2017 had quite a number of damn good movies that helped provide audiences with a solid escape from the woes of the world. Genre flicks mixing things up, minorities of society got many a chance to shine, and franchises not only found new creative life but even gave dignified sendoffs.
Sadly it also saw trends overstaying their welcome, reboot
fatigue achieve climax, and the success of weaker products on platforms so
perfectly designed to spare consumer expense that the theater experience has
come into question even harder than ever before.
For many, these films exist for their annual worst of the
year lists. For me, somebody that finds failure worth exploring to grasp where
we are but not celebrated with the best of the year for a task involving
exposure to vast amounts of dangerous material in a season widely considered to
be crunch time for critics, there’s Crapshoot.
For those, new to Crit. Hit, Welcome! Thanks for stopping
by, hope you enjoy your stay, and Crapshoot is my annual look back at the worst
films of the year.
If you wish to be reminded of the cinematic happenings that
you completely missed or would rather forget, join me across the month of
February as I take a look at the very best of 2017’s very worst movies in a
nonsensical and unintentional effort to drown out the fact that I’ll be
watching and more than likely enjoying “Black Panther” in less than 4 days.
But Crapshoot is about new experiences of badness so before looking
at my newly exposed wounds, let’s take a gander at some of the cinematic crimes
against humanity that won’t be explicitly looked at.
Transformers: The Last Knight
Details on this one will be relatively sparse as many of my better articulated thoughts on the movies lack of care and focus along with its cynical efforts to retroactively prepackage its sloppy and passion free narrative into branching mega-franchise will be the focus of my series analyzing cinematic universes, "Universal Monstrosities."
What I can say as a lifelong fan that's gone numb to the bastardization of this franchise suffered at the hands of Michael Bay is that mustering the passion necessary to fire the venom at this thing that it properly deserves is a chore when it's becoming blatantly evident how little the filmmakers themselves care about the product they're working on, much less the potential of the material they're working with.
It's too explicit and crass to work for kids, too surreal in its nonsensical plotting for mainstream adult crowds, and the compositing on its trademark special effects undermines the excessive budget that went into its production.
The only good thing about "Transformers: The Last Knight" is the very thing that made me break my pact to stay away from it following my befuddled exposure to its previous installment; its unexpected financial underperformance sets a hopeful new precedence for Hollywood's future.
Flatliners
I had to research this movie for almost 5 minutes straight just to remember that this movie even existed.
Not Remember what happened, remember that I actually watched the movie, period.
Ordinarily that level of forgettability spares movies from special recognition of badness but as the PTSD-esque memory flashes of confusion and hilarity ensue over how little a film about hospital work seems to care about actual medical conduct for a film so cheap and lazily inept you ask why anybody bothered to even show up to work, "Flatliners" is a cinematic experience that I will be looking forward to forgetting once more as soon as possible.
The Dark Tower
Strike 1: An adaptation of the western genre skinned metatextual nexus of a barely cohesive, Easter egg driven mythology constructed by plot essential locale traversals, side stories, flashbacks, dimension hopping, and time travel independent of the story's plot itself by a an industry that rarely gets straight forward Stephen King adaptations right.
Strike 2: Boiling said tale down to a bland, unimpressive, inconsequential Young Adult coming of age narrative for an audience not even in the story's demographic crosshairs. And it would have sucked on that level too.
The Snowman
"The Snowman" is the cinematic equivalent of watching a scratched DVD that skips entire sequences, with no hope of repair.
The "Fantastic 4 (2015)" of 2017.
Jo Nesbo's cinematic and gripping Harry Hole novels may seem like a perfect fit for a film franchise but a mishandled production helmed by a director whose vision may not have been the most ideal reading of the material have led to a movie that's not only blatantly muddled and nonsensical but flat out unfinished.
The Emoji Movie
*sigh* Do I even have to bother?
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