Wednesday, March 6, 2019

The Last Crapshoot: All Good Things


 

And so I say goodbye to a nother year’s bad movies and a series that has accompanied me for 8 years.

Although letting go of Crapshoot feels like saying goodbye to a dear old friend, I can’t help but look to the positives of the shake ups to come for the future.

My journey as a film critic has been long and winding and as hard as it can be to not recognize the things around you, it’s always inspiring to see the level of progress you’re making in your life’s journey.

So as I begin cataloguing bad movies for a proper top 10 worst of list this year in about 10 months, Let me close out Crapshoot once and for all with a look at the 3 films that stand above the others as the worst things that I have witnessed in 2018 cinematically.


Holmes and Watson


After the last triple feature I had the misfortune of suffering through, a comedic misfire featuring Will Ferrell and John C. Reily almost feels like a distant memory of a cake walk in comparison.

Of course I can’t exactly let off the hook, a film that is somehow lethally smug to the point of being lazy, yet somehow have a production that isn’t poor enough to match the lack of effort put into its almost nonexistent screenplay.

I keep hoping that one day these two will unite to provide me with a film that is the true second coming of “Talladega Nights” but for now, “Holmes and Watson” is just proof that their careers should probably file for restraining orders against one another.

Gotti


Far from good but almost compulsively watchable in its unwatchability, “Gotti” joins the ranks of “Venom” and “Showdogs” in the prestigious category of things my friends have to see under copious levels of alcoholic influence.

Perhaps the story of John Gotti will one day make for a worthy feature that gives Oscar nominees a run for its money but for now it’ll have to settle for the Razzies and the praise of a hundred fake MoviePass backed Rotten Tomatoes user accounts

Life Itself


 I don’t know if I quite managed to sell just how much I hate “Life Itself” with a seething and fiery passion. This is primarily because I don’t think that I can put my hatred of it into words.

Credit where it’s due, Dan Fogelman was clearly trying to do something off beat with the movie and I can admire an artist that tried and failed as opposed to not trying at all.

As somebody that tends to love the sort of art house experiments that this movie so desperately tries and fails to be however, my irritation at the depths of its failing to form any sort of cohesive narrative, tie any sense of thematic coherency to tale its telling, and daring to land on Hallmark Card schmaltz as a justifiable theme for the unwatchable mess of editing I was tortured with incites a rage I’ve not felt in quite some time.

“Life Itself” is far from the most boring, laziest, or even most offensive thing I’ve ever watched in my time writing Crapshoot. The anger it induces within me however outdoes many of those films sherry based on how mangled it is in terms of storytelling.


RIP Crapshoot: 2011 - 2019

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