Search found 1 match: Barbara Hershey

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by Guest
Mon Jan 10, 2011 10:49 pm
Forum: General Discussion
Topic: Top ten of 2010
Replies: 72
Views: 63783

Re: Top ten of 2010

tef wrote:
tomelce wrote:The Worst: Greenberg Up in the Air Easy A Black Swan


Could you explain these choices as being fit to be called the worst of 2010?


Well Greenberg and Up in the Air probably wouldn't have made the list if I'd endured the miseries of some of the year's more blatantly abysmal movies (Cats & Dogs 2, Twilight: Eclipse, Vampires Suck, etc). In any case, they're still pretty mediocre. I've only seen two of Noah Baumbach's films but he doesn't appear to have anything interesting to say or do. Rather he just makes humourless, badly shot alternatives to the films of Wes Anderson and Todd Solondz; that is, ugly films about ugly people.

For a purported commentary on the serious nature of the current socio-economic situation, Up in the Air was unforgivably shallow and weightless. It seemed more concerned with revelling in the high-flying, spiritually empty lives of its primary characters than with critiquing them. It's easily surpassed, in all departments, by Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps.

Easy A and Black Swan, meanwhile, are pretty terrible. The former's a pretty infantile, amoral and obnoxious impression of John Hughes' movies that spends more time telling the audience how funny it is than actually demonstrating it. I'm slightly impressed that Will Gluck had the nerve to throw in a montage of so many better movies midway through, though. If you've seen Saved! there's absolutely no need to bother with it, whether you liked Saved! or not. And if I never hear a comparison of Emma Stone with Julia Roberts again, it will be too soon.

Black Swan struck me as an especially trying work of Academy-blowing nonsense. Aside from the fact that it says nothing of any interest about Portman's character's physical and psychological turmoil, it's shamelessly banal even by Oscars season standards. Its jump scares were no more dignified this time around than when I saw them before in all those J-horror remakes, and its echoes of Suspiria, Showgirls and The Company were especially unflattering. It's a bad film dressed up in pretty clothing but it's a bad film all the same. And Barbara Hershey's entire role -- never mind her and everyone else's capital-A acting -- was an embarrassment.