Worst Years In Film

[overrated]

I was writing up my review for xXx, a great use of my time, when it occurred to me that 2002 was a pretty abysmal year for film. Now, now, I know Adaptation, Road to Perdition, and City Of God were released that year among others. But the first two weren't even nominated for Best Picture, and City Of God wasn't nominated for anything until 2004. Chicago was Best Picture winner, which seems kind of undeserved. We had Michael Moore bloviating about a fictitious war and a fictitious president in his acceptance speech for Bowling For Columbine. The big indie hit was My Big Fat Greek Wedding.

Now let's take a look at wikipedia and see which undeniably bad movies were released that year. In alphabetical order: Adventures of Pluto Nash, Austin Powers in Goldmember, Ballistic: Ecks vs Severs, Boat Trip, Crossroads, Feardotcom, The Hot Chick, K-19 The Widowmaker, Queen Of The Damned, Reign Of Fire, Scooby Doo, The Scorpion King, The Sum Of All Fears, The Time Machine, Windtalkers and of course xXx. Rob Schneider, Ben Affleck, and Vin Diesel were all at the height of their power.

This is leaving out films like Resident Evil or Signs which are reviled by some and embraced by others. And then we have the big budget sequels - Attack Of The Clones, Die Another Day, Halloween: Resurrection, Men In Black II, LOTR The Two Towers (which isn't a bad film but most people would agree it's the weakest of the three), Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (which again was successful, but led to Chris Columbus being replaced as director for the third film), and Star Trek: Nemesis.

Why was 2002 so terrible? Was Hollywood reflecting some of the national malaise post-9/11? Was this the height of directors being obssessed with CGI? Was it just a hiatus/prep year for directors with decent projects (Lynch, Tarantino, nor the Coen Brothers released anything that year)? Why did 2002 suck so much in comparison to say, 2007?

If you have any other years which you think were horrendous, feel free to discuss them too.

[djross]

x

[overrated]

Yeah my post was absurdly Hollywood & Academy Award-centric, that should be a disclaimer. I'm just amazed at that crappy line up of blockbusters. I've been looking at '2000's in film' on wiki and in my opinion, in terms of (what I've seen and heard) bad-to-good ratio & what was nominated/won that year, it breaks down like this: 2000 [3 Tier 10 films], 2001 [4], 2002 [4] and 2005 [3] were bad years; 2003 [4], 2006 [4] and 2009 [3] were 'alright' years; 2004 [9], 2007 [6] and 2008 [4] were good years.

But according to your criteria, 2000, 2005 and 2009 were even worse for me than 2002. Hmmm. Also I wasn't expecting 2004 to be stronger than 2007.

Getting away from the 2000's, 1996 was a terrible year discounting Fargo and Trainspotting. Fargo lost to The English Patient, jeez.

[wokelstein]

2002 was a terrific year for movies! It might actually have been the best in my opinion.

Adaptation. (Jonze/Kaufman!)
Bowling for Columbine
Y Tu Mama Tambien
Catch Me If You Can (Spielberg!)
Frailty
The Rules of Attraction
The Grey Zone
Jackass
Punch Drunk Love (P.T. Anderson!)
Solaris


This was also the year that Spirited Away came out to the U.S. I love Two Towers and wouldn't consider it the weakest at all. The Treebeard fight was incredible.

I also really liked, to a lesser extent:

Signs
Insomnia
About Schmidt
The Bourne Identity
Blade 2
Simone
Changing Lanes

Not at all a bad year for movies.

A lot of people found 2006 to be a weak year, but there was a lot there I liked also. Marie Antoinette and The Departed are top 100 fodder for me. Apocalypto, Scanner Darkly, Children of Men, Pan's Labyrinth.

I think 2000 was the weakest year of the 00s. George Washington, Traffic, Crouching Tiger. I liked Cast Away. Loved Wonder Boys. Fairly weak though, and I think I saw a lot of stuff that made me actively angry.

1996 did in fact suck pretty bad. That's the worst vintage I can think of in recent years.

[Bojangles]

To the extent of the post-2000 movies that I've seen, 2003 was horrible. Although I never saw Oldboy..

[ShogunRua]

I was writing up my review for xXx, a great use of my time, when it occurred to me that 2002 was a pretty abysmal year for film. Now, now, I know Adaptation, Road to Perdition, and City Of God were released that year among others. But the first two weren't even nominated for Best Picture, and City Of God wasn't nominated for anything until 2004. Chicago was Best Picture winner, which seems kind of undeserved. We had Michael Moore bloviating about a fictitious war and a fictitious president in his acceptance speech for Bowling For Columbine. The big indie hit was My Big Fat Greek Wedding.

Road to Perdition really don't deserve to be placed in the same category as City of God or Adaptation. It was an okay film with excellent acting, a bunch of plot holes in the script, and some far-fetched, ridiculous scenes in a supposedly "realistic" treatment. (That whole bank robbing montage, for instance?)

It attempted to be a great movie, but didn't quite make it. Still decent and enjoyable, but the other two were excellent.

Now let's take a look at wikipedia and see which undeniably bad movies were released that year. In alphabetical order: Adventures of Pluto Nash, Austin Powers in Goldmember, Ballistic: Ecks vs Severs, Boat Trip, Crossroads, Feardotcom, The Hot Chick, K-19 The Widowmaker, Queen Of The Damned, Reign Of Fire, Scooby Doo, The Scorpion King, The Sum Of All Fears, The Time Machine, Windtalkers and of course xXx. Rob Schneider, Ben Affleck, and Vin Diesel were all at the height of their power.

Most of those were awful, but I don't get your vitriol towards xXx. It was an action film with very little bullshit exposition, whose only goal was to entertain the audience with crazy and original stunts. And guess what? It succeeded. I rated it 61, T6.

This is leaving out films like Resident Evil or Signs which are reviled by some and embraced by others. And then we have the big budget sequels - Attack Of The Clones, Die Another Day, Halloween: Resurrection, Men In Black II,

Attack of the Clones, Die Another Day, and MIB2 are far more egregious offenders than anything you listed above, since there were actual expectations for them being good, and instead, they all sucked hard. (And Die another Day scored a 12, one of my 20-30 lowest ranked films ever)

Also, you missed one really good blockbuster that year, "Catch me if You Can", which is a 72, T8 for me.

Overall, you might have a point about 2002; I haven't ranked "City of God" and "Adaptation" yet, and no other film is higher than that 72 for the year (out of 31 total ranked). Even the indie films I've seen from that year ("Century of the Self"; absurd garbage) and foreign films (Returner, Hero, Kigeki, ranging from okay to very bad) weren't very good.

Every other year in the 2000s had much higher rankings for me than 2002 did.

From the 90s, 1995 is the worst based on my list; the highest is a 76 for one of the Wallace and Gromits, among 65 total.

[overrated]

1991 was shit. My highest rating is a tier 8, an my PSI's show no probable tier 10's. Pre-1920 was generally bad too .

Silence Of The Lambs?

Although I never saw Oldboy..

When you get round to it, brace yourself.

Road to Perdition really don't deserve to be placed in the same category as City of God or Adaptation. It was an okay film with excellent acting, a bunch of plot holes in the script, and some far-fetched, ridiculous scenes in a supposedly "realistic" treatment. (That whole bank robbing montage, for instance?)

It attempted to be a great movie, but didn't quite make it. Still decent and enjoyable, but the other two were excellent.

Yeah true. I was just thinking of films off the top of my head that are better than Chicago. I'd go with Bloody Sunday instead, now that I've taken a look at my top tier, it's Greengrass' best film. Also just to clear up potential confusion, City Of God is listed on criticker as released in 2003, but that was the international release, in Brazil it was 2002.

Most of those were awful, but I don't get your vitriol towards xXx. It was an action film with very little bullshit exposition, whose only goal was to entertain the audience with crazy and original stunts. And guess what? It succeeded. I rated it 61, T6.

Haha I think we might have to agree to disagree, in case this becomes another Hurt Locker thread. xXx, like I wrote in my review, just sums up everything that was bad with late 90's/2000's action films to me.

Attack of the Clones, Die Another Day, and MIB2 are far more egregious offenders than anything you listed above, since there were actual expectations for them being good, and instead, they all sucked hard. (And Die another Day scored a 12, one of my 20-30 lowest ranked films ever)

Yeah that's really what prompted me to make this thread, the summer blockbusters that year just epically sucked and I don't think there's another year where it's happened on that scale since. AOTC was the worst Star Wars prequel; MIB2 killed the franchise; [spoiler]Laurie dies unceremoniously in the first ten minutes of[/spoiler] Halloween Resurrection; Die Another Day led to the Daniel Craig reboot, and Star Trek Nemesis led to last year's reboot.

From the 90s, 1995 is the worst based on my list; the highest is a 76 for one of the Wallace and Gromits, among 65 total.

From my rankings: Heat, Seven, Usual Suspects, Die Hard III, Casino, 12 Monkeys? The only offensively bad movies that I saw from 1995 were Under Siege 2, The Net and Showgirls. Popular opinion would also include Waterworld and Judge Dredd but I personally don't think they're that bad.

[ShogunRua]

Haha I think we might have to agree to disagree, in case this becomes another Hurt Locker thread. xXx, like I wrote in my review, just sums up everything that was bad with late 90's/2000's action films to me.

I would be interested to hear your reasoning. I didn't love the film or anything, but it's hard to deny the originality of the parachuting off the falling car scene near the beginning, which won an award for Hollywood stunts. Also, the lack of the typical lame exposition and verbal cliches that infest Hollywood "action" movies was a plus.

From my rankings: Heat, Seven, Usual Suspects, Die Hard III, Casino, 12 Monkeys?

Haven't ranked "Heat", but the rest go

Tier 9- (Seven, 74)
Tier 8- (Casino, 71), (12 Monkeys, 70)
Tier 7- (Die Hard 3, 68), (The Usual Suspects, 62)

All solid and entertaining, and 3 of them definitely good...just nothing special. I guess you're looking at it from the perspective of what major Hollywood films really sucked that year, while I'm looking at it more from the perspective of how many great films from all over the world there were that year.

The only offensively bad movies that I saw from 1995 were Under Siege 2, The Net and Showgirls. Popular opinion would also include Waterworld and Judge Dredd but I personally don't think they're that bad.

I liked Judge Dredd! Never understood why that film received so much flak; it had a very wry sense of humor I appreciated. Among major blockbusters I disliked, there was

Tier 3- (The American President, 39), (Species, 38), (Waterworld, 37), (Friday, 34), (French Kiss, 33)
Tier 2-(Forget Paris, 30), (Jumanji, 27), (Vampire in Brooklyn, 26), (Babe, 25), (Dangerous Minds, 24)
Tier 1- (Crimson Tide, 22), (First Knight, 22), (Congo, 20), (Pocahontas, 18)

Yeah, there was a bunch of garbage that year.

[overrated]

I would be interested to hear your reasoning. I didn't love the film or anything, but it's hard to deny the originality of the parachuting off the falling car scene near the beginning, which won an award for Hollywood stunts. Also, the lack of the typical lame exposition and verbal cliches that infest Hollywood "action" movies was a plus.

Okay I don't want to write an essay on why I think xXx is bad but here goes; when you're an action hero, especially when you're ripped like a bodybuilder, it doesn't work if you have a nice guy persona. I can't think of a single great action movie where the hero isn't either an outright asshole, disturbed in some way, or a cold motherfucker like Connery as Bond. John McClane kiiind of gets away with it because he's set up as a normal guy (he also borders on asshole territory). Diesel plays a nice guy whose only sin is that he's cocky about his stunts. And that translates as boring. I can't even think of any other characteristics he was supposed to have besides being a heterosexual thrillseeker.

Which brings me to this; it's great if you can incorporate fantastic stunts seamlessly into an already good action movie, but if the entire premise is that this super-stuntman-dude is going to be executing some sweetass stunts throughout the film and the rest of it's all periphery, then it gets uninteresting. The villain's motivations and methods are stupid, but not stupid enough to be charming. They're all European anarchists, which has to be the lamest stock antagonist stereotype there is (and to bring it back to the 2002 post-9/11 climate, just reeks of being outlandish and unrealistic). The soundtrack from what I remember was terrible nu-metal. No one-liners. No tits. No gore.

All solid and entertaining, and 3 of them definitely good...just nothing special. I guess you're looking at it from the perspective of what major Hollywood films really sucked that year, while I'm looking at it more from the perspective of how many great films from all over the world there were that year.

I'm pretty ignorant of world cinema, admittedly. But besides City Of God and djross's five films (of which I've only heard of Irreversible) someone has yet to say it was a good year in that regard either.

I liked Judge Dredd!

Thank god, I thought I was the only one. It's basically an Arnie film that suffers because Sly is no Arnie.

Looking at other years there isn't a comparable one to 2002 that I've found. 1983 was pretty unremarkable besides Videodrome from the looks of things though.

[omgfridge]

Tier 10s from the 2000s
2009[4], 2008[5], 2007[4], 2006[2], 2005[1], 2004[3], 2003[6], 2002[3], 2001[2], 2000[2].

Looking at the rest of my rankings for those years besides tier 10s, 2005 was probably the weakest.

Just looked at 1983 and it seemed pretty lacking. I mean I haven't seen much but I remember going though at an earlier time and noting I had no tier 10s from there as every year after had at least one. Well I think that was the case. It had Star Wars VI and Scarface which are tier 9s for me. Well just a possible example.