AV Club's 15 Worst Films of 2010: 1. The Last Airbender

It's hard to maintain a career, esp. for actresses.

 

I have only seen the trailers for Finding Bliss, and I stayed as far away as possible. Apparently I was right in doing so.

 

When I first saw the trailer for this I thought that Kevin James must have sheepishly accepted the role knowing that if Chris Farley were still alive he'd have been cast in the fat-friend role.

 

5. The Nutcracker In 3D

"Few terrible movies are as bad as terrible children?s movies, because terrible children?s movies tend to add a veneer of saccharine tweeness atop all the other problems. The Nutcracker In 3D, for instance, is the cinematic equivalent of a **** sprinkled with powdered sugar: It?s already slow, awkward, overblown, and filled with dull songs that paste lousy lyrics onto Tchaikovsky?s ballet. Also, it re-envisions the Holocaust as a doll-pocalypse, as rat soldiers round up toys to burn in giant ovens whose smoke blots out the sun. And the badly rendered titular 3-D is a nonstop, blurry headache. But atop all that, it?s toothache-inducingly syrupy, a froth of dancing sugarplum fairies and elaborately set-dressed wonderlands that serve as giant echo chambers for the underdeveloped characters. The story barely follows sensibly from one moment to the next, but apparently someone felt that if everyone smiled and giggled and gasped in wonder often enough, the audience would never notice."

 

Cats & Dogs: The Revenge Of Kitty Galore

"Nine years. Humanity got through nine whole years without a sequel to Cats & Dogs, a hateful piece of anti-cat propaganda released under the guise of a high-tech, James Bond-inspired CGI thriller for kids. That?s enough time for a generation of young people to appreciate kitties for taking care of their own business and curling up in the most comfortable places they can find. But Warner Bros., seeing a demand where there wasn?t one, decided to revive the infernal series with Cats & Dogs: The Revenge Of Kitty Galore, a predictably wretched sequel featuring Bette Midler voicing the ?radical felinist? of the title, the use of ?Bad To The Bone? as a music cue, and a topical reference to waterboarding. Because there?s nothing 6-year-olds enjoy more than torture references."

 

I liked Letters to Juliet - but I'm a sap for Europeon locations.
and it was sweet to see Vanessa Redgrave rediscovering her lost love in Franco Nero, her real-life love, remembering they met on 'Camelot", she as Guinevere, he as Lancelot.
and that this filming was prior to her losing her beautiful daughter, Natasha Richardson wife of Liam Neeson. What a sad, sad day. But for some peculiar reason, seeing this film just feels like a good place to be.

Natasha was a favorite of mine.

 

3. Jonah Hex

"Seemingly ripped from the editing bay moments before its release, this trouble-plagued transplant of a DC Comics Western hero hit theaters looking unfinished, and not really worth finishing. Clocking in at a slim 81 minutes, including credits, Jonah Hex stars Josh Brolin as a badly scarred gunslinger who also has magical resurrection powers akin to Lee Pace on Pushing Daisies. The borrowing and bad mojo don?t stop there, however: The finale seems to be on loan from Wild Wild West, and even that is padded out with a fantasy sequence that looks like the finale from an earlier cut of the movie. Other highlights include a plethora of CGI crows, magic Native Americans, a creepily pore-deprived Megan Fox, and a scene in which Brolin?s Hex, a Confederate veteran, hangs out with an African-American pal?lest we get the wrong idea. It would easily be the worst film of the year if it weren?t, in its own way, such a fascinating mess."

 

2. Sex And The City 2

"Sex And The City 2 feels less like a proper sequel than like an attempt to destroy the seemingly unkillable franchise, then salt the ground to ensure nothing can grow in its place. It?s a film so egregiously awful, it horrified even ostensibly easy-to-please Sex And The City cultists. The miscalculations begin with making Sarah Jessica Parker and hubby Chris Noth?a romance for the ages in the television show?an Ambien in couple form, then sending Parker and her shrill pals off to a cartoonish caricature of Abu Dhabi for a few days of fun, sun, and nauseating entitlement. The film can?t seem to figure out whether it?s a scathing satire of boorish American self-absorption and cultural myopia, or a shameless celebration of the same. Evidence of the latter: The climax finds the quartet racing against the clock to keep from having to suffer the ultimate indignity: flying coach. Sex And The City 2 inexplicably cost almost $100 million, yet somehow looks cheaper and tackier than the television show that inspired it. Dubai refused to let the movie shoot in their country over concerns about the film?s racy content; if only every other nation in the world had followed suit."

 

I always thought the tv show was terrible I don't see why the movies would be any different

 

1. The Last Airbender

"Artistically and critically speaking, there was no bigger fiasco this year than The Last Airbender, M. Night Shyamalan?s first foray into big-budget special-effects action-adventure. Clumsily adapting the entire first season of a terrific Nickelodeon animated series into a 103-minute live-action feature, Shyamalan coped with his time crunch by having the characters dully, dutifully explain everything they?re thinking, planning, or feeling. Flat acting and stiff directing don?t help matters, nor does the overcrowded plot; treating his world as something the characters have to constantly define for each other makes his fantasy world feel even more ludicrous and unreal. And then there?s the disastrous 3-D conversion, which make the visuals so dark and muddy that even the special effects couldn?t serve as a sop for the fans. Laughable where it?s supposed to be serious and depressing where it?s supposed to be comedic, The Last Airbender was a punchline for much of 2010?again, artistically and critically speaking. Financially, it made back its money, and Shyamalan has sketched out a sequel that may or may not happen. If it does, at least this time, viewers will go in forewarned, and with a slot ready and waiting for the worst films of 2011 or 2012."

 

Gosh, these guys really love to lay it on thick. For all the criticism and hate across the net, this movie sold 318 million dollars worth of tickets, not counting the DVD income and so forth in the future.

This reminds me of the song "Ice Ice Baby" by Vanilla Ice. You can't find one person on the planet who admits they liked it and bought the single, but it was a number one song that sold 15 MILLION copies world-wide. Somebody bought it. (The album it was from sold 7 million copies in the U.S.) And someone bought 318 million dollars worth of Last Airbender movie tickets. And it didn't sell all those tickets on the first weekend.

No matter how much the "intelligentsia" at the A.V. Club and others on the net complain about a movie, there's a lot of moviegoers who just don't care.

 

Dumping on Shymalan seems to be fashionable, a la dumping on Nicholas Cage.

 

The problem is that TLA really is an awful film. The acting is cringeworthy, the story and script messed up (but at least there's a huge amount of exposition by the narrator!), the direction is poor, the music forgettable, the humour and light-heartedness that was so typical for the first season of the TV show is non-existent, they even managed to make bending boring (10 seconds of martial arts movements before even the slightest change in the element happens). The only thing that was good were the costumes and the art direction. My first impression after seeing it was that virtually nothing happened between Aang's release from the iceberg and the final battle at the North Pole - the story was so forgettable.