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The 10 Worst Films of 2014

There was no shortage of terrible cinematic experiences in 2014, and often from places one might not so readily expect.

Foxcatcher

With beauty comes ugliness, with pleasure comes pain. While the year’s best films are likely to linger on your palate much longer than the worst, there was no shortage of terrible cinematic experiences in 2014, and often from places one might not so readily expect. Sure, Transformers: Age of Extinction is loud and dumb, RoboCop is another unnecessary (and botched) remake, and 22 Jump Street continues Phil Lord and Christopher Miller’s unfortunate reign of still-unchecked comedic terror. But beyond the usual sites of acrid popular cinema lingers a more pungent stench, coming from those films sprayed with either a sheen of pretense or sun-burnt from undue praise or exposure. A fart gag is one thing, but class-reliant sentiment that dutifully extracts any deeper conception of its bourgeois leanings in order to satiate a desired audience? Hopefully we can all agree as to which is the worse form of flatulence.


Still Alice

10. Still Alice

Hear that risible piano music on the soundtrack, ushering Alice (Julianne Moore) into her guest lecture at UCLA? That’s the sound of Still Alice cueing its first of numerous false notes throughout its nearly unendurable runtime, as its narrative of a linguistics professor who starts to forget words (!) itself rapidly deteriorates into a series of schmaltzy, reductive conversations on the nature of memory, love, and family. Here’s a film that has no sense of intellectual toil or interest in exploring how truly horrifying its central irony is. Instead, directors Richard Glatzner and Wash Westmoreland seek to use Alice’s professional and class status not as a starting point for exploring her torment, but an endgame to stage facile confrontations between her past and present.


Third Person

9. Third Person

Paul Haggis is a scary filmmaker for the wrong reasons: He seems to envision all human beings as afflicted by social astigmatism, where every provisional interaction hinges on self-involved preoccupations which preclude empathy or cross-cultural identification. Thus, Scott (Adrien Brody) walks into an Italian bar and can only comment on how no one speaks English, all while eye-fucking Monika (Moran Atias), who sits a few stools down. Such insight persists across the film’s dozen-character ensemble. If Crash can be used as a cinematic litmus test to separate the wheat from the chaff, then Third Person intensifies that challenge by making already absurd and offensive precepts regarding race comprehensibly cretinous, as the “coincidences” of a single city are now dispersed across time, geographical space, and the film’s catastrophically elongated 137-minute runtime.


America

8. America

Forget Edge of Tomorrow or Lucy. The (inadvertent) romp of the summer was Dinesh D’Souza’s America. Playing out like a nightmarish freshman composition paper where the research topic is “the history of America,” D’Souza follows up 2016: Obama’s America with an even more incoherent and cinematically incompetent pander poem to red-state America, as the proposed topic (speculative fiction of America’s absence in global diplomacy) is simply a disguise to engage Tea Party vitriol. The film also features numerous shots of D’Souza walking…and staring…and eating a hot dog…and appearing distressed, presumably as a means to amplify the dread. Instead, it hilariously undercuts it. The capper is an Unsolved Mysteries-esque segment implying that Hillary Clinton is, more or less, a psychopathic serial killer. Fair and balanced…not so much.


Fed Up

7. Fed Up

Although the nutritional information within Fed Up is fair, if mostly hewing too rigidly to the Michael Pollan school of dietary advice, Stephanie Soechtig’s documentary exposé on America’s obesity epidemic is utterly deplorable for its exploitation of three lower-class families, each of which is struggling to provide healthy alternatives for several obese children. Failing to at any point examine economics, income, or the sociological factors that contribute to childhood weight gain, Soechtig uses these segments as mere complements to the film’s larger talking-heads takedown of food additives and exercise. Forget manipulating information; this documentary manipulates lives, then has the gall to appropriate these families’ pain for a predictable end point of “yes we can” hope. Problem is, Fed Up hasn’t even managed to mention the real issues, much less resolve them.

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The Double

6. The Double

As abject literary adaptations go, Richard Ayoade’s The Double is particularly odious, since it remains so enamored with its own allegedly clever cynicism regarding bureaucratic organization and workplace decorum that it fails to establish any meaningful stakes for its own critique. Ayoade operates on theoretical and fallacious reasoning, such that his pessimism is a mere affront, foregrounded as an endpoint, with the film dutifully piling downtrodden evidence to support his dogmatic presumptions. No one in the film, especially not Jesse Eisenberg’s Simon, is an actual character, but merely a pawn in Ayoade’s perfidious rigmarole. Allusions to other movies abound and the film’s tone suffocates with dread, much like being in the presence of a young person who’s just discovered that Terry Gilliam’s Brazil is, like, fucking cool, dude.


Foxcatcher

5. Foxcatcher

Bennett Miller’s Foxcatcher engages in textual and formal grab-assery, seeking a perverse kind of is-it-or-isn’t-it satire that neglects to actually characterize anyone or anything. Du Pont (Steve Carrell) isn’t actually a pervert, because Miller’s approach is to deny any such psychological causality or reasoning, only he has no idea what to replace that absence with. Silences, awkward exchanges, and thoroughly aped formal austerity do not a scathing indictment of American homosocial behaviors make. The film’s every gesture is a feigned move, a non-committal nose-turn. This is about the emptiest kind of cinema imaginable.


The Monuments Men

4. The Monuments Men

George Clooney continues his reign as the worst high-profile American director working today in another back-patting, borderline propagandistic venture that continues to revel in the same leftist mythologizing as Good Night, and Good Luck. While The Monuments Men has been largely critiqued for its inept dramatization, that’s only the half of it, since thoroughly weaved within nearly every scene is some sort of speech, pander, or self-righteous gesture of American exceptionalism, made more insidious by Clooney’s insistence that his elderly band of gentlemanly misfits amount to something greater than celebrity naval-gazing. When a caricatured Nazi spews vitriol against Jews, Clooney’s character corrects him, but that’s as deep as Clooney’s insights go, such that Americans once again reign supreme, but here audiences are defeated by Clooney’s perpetually tepid and sentimental revisionisms.


Bad Words

3. Bad Words

Few comedies are as abominable and wrong-headed as Jason Bateman’s Bad Words. As Guy, Bateman embodies a human being only conceivable within the fantasies of homosocial male hatemongering, where explicit racial slurs, cynicism, and bromantic bonding through scoring drugs or prostitutes can all be performed, so long as there’s a tongue-in-cheek detachment from it or, even worse, the kind of sentimental third-act reversal Bateman opts for in order to lend Guy some empathy. No such luck, brah: Bad Words thinks it’s daring, provocative, and genuinely incendiary merely because it likes to put naughty phrases in the mouth of a child and have Guy say things the film, despicably, thinks we all, deep down, maybe want to say too. At least Adam Sandler’s flicks are self-acknowledgingly puerile; Bateman hides his juvenilia behind irony and inflated self-worth.

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The Fault in Our Stars

2. The Fault in Our Stars

Director Josh Boone so comprehensively enshrines the privilege of his white, cancer-stricken, YA fiction-loving protagonists throughout The Fault in Our Stars that when their favorite author (Willem Dafoe) makes them listen to a Swedish rap track, insisting that “the important thing is not what the voices are saying, but what the voices are feeling,” our heroes, appalled by the idea of giving themselves over to cultural forces beyond their own comprehension, run off to make out in Anne Frank’s house. Writers Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber join the Phil Lord and Christopher Miller bandwagon of outwardly critiquing the very narrative template they’re actually beholden to, but here it’s even more insidious given the ever-so-schmaltzy insistence that a sense of irony is all one needs to find personal happiness. Actually, that’s the very quality that makes the presentation of these characters (and their myopic worldview) contemptible.


Nothing Bad Can Happen

1. Nothing Bad Can Happen

Nothing Bad Can Happen would be virulent were it not a base product of film-school ignominy, with “provocation” being the valorized dispositif, no matter how flawed or asinine the conceit. This film features not one, but two inexcusable rape scenes, the latter of which makes the risible gay-club sequence in Steve McQueen’s Shame look positively Bressonian by comparison. The film is so riddled with jaw-droppingly cruel and gleefully nasty scenes that it’s difficult not to wonder about director Katrin Gebbe’s complicity with the gestating absurdity and whether this material is, truly, meant to be taken seriously. Gebbe’s subterfuge amounts to prizing art-house guttersnipe moves at all costs, no matter the ramifications.

Clayton Dillard

Clayton Dillard is a lecturer in cinema at San Francisco State University.

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