The 22nd Best Movie I’ve Seen This Year

#22. X-Men Origins: Wolverine
 
You know how every year you look forward to something, and it always disappoints you?
 
Your birthday comes and goes, and even if you do something fun, you realize that the only difference is that you’ve added a year to your age and gotten precisely three books richer. Every sports season begins this way for me – Opening Day nears, and I get outrageously excited. And then, as I sit through the first blowout loss, I suddenly remember “oh, yeah, sometimes these games suck.” Halfway through the first game, I’m poking through emails on my laptop.
 
The start of summer blockbusters is exactly the same for me – all throughout the spring, I see the trailers. Terrible horror movie after terrible horror movie comes out - I skip them all. As a result, I’m never at the movies, and I miss it – no sneaking from theater to theater, no smuggling in of food, no yelling out sarcastic things at yet another terrible Dwayne Johnson trailer. Instead, I wait for the summer blockbusters.
 
Naturally, watching the trailers, they all look amazing – dizzying fight scenes and pervasive explosions, and at the end of it you’re making note of the day it comes out so you can go to the midnight showing. And so when early May rolls around and you go to the first one, it’s not just a movie you’re going to see, it’s Opening Day for you. It’s the beginning of a whole summer of escapist fun.
 
And then, you see X-Men Origins: Wolverine, and you remember “oh, yeah, sometimes these movies suck.” And it sucks the fun out of your whole summer.
 
With Wolverine, there were just so many things that went wrong. It wasn’t just that you could predict what was going to happen – it’s that you could predict it with such accuracy. There’s a moment where one of the characters – it’s not a spoiler, because you’ll see it immediately if you see the movie – takes a small step to her right, placing a window with a long, clear shot of the fields behind it directly behind her head. And before you can shout “quick, move, you easily replaceable one-dimensional character; before a sniper with superhuman accuracy shoots you through the head,” she’s dead.
 
It’s a shame, because the film begins with such promise – the Avengers-like fighting force that Wolverine joins at the beginning of the movie is oodles of fun – but quickly devolves into one man’s slow, explosion-filled quest to seek revenge on the men who took his love from him. Hugh Jackman’s quest to be the world’s Most-Ripped Actor ends up being the only effort in this movie that’s in any way successful.
 
Some things require a back story. How Wolverine got that bitchin’ leather coat is not one of them.

The "He Wolf" Phenomenon

I don't know if you've seen this yet, but, while extremely disturbing, it's worth it.

This is Shakira's "She Wolf" video, a mildly creepy video for a mildly catchy song that sounds a whole lot like it (and by "it" I mean both the song and the video) was envisoned in 1972.

Embedding is, naturally, disabled, but here's the link. If you haven't heard the song, it's worth watching at least to the chorus, which features Shakira doing a wolf howl.

The follow-up is "He-Wolf," a shot-by-shot remake of the original video shot by Andrew Foster, a freshman violin performance major who saw the video and said "I can do that."

If Shakira's video was only "mildly creepy" - this one is a great deal more alarming:

 

The 23rd Best Movie I’ve Seen This Year

#23. Taken
 
I’ve been trying to figure out how to spell the word “yech.” Or maybe it’s “yelch.” “Yealch.” “Yealk.” It’s onomatopoeia, so it’s a little tricky, but it’s that word you say when you’re trying to say “yuck,” but your tongue gets involved, and so it kind of adds a lllllll sound at the back of your throat.
 
“Yulck.”  Sure. Let’s do that.
 
I bring this up because that’s the word that sprang unbidden to my lips when I decided that I should review all of the 23 movies I’ve seen this year,  starting with the bottom – and I saw that on the bottom was Taken.
 
Now, understand, this is a clear case of misplaced enthusiasm. There were certainly worse movies released this year (I fortunately avoided almost all of them), but Taken had a lot going for it. It starred a classic man’s man, Liam Neeson, a man with educated tone and ever-haunted eyes – the man who taught Bruce Wayne to fight in Batman Begins, appeared in one of the greatest duels in cinema history in Rob Roy, and made us weep like little children in Love Actually (maybe that was just me). This is a man who appeared in The Phantom Menace and yet somehow became more awesome. This is an actor of terrific power. And this is an actor wasted.

I was so certain I would like this movie that I almost didn’t realize that I didn’t. In the middle of yet another disjointed, poorly shot car chase, Claire whispered to me “hey, are you really bored?” And it suddenly hit me – I was really bored.  I was terribly bored. I was nearly asleep. I just hadn’t realized it until just that moment, because my brain just kept telling me “any second now – it’s gonna get good.”
 
All you need to understand about the movie is this: there’s a great exchange during the trailer where Neeson is on the phone with the people who took his daughter – it played in every single one of their 30-second TV spots, and it's on that poster over there on the top left. In it, Neeson promises to find and kill every one of the kidnappers. A dark voice on the other end of the line growls knowingly, “good luck,” then hangs up with a click. At this point, everyone in the theater watching the trailer is practically fist-pumping with anticipation. “Oh, it is on! Liam Neeson’s gonna kill that mother!” It looks like a classic cat-and-mouse as Neeson hunts down the thieves while the mastermind behind it all sends him down darkened alleys and into traps.
 
Instead, the guy on the other end of the phone turns out to be a fairly dumb, run-of-the-mill thug who Neeson stumbles upon midway through the film. When he dies, you’ll know you’re about two-thirds of the way through the movie.

A slight differential, yes.

The 23 Best Movies I’ve Seen in Theaters This Year (In Terms Of Box Office)

1. Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen
2. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
3. Up
4. The Hangover
5. Star Trek
6. X-Men Origins: Wolverine
7. Taken
8. Inglorious Basterds
9. District 9
10. Watchmen
11. I Love You, Man
12. Zombieland
13. Funny People
14. State of Play
15. Where The Wild Things Are
16. (500)Days of Summer
17. The Informant!
18. Adventureland
19. The Invention of Lying
20. The Hurt Locker
21. Whip It
22. Away We Go
23. Taking Woodstock


The 23 Best Movies I’ve Seen In Theaters This Year (In Terms of Excellence)

1. Up
2. The Hurt Locker
3. (500) Days Of Summer
4. Inglorious Basterds
5. Away We Go
6. Star Trek
7. Zombieland
8. Where The Wild Things Are
9. Adventureland
10. District 9
11. The Hangover
12. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
13. I Love You, Man
14. State Of Play
15. The Invention Of Lying
16. Whip It
17. Watchmen
18. Taking Woodstock
19. Transformers: Revenge Of The Fallen
20. The Informant!
21. Funny People
22. X-Men Origins: Wolverine
23. Taken