Many people I know and admire disagree with me that 2018 wasn't a very good year at the movies, but one thing we can all agree on: When it got bad, it got awful.
How bad? Read on for the five stinkers from 2018 that disappointed, bored, irritated and sometimes even angered me. And that wasn't the good kind of anger.
Not even close to being the worst movie of the year,
First Man was made by people who know how to tell a story -- they just apparently forgot. Writer Josh Singer's last movie was Steven Spielberg's very fine
The Post (which Singer wrote with Liz Hannah), and he also co-wrote
Spotlight. Director Damien Chazelle is coming off of the stellar one-two punch of
La La Land and
Whiplash. So, why is this movie about Neil Armstrong, the first man to set foot on the surface of the moon, an almost total bore? The typically unassailable Ryan Gosling plays Armstrong as an insufferable, taciturn brat, which may have been true (as many have pointed out), but makes for terrible storytelling.
First Man achieves the weird feat of asking why we went to the moon and failing to come up with an answer. It's not the worst film of the year by a long shot, just the most supremely and surprisingly disappointing.
Two more cases of compelling real-life stories becoming dramatically inert films, not saved even by having fantastic actors in the lead roles. In
Beautiful Boy, Timothée Chalamet tries his best to find something at the bottom of a drug-addicted heart, and it's hard to completely fault him or Steve Carell as his father for the rather complete failure of the movie. Director Felix van Groenigen can't find any compelling way to make us care for either character. The father is spoiled, self-absorbed and out-of-touch, who thinks the best way to bond with his drug-using son us to use drugs along with him. (In one of the film's weirdest sequences, he searches for his own answers by ... snorting cocaine.) Chalamet acts and acts and acts but can't give us any sort of explanation for why a kid with a perfect life ends up in the mean streets of San Francisco. The film promises answers and illumination, but gives us a dramatic interpretation that feels more like one of those disease-of-the-week TV movies from the 1970s.
Likewise,
Boy Erased offers up the wonderfully droll Lucas Hedges from
Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri, and
Manchester By the Sea, and places him alongside Nicole Kidman and Russell Crowe, then stands back to watch the sparks fizzle like a dud firecracker. Also Based on a True Story,
Boy Erased is so set on being sincere in telling the story of a boy forced into gay "conversion" therapy that it never once shows us anything that jolts us. Told with muted colors and muted emotions, it wants to be Very Important but winds up very dull indeed. Both this movie and
Beautiful Boy end with title cards offering allegedly sobering statistics and information, as if they've been public service announcements. Neither offers any insight whatsoever, and both fail through their markedly noble intentions.
Watching
Vox Lux is like listening to a crazy person spouting off all sorts of ideas and theories about pop culture and violence and mass shootings and celebrity and Lady Gaga and parenting and Hollywood and the music industry and the media and drug abuse and teen sex and alcoholism ... if that crazy person had no energy and just sort of rambled until he fell asleep.
Vox Lux says a lot of things but has almost nothing to say, and worse than that says all of it with the energy of a three-toed sloth on Quaaludes. You go in hoping for something daring, you'll even settle for something as stupidly over-the-top as the incomprehensible
Annihilation (which came close to being on this list, but aside from its insanely meaningless third act was at least interesting). But outside of a few intriguingly complex shots and Natalie Portman's loud and brash performance, you get nothing of note. Not a thing. Zip. Zero.
Vox Lux just kind of sits there and occasionally moves about a little, and you're watching it the way you would a friend who's passed out, just seeing if there are signs of life. But there aren't. None at all.
Watch this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4NNZN58zLUU
There.
That's the one laugh in
Book Club, and it's available online and for free. It's not a bad laugh, to be fair. But I just saved you 1 hour, 43 minutes and 40 seconds. Go do something useful with that time.
I would say something good about this horrible movie, but I can't think of a nice word to write. Nun.
Happy viewing in 2019, everyone.
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