It’s hard to know where to start. The way I compile these year-end lists is by going through the release schedule, starting at January 1 of last year, and pulling any title I would seriously consider for The List, whether Top, Bottom or whatever. If a film just “wasn’t good,” I didn’t pull it. So Cat In The Hat… really bad… but not quite bad enough.

As such, 11 of the 44 films in competition, on reflection, deserve contempt, but don’t quite make it down there with the other 33.

Bad Boys II – This incredibly long romp with guns, comedy corpses and a Goodyear blimp’s view of a plot was a rough ride, but it wasn’t horrible. When is Michael Bay going to learn not to always leave them wanting less?

Cold Mountain – There are beautiful things in this movie but it is, for me, a big disappointment. This is just the kind of film I am normally accused of adoring while others complain of boredom. But, alas, no. With two performances as right (Jude Law & Brendan Gleeson) as everything else is wrong (“Well, Nic gave me this double barreled sling shot!” “Jude sure has a purty mouth.” “I am breathing heavy because it’s hard to talk this much with a your mouth full of scenery.”) Natalie Portman manages to have the most beautiful moment and the one of the most absurd moments (“I won’t make it through the winter without that pig!”) in one section of the film… the greatness of Mighella and the mistake of this film, right before you.

Freddy v Jason – I know that the geeks had fun. I didn’t despise it, but I couldn’t have been much more bored.

Hotel – Mike Figgis’ epic mess, pushing the envelope of digital cinema and delivering a great master’s thesis on modern production possibilities… and little else.

Kangaroo Jack – It was crap. But how can you have a movie about a Kangaroo?

Lara Croft: Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life – Really, quite bad. But not impossibly bad. What was most stunning about it was that it could have ben just as dumb and also have been fun. Like Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle, it was one of this year’s “shark jumping” action movies. Yes, Virginia, you can raise the intensity so far that it becomes an incomprehensible mess.

Love Actually – It could have been one of the great Brit comedies. Great cast, nice ideas, funny jokes. And only 20 minutes more sugar than anyone could choke down in one sitting. Richard Curtis is no director… but he didn’t need to be one. He had great actors and a solid cinematographer. What he desperately needed was a producer who could say, “You have 5 greats stories and 3 perfunctory ones… just do the important ones… it’s your first freakin’ movie and you don’t want to make an insipid comedy version of Magnolia.”

Masked & Anonymous – I can’t put it on my Top Ten because I didn’t see it. But it seems to be a legend in the making… a coffee table movie disaster. “Yeah… I saw that once… Dylan… it sucked.” But they’re just talking. Be a man! Suffer through it for yourself! (That’s the DVD sales pitch.)

Seabiscuit – How could you make this story boring? It wasn’t easy, but Gary Ross tried so hard to make a great movie that he made a mess. It reminds me of being at the stables at a racetrack, looking at the noble beauty of these proud animals and then noticing that slow stream of excrement dropping behind the horse. There is some great acting and some beautiful images, but plop, plop, plop.

The Last Samurai – A beautifully made movie that espouses everything it claims to be against. I can’t say that it really is one of the worst films made this year, but it is morally reprehensible. I guess that should be enough… but like all Zwick movies (and TV shows), there is enough value to make the failures that much more tragic.

Winged Migration – I have to admit, I was dead bored after 30 minutes of this film. It is a stunning piece of work by the filmmakers. But zzzzzzzzzzzzzzz…. The birds fly north… the birds fly south… east… west… more killing, less flying, that’s all I’m sayin’.

SPECIAL AWARDS: There are two special award categories this year.

THE INDIE CRAP AWARDS

I just can’t bring myself to kick these five well-intended, heartfelt unwatchable pieces of indie-scribable junk on the Worst 10 list.

Anything But Love – An effort at reviving the “let’s put on a show” romantic musical that has the misfortune of starring actors with little talent, charm or singing and dancing ability. There are few things more excruciating than watching someone who really loves what they are doing failing miserably.

In The Cut – I see what Jane Campion was up to… I love Jane Campion’s post-feminist ideas… but every time she tries to meld it to a genre that she doesn’t really understand, she ends up with 2/3rds of an unwatchable film.

Passionada – Oy. I really like Jason Isaacs and I really like Sofia Milos and I hear Dan Ireland is a really great and well-intended guy who made this film out of a real passion… and it is like a bad Lifetime movie. I didn’t believe a single second of it. Not one.

The Event – Presented in Toronto as an important film, Thom Fitzgerald’s greatest achievement is getting the worst ever performance by Parker Posey as hard-edged New York borough-accented investigator. For me, it was the movie equivalent of “We’re here, we’re queer, get used to it.” Well, I am used to it and I’m fine with it, but it’s not enough. If lots of drama was the same as good drama, Wal-Mart would be making their own.

Till Human Voices Wake Us – Guy Pearce kicks ass and Helena Bohnam Carter is one of the great actresses working today. The title should have been “Till Human Publicists Wake Us,” because I needed to be shaken awake and sent home. This may be the perfect movie for single women who love Guy to fall asleep to… guaranteed to put you under in 20 minutes or less.

THE THREE AFFLECK-TIONS

I hated all three of Ben Affleck’s movies this year. But for all my revulsion, none of the three could make the Bottom 10.

Daredevil – Ben’s fetish flick, Mark Steven Johnson did almost everything wrong, other than hiring Colin Farrell and Jennifer Garner’s lips. (She was wearing colored contacts, wasn’t she?) There were a lot of good ideas botched here. In the end, the biggest mistake was trying to be real and yet dumping reality for CG mayhem whenever given the chance. Do you think he got the red leather suit on sale in the village, “Oh yesssss… you really look good in that. No… I mean it!”

Gigli – It’s failed art, but it is more than the sum of the jokes. The idea of doing down and dirty monologues about the male and female vision of their own sexuality is a wonderful notion. And while Jennifer Lopez’ appreciation of her vagina came close to working, Ben’s take on the male member was a little soft-headed. The idea of aggressive machismo being challenged by lesbian-tinged femininity and losing to the softness of woman was interesting. The idea of Larry Gigli seeing a reflection of his better self in the mentally-challenged boy that he starts by thinking he is infinitely superior to, is interesting. I honestly am curious about taking another look at this one. But it is, in the end, a failure… perfectly framed by the notion that you can see the talent hanging out waiting to shoot Baywatch anytime you drive up PCH. It was an arch idea that required perfect finesse and ended up too often ham fisted.

Paycheck – Just a turd. Real simple. Affleck is bad. DP Jeffrey Kimball, who knows how to make people look good, manages to use a lot of Vaseline/filters and still finds every bad angle on Uma Thurman’s face. The film is a clock movie without a clock, a sci-fi film without any challenging science, a thriller without any thrills and the action is so over the top that you don’t believe anything except that a lot of people got paid a lot of good money for no good reason.

THE 15 DUMBER UPS

American Wedding – “Okay guys… what bodily item haven’t we put in someone’s mouth? Pubic hair? Hysterical!” The cast of actors who would pass for teens got awfully long in the tooth. It felt a bit like a late 70s sitcom reunion.

The Battle of Shaker Heights – Everything the series promised. This is what happens when you hire a comedy director to do a drama and then try to fix it in post. The best memento of this film comes in the upcoming Win A Date With Tad Hamilton when Gary Cole gets payback for being dissed in the casting process.

Bruce Almighty – They spend $80 million on a comedy and couldn’t get Jim Carrey to actually go shoot at Niagara Falls, leading to some of the worst green screen work ever in a studio movie. But that’s just the start. They take a great premise and a bunch of great actors and have the character who gets the power of God use the power to have sex with his newly bust-enhanced girlfriend. That’s the equivalent of “What would you do with a million dollars?” “I’d buy a case of Bubble Yum and that Buffalo Springfield box set I’ve been eyeing!” But they have their cash to keep them warm.

Cabin Fever – Much ado about so little. I didn’t laugh. I didn’t scream. I watched an audience get signaled to do both and to respond. Mediocrity would have been okay.. had viewers only been so lucky. The only way this thing could be put in league with Evil Dead or Reanimator or Ginger Snaps is that all four titles feature the letters “a,” “e,” and “i.”

The In-Laws – It had enough moments to stay out of the Bottom 10, but what a sad mess for all involved. Let’s just try to put it behind us.

Johnny English – Small doses. Got it?

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen – This thing was an epic mess. There were some nice touches, including the guy doing the Tony Shaloub imitation. But you could see where the ideas came up short of the planning or budget.

Legally Blonde 2 – A master’s thesis on how not to do a sequel. The one good idea was bringing in Bob Newhart as a new sidekick. But even that came up short as they couldn’t figure out how to use him. Good sequels are usually reimaginings of the original and I guess they tried that here. But every time they moved in a new direction, they pulled themselves back in. I love Jennifer Coolidge, but a rich girl in Washington might have an assistant, right? That girl’s boyfriend might actually be working in Washington - even if he had other movies to shoot and was only available for a few days of shooting, forcing the filmmakers to bend like pretzels to keep that actor in the movie. Etc, etc, etc.

Once Upon A Time in Mexico – Johnny Depp’s Pirates of The Caribbean performance without the supporting cast and images. Robert Rodriguez came up with a story so complex and cool that you could only keep up (or care) if you were eating a hamburger (or a side of beef) with him at a café in Austin. The most shocking thing is that Rodriguez, the M. Night Shyamalan of the pre-teen set, still doesn’t know how to shoot a coherent set of images. The movie is a mess.

The Shape of Things – Neil Labute hates women for a reason… because they started! This is one of those movies where the third act feels like the second act, because the shocker in the third act isn’t shocking enough to be interesting without further exploration. And Rachel Weisz is beautiful enough, but not young or American enough to pull this one off.

Spun – The Mickey Rourke Plastic Surgery Movie of the Year. Being outrageous doesn’t equal being smart or good. There is actually stuff that will make me watch this movie again if it ever arrives on the satellite. But it’s mostly like watching a car accident.

The Statement – How could this be sooooo bad? A thriller that doesn’t thrill. An actors’ movie with no good parts. A strong performance by Michael Caine that is ruined by a dramatically flawed screenplay. Sad.

Underworld – Bill Nighy is worth the price of admission. But the promise of a sexy Ms. Beckinsale is never fulfilled. However, it is the film with The Worst Performance By a New Actor In 2003… congratulations Shane Brolly!!! You should go into cattle farming! You have the charisma of block of tofu!

Uptown Girls – This was close to making it. Like a bad sitcom pilot, both lead actresses here play their stereotypical roles to the hilt. Britney Murphy’s performance had all the desperate neediness of Sally Field at a Gidget fan convention.

Wonderland – It’s hard work to make a movie about a porn star unsexy. It’s very difficult to make a tale of drug addiction and murder boring. It’s not easy to have a cast of great actors and have Lisa Kudrow left as the only really compelling performance. But they did it. Kudrow and Kilmer kept it off the Bottom 10. And the director, James Cox, was obviously reaching for something… Pepto-Bismol is my guess.

And now…

THE 10 WORST FILMS OF 2003

10. Dreamcatcher – Sometimes you just wonder how it is possible for a disaster like this to happen. Mixing multiple genres in a movie is very, very difficult. And this film failed remarkably. You could see the construction frame of the film. It was either going to be truly great or truly awful. Ironically, this was one of those films where you admire the bravery of going with little-known actors when, in the end, the film desperately needed some familiar faces with some serious star power to give it any chance.

9. Confidence – James Foley is one of those Assumed Savants who has never been as commercial as they wanted him to be, but has overseen some of the most memorable scenes in recent movie history. From the opening roundabout of At Close Range to the film;s climax between Penn & Walken… to a dozen great scenes in Glengarry Glen Ross, including the ultimate Baldwin moment ever… to the very underrated Fear, which made the ascent of Reese Witherspoon an inevitability even before Election marked her as a star. And maybe this is the best Ed Burns can be. But this guy makes Shane Brolly look rangy. There was nothing about this movie that worked. The saddest part was watching Dustin Hoffman try to craft a special performance when there was no one to hit the ball back.

8. Good Boy! – Some dogs talk. Some dogs play on movie screens. The is the kind of kid's movie that makes you want to get a vasectomy.

7. View From The Top – Gwyneth Paltrow’s biggest career mistake ever was taking $12 million to be in this loser. It seems to have served as the Miramax equivalent of one of those movie moments where the mob boss lets the guy live as long as he never comes back to town again. What exactly was it that made any humanwith a working brain think that Bruno Barreto could make a comedy - much less a comic twist on early 70s American culture? You couldn’t really ask for a hotter bevy of talented beauties than Paltrow, Applegate, Preston and Stacey Dash… not enough to overcome bad writing, bad directing and a cameo from Mike Myers that made his Studio 54 cameo look memorable. (Yes, there was a movie called Studio 54… wasn’t that long ago.) Oh, to think what Myers could have done with the “turds piled up in me” speech from Cold Mountain!

6. A Man Apart – This was true career killer. Just when you thought Vin Diesel was going to be a real movie star, F. Gary Gray’s career-worst work on a movie where the script was never settled, that sat in the can, that had lots of reshoots… the only thing worse than a bloody car wreck is a bloody pretentious car wreck. Universal may be underestimating just how damaging this film was to Diesel’s popularity. Riddick looks massive… but Vin is in “Fool me twice, shame on me” land right now. Sell the movie, not the former star.

5. Party Monster – The Rosemary’s Baby of the gay arthouse scene… not that it is, for a frame, as good as Polanski’s masterpiece. But how could Bailey & Barbato, two very talented filmmakers, spawn something quite this heart-stoppingly bad? Well, start with the idea to hire Macauley “I never really could act, but I was really cute and I knew how to see that” Culkin to play a role he couldn’t begin to understand. Then take Seth Green, who is terribly talented, to play a queeny gay man that he just can’t make real. The entire performance sounds like a Russian trying to do a southern accent. It just never feels real. Add to that a mess of a screenplay - and none of the creative vision that the boys brought to their docs - and you get a monstrously bad movie.

4. The Haunted Mansion – The movie that naysayers feared Pirates of the Caribbean would be…. only worse! I am not a basher of Murphy’s family film career. But here, he is one step from Fetchit. All he really gets to do here is to react with googly eyes as this family thriller comedy digs deep into the issue of miscegenation while pretending hopelessly that it’s not happening. Every sidekick is misused. Every effect is irrelevant. Every idea is bent with subtext that manages to creep you out, but not deliver anything interesting. The logline: Closeted gay manservant in the 1800s kills his slave owning master’s black fiancé in order to have him all for himself. 120 years later, the reincarnate of the fiancé comes back, kindling a battle between the slave owner and the self-indulgent, greedy, bug-eyed black husband of the reincarnate. Hilarity ensues.

Uh… no… it does not.

3. Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle – Not the end of the world, but pretty much the end of any idea that film is meant to tell story, offer emotion, make one think or have any value as anything other than as a flashing light on a screen that distracts us for 90 minutes. McG’s attempt to raise premature ejaculation to an art form just never comes together. Some people would watch Drew or Cameron or Lucy read a phonebook. But that would have too much narrative logic for McG. What if they read a flying phonebook that tears its own pages out and stops t look at itself in the mirror every 45 seconds? If you want to do something for cinema, try to tell someone what a failure this film was every day.

1. Tie - Just Married / The Life of David Gale – I hardly knew how to rate one disaster ahead of another. Just Married aspires to absolutely nothing and its success in achieving that goal is its only redeeming quality. The Life of David Gale is a film made by a great filmmaker, starring some great actors, in a movie about something important, that fails so utterly that it has to rank as the greatest (and most forgotten) failure of the year. But then again, there is the scene with the cockroach in Just Married…. Or the character named – get ready to laugh – “Pussy.” Woo Hoo!!! That’s comedy. But then there is the on-again, off-again accents in Gale. But then there is the constant illogic of Just Married. But then there is the constant illogic of David Gale. Just Married is the movie that most made me feel like I had lost a portion of my life sitting in a theater. David Gale is the movie that made me saddest upon considering the amount of time wasted by Alan Parker in an utterly failed effort. I wanted to commit suicide to make my point that Britney Murphy movies are the newest form of self-abuse. (She, like Affleck, has three films on this chart.)

I don’t think that 2003 was one of the worst years for cinema. But it was clearly one of the great years of all time for horrible movies. Congratulations to you all for these achievements. I may seem harsh here, but I tip well and look forward to seeing you all very soon… yes, medium rare… could I get some more Equal… thanks.

READER OF THE DAY: CURLY FRIES writes: “Two films that gained little notice but made an impression on me were: Owning Mahowney, Richard Kietniowski's nicely honed portrait of a compulsive gambler. Philip Seymour Hoffman's performance is perfectly pitched and the film gets the small Canadian details just right. All the Real Girls. I thought this might be a mainstream breakthrough for David Gordon Green but it just wasn't to be. Still, if you're looking for the poetry of place and that achy sensation of young love, this movie captivates.”

THE CARNIVAL BARKER writes: “I have to add to the list The Singing Detective. Downey was fantastic and I have a bet going that this will become a cult favorite at some point. I just think a lot of people did not even try to understand this movie. I hope when it comes out on DVD more people will see it and give it a chance. Keith Gordon is still my favorite director and Downey is just mother freaking great!“

FRANKRY MY DEAR writes: “Lilya-4-Ever. Pretty heartwrenching stuff and admittedly incredibly difficult to watch. But the performance is breathtaking and the ending doesn't feel forced. I didn't like Together or Fucking Amal, but this one really did get to me. It had Bergman's seal of approval when it was submitted for the foreign Oscar submission, what further proof is needed for a film's quality?

The Man Without a Past. A hilarious deadpan masterpiece. The Finnish band, the fight over his wife, the bank robbery. Hilarity and warmth all around.

Last, in a year of documentaries, OT: Our Town wasn't seen by many people, but it is genuinely uplifting.”

And this from BUFFALO BRI: “You hear that noise? It’s the art house crowd realizing Anthony Minghella made only a pretty good movie, not a great one and now they must find a new opponent for ROTK. New Line and PJ must be happy as hell. They may just get some recognition with the big Oscar awards. The “art house” might have just fallen like Sauron. They have been found lacking and the Academy might have to give some big awards to a movie with 1500+ visual effect shots. The love story in the Matrix Reloaded and Matrix Revolutions had more passion if you ask me. Jude Law’s character was just too understated, too soft spoken. “Team Evil” (Ray Winstone and his boys) werent evil enough back on Cold Mountain. The young, acrobatic Albino seemed out of place. Nicole Kidman did well. Renee was like the comedic, buddy cop character that usually dies, but in this case didn’t. Some might think that Renee’s free living, foul mouthed character might have given Inman better sex than Ada. Not a terrible movie, but Minghella aint got anything on Terrence Malick. The Thin Red Line did it all so much better. Weinstein tried too hard in loading the cast, too desperate it seems for an audience. Even a Star Wars vet and a rock star couldn’t save it. What happened to the rumors that Natalie showed her tits? Nicole did but she always does. This movie called out for a better actor and an American to play Inman.”

E ME: Evil is as Evil does. What turned your brown eyes red this year?

Monday - December 29 - The Movies You Didn't See, But Should Have
Tuesday, December 30 - The Ten Worst Films Of 2002
Wednesday, December 31 - The Best Films Of 2002
Thursday, January 1 – New Year’s Resolutions
Thursday, January 1 – @MCN – 20 Weeks To Oscar, 9 Weeks To Go
Monday, January 5 – THB Returns To The Daily Schedule

MCN will be updated daily through the holidays.