VINCE’S DISCLAIMER: I didn’t make a list of worst movies this year because to do it fairly, I would’ve had to knowingly subject myself to terrible movies. I don’t care what anyone says, you do that often, eventually it’s going to mess you up.  Ever read a film critic who’s seen every Katherine Heigl ass-pile (or whatever the equivalent of Heigl was in 1983) for the last 30 years?  They slowly go insane, they start recommending films like Atonement. Poor Peter Travers used to be the best critic around.  Now he feeds his scabs to pigeons and buries herring in his garden to commemorate krystallnacht.  I don’t believe in seeing every movie and pretending I don’t already have a pretty good idea which ones are going to suck.  Snobby as it may sound, I’m trying to not ruin my taste buds by purposely scalding them on microwaved chili biscuits from Am/Pm.  But I know how people love lists of bad movies. Luckily, for that we have Burnsy. You think that guy worries about his taste?  Dude lives in Orlando. [/end disclaimer]

Putting together a Top 10 list is a grueling process in any genre, but I found the feat of selecting the 10 worst movies of 2010 to be downright painful. It’s primarily difficult because these movies are atrocious piles of cow flop that should cause unparalleled levels of shame to be cast upon the families of everyone involved in them. It was also painful because I watched so much crap this year, and there was so much more crap that I could have watched but just couldn’t. Seriously, The Bounty Hunter? I don’t have the will power to not throw my TV into traffic. But here’s the thing – I enjoy watching terrible movies so much more than great movies because I live to criticize. Vince can tighten his scarf and crank Florence + The Machine from his hybrid IROC while he raves about Hesher, but by all accounts Hesher is a great movie, so nobody’s going to argue.

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Overall, this weekend’s box office was down 28% from the same weekend last year, and I hope the conclusion film execs draw from this is “hey, maybe we should make better movies.”  Consider that the top seven films consisted of: the third sequel to a kid’s movie, another sequel, a rip off of at least five other films from the last five years starring Ashton Kutcher and Katherine Heigl, a movie based on a video game, a sequel to a movie based on a TV show based on a book, a movie based on an unfunny one-frame comic strip, and a sequel to a movie based on a comic book, respectively.  Er, disrespectively.

The specifics (full top ten after the jump): Shrek Forever After landed on top for the second weekend in a row with $25.3 million.  Get Him to the Greek did decent business at $17.4 million (I saw it, it wasn’t life-changing, but pretty funny), Killers landed just behind that, followed by Prince of Persia and SATC 2, which both suffered big, 50%+ drops from their first weekend.  Marmaduke opened all the way down at number six, with just $11.6 million, which is a nice bit of schadenfreude, but not quite justice.  I don’t think it’s hyperbole to say that whoever greenlit Marmaduke movie deserves to be homeless.  Ahh, but it wouldn’t be Box Office Wrap Up without some asinine, faux-scientific analysis.  How say you, BoxOfficeMojo?

Killers, wasn’t a disaster with an estimated $16.1 million on close to 3,300 screens at 2,859 venues, but it was less than the last two comparable movies The Bounty Hunter ($20.7 million) and Date Night ($25.2 million). While Killers was a commercial step backwards for lead actors Katherine Heigl and Ashton Kutcher, it did speak to their bankability, considering that they were pretty much the only things going for the movie. Other than the use of the Talking Heads’ “Psycho Killer,” Killers‘ advertising campaign was a nondescript blur and only conveyed that Kutcher’s character turns out to be a spy, followed by unexplained action. Killers was further hampered by its title: there was a dissonance between what the generic name “Killers” means and the marriage action-comedy presented in which only Kutcher is a killer.

So… it did less business than The Bounty Hunter and that somehow “speaks to the bankability” of Katherine Heigl and Ashton Kutcher? How do you figure?  And of al the things wrong with that movie, you’re gonna bring up the f*cking title?  Well allow me to present a much more reasoned, thorough analysis. It’s a picture of a walrus blowing itself.

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It would’ve been virtually impossible to predict, but as it turns out, a weekend that opened with a fourth Shrek, a second Sex and the City, and a pastiche of tired Jerry Bruckheimer clichés didn’t exactly light people’s c*cks on fire.  In terms of attendance, it was the worst Memorial Day weekend since 1993, which of course opened with Pluto Nash Forever After.

Overall revenues for the top-50 films during the four-day holiday weekend came in at $192 million, the lowest since 2001. Factoring in today’s higher admission prices, about 24.2 million tickets were sold, the least since a 22.5 million head count in 1993.

Jake Gyllenhaal’s action tale “Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time” came in second with $37.8 million. Sarah Jessica Parker’s “Sex and the City 2,” which many thought would debut at No. 1, wound up in third with $36.8 million.

“When you have a Memorial Day weekend down this much, it just tells me the movies in the marketplace are just not grabbing people the way they have in past years,” said Paul Dergarabedian, box-office analyst for Hollywood.com.  [AP]

Wow, that’s a bold statement, Paul.  Good thing we have a “box-office analyst” to clear things up for us.  Lower attendance = less interest from the marketplace?  Who knew!  I would’ve thought lower attendance = sandwich.  Mmm, sandwich. ANYWAY, the silver lining in all this is that the flaccid sequel showings so far could softify Hollywood’s formerly stiff boner for superfluous sequels.  Penis.

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In this press interview for Prince of Persia, the interviewer asks Jake Gyllenhaal about the correct pronunciation of his name, and he says it’s actually pronounced “yillin-HOO-la hey.”  It’s hard to tell if he’s joking (like pretty much everything with Prince of Persia), but if that’s true, then the spelling of his name shows even more blatant disregard for Phonetics than Laveranues Coles.  I was all set to make fun of it for being Dutch and maybe even bring in the “Händenwaschen Ultra Fail” video from the other day, but then I looked it up and he’s actually Swedish.  Well fine.  All I have to say to that is at least he’s not Dutch, Europe’s pot-smoking gibberish clowns.

[Buzzfeed]

Jerry Bruckheimer movies are kind of like the father who took off when you were a kid, and then when you were like 16, he finally decided he wanted back in your life, so he tries to bribe you with presents.  Only it’s clear he knows nothing about you, because all the gifts he brings you are just some stuff that he read in the newspaper was popular with teenagers.  Hey, how ya doin’, kid?  Ya like parkour?  I hear a lot of the kids are into that nowadays.  What about super slow motion like Watchmen, and bullet close-ups like in Wanted?  My cousin Gina’s kid Terrance, he’s about your age, he can’t get enough of that stuff.  So whaddya say, kid?  C’mon, come give your old dad a hug.

LEAVE ME ALONE, JERRY!  YOU’RE NOT MY REAL FATHER!  EVERYTHING WAS FINE BEFORE YOU SHOWED UP!