After last year’s Worst Movies feature, I received feedback from some readers and Twitter folk about me possibly being “too negative” and “mean” when it came to criticizing films that I chose to watch for this annual hate crime report. Some people even pulled the “What movies have you written?” card, which is cheap because I can just turn around and ask what dog they’ve ever photoshopped a mustache on, and BOOM – argument over.

Hundreds, if not thousands, of films are made each year, and a lot of them are bad. That’s not just by my standards; that’s by the standards of the majority. I have never, in the several years that Vince has let me poison the quality of his website, proclaimed to be a critic. I am just a bro who likes watching movies, and I have a naïve innocence that lets me still believe that people in Hollywood care about making quality films. Then I watch Bucky Larson and that gullible side of me is shoved into a wood chipper.

So how, then, do I determine which of the many, many mainstream films that I have watched in 2012 are the absolute worst of the worst of the WORST? It’s a little pinch of common sense mixed with a dash of “Come on, that’s just f*cking awful”. But I also have some rules, and let’s review them now…

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Quentin Tarantino recently chose his top 20 movies of 2010, led by Toy Story 3. Excluding the ones I still haven’t seen, all of his choices made at least my honorable mentions list, with the exceptions of Robin Hood and Knight and Day. Seriously, Q, Robin Hood? He must have let the Coke Wizard choose that one.  (That’s the magical wizard behind Tarantino in the picture who shows up when Quentin does too much blow).  I don’t have one of those, but there is a leprechaun who bruises me up and pees in my bed when I drink too much. I’ll get you one day, Shameus O’Reardon.

1. Toy Story 3
2. The Social Network
3. Animal Kingdom
4. I Am Love
5. Tangled
6. True Grit
7. The Town
8. Greenberg
9. Cyrus
10. Enter The Void (“Hands down best credit scene of the year … Maybe best credit scene of the decade. One of the greatest in cinema history.”)

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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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"Hey, nerd, it looks like your computer's got a KNOWLEDGE virus."

Look, I know it feels like I hammer on Armond White a lot, but dammit, I only do it because it’s fun.  Jokes aside, I tried to do a list like this for Pete Hammond, and it didn’t work. It wasn’t funny, and I think the process made me dumber (Sample quote: “Purists may wonder ‘Why the remake?’ but after seeing it will wonder no more.”).  White, venerable curmudgeonly academiad of the New York Press,  is much more fun, because as preposterously dense and academic he is, if you unpack the quotes, they usually contain genuine insight (when he’s not being hilariously contrarian).  He’s fun to make fun of, but that’s partially because he’s fun to read (and thus, by extension, good at his job).  I guess what I’m trying to say is, don’t take these posts as me picking on the guy.  I’m not being sarcastic when I say that I really do love the thesaurificent old cantankeramous, even if he does represent the fusty tyrranicism of the country club Gutentocracy.

So here’s a snapshot of 2010 through Armond White quotes — some cranky, most obtuse, occasionally dead on — but all classic Armond.

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I SAW MOVIES THIS YEAR!  I HAVE OPINIONS ABOUT THEM!  BEHOLD AS I ARRANGE THEM NUMERICALLY!

Look, I’m not going to start by apologizing for the movies on the list.  We all know the idea of assigning movies numerical value is ridiculous, but that doesn’t stop us from reading lists, comparing lists, and arguing about lists.  It’s human nature, like love, or pooping.  At some point, you just have to sack up and commit to the format.  That said, it’s a truth critics rarely acknowledge: no one saw every movie that came out this year.  I saw fewer foreign movies than I usually do, and in retrospect, I should’ve spent more time watching those and less time on The Last god-d*mned Airbender.  Oh my God that was terrible.  People are entitled to their opinions, but anyone who liked that movie should be locked a cage and buried in the forest.

Anyway, enough foreplay, it’s time to drop your panties.  Here are my favorites of this year.  KNIVES OUT!  GRRR, MIXED METAPHOR!

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