by jellydonut25 » Thu Dec 31, 2015 3:42 pm
Disclaimer: I have a LONG list of movies I need to see still: (Sicario, Everest, Straight Outta Compton, Black Mass, Steve Jobs, The Walk, Bridge of Spies, Hunger Games, Good Dinosaur, The Night Before, Creed, In the Heart of the Sea, The Big Short, Hateful Eight, The Revenant (unless we're counting this one as 2016)) AND a list of movies that I won't list entirely, but that I need to see, that I don't think could make my top 10, but I still wanna see, like Green Inferno and Goosebumps and Scout's Guide to the Zombie Apocalypse.
SO, what were YOUR favorite movies of 2015? Or your favorites so FAR of 2015? Or, you're a grump and don't like anything?
Here's my (very fluid) TOP 10:
1.) Mad Max: Fury Road
2.) The Martian
3.) Krampus
4.) What We Do in the Shadows
5.) Star Wars: The Force Awakens
6.) Bone Tomahawk
7.) Ex Machina
8.) It Follows
9.) Jurassic World
10.) Crimson Peak
Just barely missing the cut: Ant-Man, The Final Girls, Shaun the Sheep Movie, Chappie, The Gift.
I'd say my top 7 are pretty safely going to be in my top 10 after I see everything I want to, but Crimson Peak and Jurassic World will almost assuredly not make the final cut and It Follows is a bubble movie.
Ultimately, I think I'll wind up with like 20 movies that I either buy, or put on my short-list, and maybe another 5-10 that I put on a list of "If I see it for less than $10".
Of course, I suppose no discussion of favorites would be complete without discussing some least favorites...but FIRST
Let-Downs:
Avengers
Tomorrowland
Southpaw
Inside Out
American Ultra
Jupiter Ascending
Maggie
^I don't really DISLIKE any of these, but aside from Avengers due to completionism and MAYBE American Ultra (as it's something I think I might enjoy more and more with repeat viewings) I went into each of these movies expecting something and feeling like that expectation wasn't met. Whether it was "This could be a top 10" and finding it to be utterly forgettable (Tomorrowland, Southpaw) or "This should be a lot of fun" and finding it to have some major (or several minor) flaw(s) that kept me at an arm's length from loving it (Jupiter Ascending, Avengers, Inside Out), these movies all left me cold, though I wouldn't necessarily tell people to avoid them.
Now, my WORSTS:
9.) Strange Magic - Maybe this could be even higher on the list, considering I quit on it, but at the same time, it didn't suck away too much of my time...because I turned it off.
8.) The Gunman - Another movie I don't remember too well, just that it was overly self-serious, poorly directed/scripted, and not very well cast.
7.) Terminator Genisys - Stupid, bland, overly convoluted, poorly acted, poorly cast, poorly scripted, just a mishmash of bad BAD stuff with occasional moments that attempt to trade in on nostalgia and fail to do so. Terminator with kid-gloves on...just awful stuff. To see what this franchise has degenerated into almost makes me sad.
6.) Magic Mike XXL - the first movie was a serious attempt at a real movie, building real characters, telling a real story. This movie is everything you thought the first one was going to be given its trailers. It's a bunch of dudebros hanging out getting any girl they want flopping around in speedos just being dbags all the time, and it completely negates everything from the first movie.
5.) Pitch Perfect 2 - I don't get the fascination with this franchise. Listening to a tween girl's iPod shuffle while a bunch of mean-spirited mean-girl-types act all judgmental of everyone who isn't them, and the only likable one is a girl everyone calls "Fat Amy" with a BUNCH of acapella "puns" that aren't puns at all, they're just terribly written jokes...and there's TONS of cheating on the songs, with me SWEARING I can hear musical accompaniments, but others SWEARING there's not, but DEFINITELY dozens upon dozens of tracks being used when only one or two people are supposedly singing.
4.) San Andreas - You get The Rock, one of the most charismatic people there is, who is a prototypical action-star to the extent that everything he did in a movie called HERCULES is stuff I think The Rock could actually do in real-life....and you put him in a plane floating above all the action for 100 out of 115 minutes.
3.) Minions - I kinda liked the Minions in the first Despicable Me, when they were just cannon-fodder for Gru and not really "people" with personalities, as much. Then something happened in between the first and second movie where all the moms started to get minion fever and they wound up taking over the show. These little pukes are unfunny and their adventures are not remotely interesting. There's a reason Pixar never made a "Little Green Aliens from the Claw Machine" movie. This stuff is only tolerable in small doses.
2.) Trainwreck/Vacation - A tie of unfunniness.
1.) Hot Tub Time Machine 2 - This is one of the first movies I think maybe I've ever seen where I finally saw the "Comedy is WAY too mean-spirited these days" complaint a lot of people throw around. I couldn't believe how nasty and ultimately woefully unfunny this movie is.There's a LENGTHY scene where the entire "joke" is that one character has to butt-rape another....and then he actually does. And we're supposed to LAUGH??? This is horrible.