by Galen Rende
What do you get when you combine Jessica Alba, Jamie Foxx, Anne Hathaway, Taylor Lautner, Queen Latifah, George Lopez, Taylor Swift, and the one holiday that leads to thousands of teenage girls sobbing while watching The Notebook for the fifteenth time? You get Garry Marshall’s 2010 film Valentine’s Day.
Not to bash any of the aforementioned actors, but movies that seek to generate a viewing audience based on one single day out of the calendar have no right of making it to the big screen. But with the holidays fast approaching, movies like this are to be expected.
Even though movies such as New Years Eve, Christmas with the Kranks, and Deck the Halls all received terrible reviews and resoundingly negative public responses, some of Hollywood’s most famous actors, producers, and directors continue to churn them out.
However, bad holiday movies are not alone in their pointlessness and exceedingly corny plotlines- there are plenty of other terrible films that have absolutely nothing to do with the holidays.
Gabe Katzman, a freshman journalism major, noted that “movies with bad acting, bad special effects, and bad sound effects” are bound to be terrible. When I asked him what his least favorite movie was, he responded almost immediately with, “anything with Nicholas Cage.”
Freshman business major Pat Powers gave his input as well, asserting, “Pretty much any Adam Sandler movie after the 90s is bad.” Who could argue? While Mr. Deeds may have captured the hearts of some, I don’t think anyone would vouch for Little Nicky, You Don’t Mess with the Zohan, Just Go With It, Jack and Jill, or Funny People, which ironically could be the least funny movie of his career.
While the downfall of Sandler is tragic, it highlights the increasingly popular trend of good actors contributing to bad movies. This wave of terrible filmmaking has grown over the years, reaching actors like Ben Stiller in The Heartbreak Kid, Eddie Murphy in A Thousand Words and Jack Black in The Big Year.
However, to freshman journalism major Rachel DeSantis, one movie stands alone in its stupidity and overall misery: director Dennis Dugan’s Grown Ups.
DeSantis is very vocal about this movie’s shortcomings, confessing, “I like most of the actors in Grown Ups, but I still can’t get past just how bad it is.” When asked why she hated it so much, she attributed her disdain for the movie to “the lack of a good plot line and the terrible jokes.”
Bad movies are just a part of life. Even if we send people to Mars or find the God Particle or clone goats, we can count on the fact that there will always be people in Hollywood working as hard as they can to make terrible movies.
How do I know? Well, that answer consists of just two words and a number: Grown Ups 2.
Source:
http://unwind-magazine.com/2012/12/09/%EF%BB%BFterrible-movies/