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Today in the Manifesto’s Review of 2013, we’re continuing with our look at the year’s failures. If you missed Part I, you can find it here.

The Lone Ranger. I concede that The Lone Ranger is not a good movie. Tonally, it lurches between lifeless comedy and nostalgic neo-Western. The writing is both winkingly self-conscious and painfully earnest, but the jokes are dead on arrival, and the odes to the grandeur of the Old West feel strained and unconvincing. The typically reliable Johnny Depp seems unsure of how much humor he’s supposed to bring to his character, an uncertainty that applies equally to the film’s weird flashback structure. And the plot is both overstuffed and undercooked. It’s a mess. Read More

Earlier in the Manifesto’s Review of 2013, we looked at the unmemorable movies of the year. Those movies were lackluster not because they were bad but because they barely tried to be good; they were inoffensive and harmless, meaning there was no reason to remember them. This post will highlight the flip side of the coin and examine movies that actually strove to be good but flopped in their attempt. In a way, these are nobler pictures in that they’re failures of misguided ambition and strenuous effort rather than of complacent mediocrity. But they’re failures all the same. Read More

Philip Seymour Hoffman died yesterday at the age of 46. This is a tragedy. I say this, of course, at something of a distance—I never met the man, and I cannot pretend that the pain I feel at his passing can compare to that experienced by his family and friends, as well as the industry that knew and embraced him as an astonishing talent. Yet I am confident in stating that Hoffman’s death is a blow not only to those who knew him but to those who watched him. Thousands of fans in cinema, whether they be mainstream moviegoers or art-house cinephiles, have been deprived of a truly gifted artist, and I mourn Hoffman’s death both for the incredible actor he was and for the actor he never grew to be. I am a greedy, selfish movie fan, and it grieves me that I won’t be able to witness Hoffman’s career as it unfolds into his late period, to see how he adjusts and flourishes with age. I shudder to imagine the dozens of insular, nuanced performances he will never be able to provide. It wasn’t supposed to end like this. Read More

The Manifesto is counting down every theatrical release its proprietor watched in 2013. Today, we continue with our look at the least memorable movies of 2013. If you missed Part I, you can find it here.

Moving on to the remaining movies I’ve already forgotten: Read More

About a year ago, film critic Scott Tobias wrote a piece called “The ‘Gentleman’s F’ and the Scourge of Deliberate Mediocrity”. His thesis was that “bad movies are better than useless ones”, and while I don’t necessarily agree with his specific examples, I can see his overarching point. Bad movies may be horribly executed, but at least they’re distinctive and, in their own way, defiantly memorable. Useless movies, on the other hand, are bland, slothful, and scrupulously inoffensive. They’re rarely bad enough to induce anger, but neither are they good enough to inspire debate. They are simply consumed and then discarded, and to the extent that I remember them, it’s with the wistful knowledge that in watching them, I basically wasted two hours of my life.

And so, the following collective represents 2013’s Unmemorables: the Manifesto’s view of the least memorable movies of the year. None of these films is truly terrible—a few are even mildly enjoyable, at least in part—but they produced nothing in the way of an emotional response, be it love or loathing. I simply watched them, and then I forgot about them. And such ambivalence is, in its own quiet way, a more damning reaction than outright rage.

So here’s to the cinematic sinners who sinned by not trying. In alphabetical order: Read More