The Bottom 10: Worst Movies of 2012

Hollywood is in full on awards season mode as they roll out the contenders for this year's Academy Awards. After seeing ZERO DARK THIRTY, I think it's clearly got the lock on Best Picture, Best Director and Best Screenplay. Yes--it's that good. But what about the bad movies of the last year? Well, these days with the proliferation of online critics, there are plenty of lists to choose from when looking for the Worst Movies of 2012.

CNN has a bottom 10 that has two Chris Pine movies (bad year for him) but also THE HOBBIT too (which people seem to love or hate). Moviephone has Tyler Perry's action misfire leading the list as well as TOTAL RECALL, which seems to be a bad-list regular.  GQ's list also includes TOTAL RECALL and the big budget disaster JOHN CARTER. Over at HitFlix, they thought 2012 was such a bad year that they came up with 20 films for their worst list---I hadn't even heard of PIRANHA 3DD but I'm somewhat intrigued (maybe because it stars one of my Kinda Cute dudes, Matt Bush). And the AV Club list features big budget, star-crossed films like HYDE PARK and THE PAPERBOY

As for me, I don't have a personal bad list as I tend to smell a bad movie a mile away (ie. Tyler Perry as a shotgun wielding detective formerly played by Morgan Freeman!). But I do have a de facto worst movie because I saw the trailer so many times I feel like I saw the whole horrendous movie; THE WORDS (starring Bradley Cooper). It was painful seeing this trailer once, but after the 7th time?  I don't know if anyone saw this film but it was on CNN's list which made me feel good.

Could 48 Frames Per Second Ruin The Magic Of Movies?

There is a bit of a technical tempest brewing this week after Peter Jackson screened footage from his upcoming THE HOBBIT.  Utlitizing a new digital technology that shoots 48fps (as opposed to the 80 year old 24fps standard for films), Jackson hopes to revolutionize cinema with this new look.  However, the screening of 10 minutes of scenes from his highly anticipated pre-quel to LORD OF THE RINGS got a decidedly negative reaction at Cinema Con this week.

As reported on the HuffPost and geek blogs everywhere, many people though the footage looked so hyper-real that it lost the magic that the standard movie image has.  There were unflattering comparisons to the film looking like "a bad soap opera" and the sets looking like....sets.  This sounds a bit like the concern 10 years ago when HD was first introduced and everyone thought actors on screen would look too real, and thus ordinary.  But as HD rolled out, that concern appeared to be overstated. However, given the strong reaction to Jackson's screening, it might be longer and rougher road for the conversion to this 48fps format.