The Worst of Lists

It's that time of year when all the critics are putting out the "Best of" lists of all the great movies and films and music and books and webisodes and memes that have come out way since January. I love these lists, because they're a great source of recommendations and never fail to make my "To See" queue considerably longer every December. At the same time, though, "Best of" lists are often accompanied by "Worst of" lists, which I have far more mixed feelings about.

There's no denying that "Worst of" lists are a lot of fun. The critics get to rant about cinematic dreck like "Movie 43" and "A Good Day to Die Hard" and the reader gets to either share in the catharsis or be glad that they dodged a bullet. However, I'm not sure how useful these things are. "Best of" lists, even the ones that have been written by people who haven't seen more than a handful of movies in a given year, are a good way to become informed about films that you might have otherwise overlooked. "Worst of" lists, on the other hand, often depend greatly on how many and what kind of films a viewer has watched over the course of a year.

The trouble is that most dedicated movie fans do their best to avoid bad movies, and it's usually not hard to spot a stinker from a long way off. A Wayans brothers horror parody dumped in a January release date? A spinoff of a popular animated film made by a completely different studio that should have gone straight to DVD? The crumminess is obvious. Most critics who write "Worst of" lists write lists of the worst movies they happen to have seen that year, which avoids the real dregs. The more highbrow the critic, the fewer really awful films they're likely to have subjected themselves to. That's why you see so many "Worst of" lists featuring mediocre, but not awful movies like "Oz, the Great and Powerful," or "Identity Thief." Some of these lists are better described as "Most Disappointing" lists, or "Failed to Live To Expectations" lists.

Of the "Worst of" lists I've seen so far this year, not many have mentioned the notorious "Movie 43" or the similar, but lower profile "InAPPropriate Comedy," which were widely panned across the board by the people who actually saw them. Prestige pictures and foreign films generally seem to be excluded too, since most viewers are less likely to stumble across them accidentally. Critics will go out of their way to include obscurities on "Best of" lists, thus raising their profile and encouraging moviegoers to seek them out. Nobody bothers with the "Worst of" counterparts. This makes sense to an extent, as bad foreign and independent films don't tend to get distribution in the first place. However, a few clunkers do wrangle limited releases every year. One of the lowest rated movies of the year was that Winnie Mandela biopic with Jennifer Hudson, but nobody seems to have bothered to see it.

The long and the short of it is that the "Worst of" lists aren't really the worst films of the year by any reasonable measure. And honestly, it would be counterproductive for critics to really strive to catalog the most awful films of the year the way that they do with the best. We don't want them wasting their time digging up direct-to-video depravities or incompetent film festival rejects . We want their opinions on the films that we might actually be interested in seeing. And sure, there's potential for some nice schadenfreude or commiseration in reading about a poor critic having to sit through "Smurfs 2" or the Justin Bieber movie, but then it also feels kind of pointless. Hollywood puts these movies on three thousand screens across the country because there is a particular audience out there for them, and it doesn't seem fair to judge them the same way we'd judge something like, say, "The Counselor." There are still people out there who genuinely enjoy Adam Sandler movies, and the rest of us should have learned to avoid him long ago.

I've never written a "Worst of" list because I've never been able to quite reconcile these different competing interests. Also, because this isn't my real job, I don't see most of the movies I'm likely to hate anyway. I'll single out a few really disappointing movies and television shows in year-end posts, but worst? I'm just not qualified. I do like reading these lists though, especially from those movie viewers who don't bother trying to be objective at all, but instead use it at an opportunity to vigorously vent their spleen about their worst cinematic experiences of the year and take the time to call out Hollywood on their bad habits.
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