By Chance Cerbone —
The year 2011 ended with a slew of God-awful movies that decided to carry over into 2012. A few managed to be watchable without upchucking all that delicious Christmas dinner and the gallons of eggnog you thought would be a good idea to spike with Captain Morgan.
First off: “Alvin and The Chipmunks: Chipwrecked”. The only three words that really sum up this movie are “Oh God, why?” The fact that the whole movie is completely intolerable for anyone that can figure out left from right coupled with the already stale references to ‘pop culture’ make for a nice 87-minute lobotomy.
Daniel M. Kimmel, of New England Movies Weekly sums up my thoughts by saying “There are a lot of wonderful family-friendly films out there this season. ‘Alvin and The Chipmunks: Chipwrecked’ is not one of them.”
Continuing the mind-numbing pain of horrendous movies, (now in horror flavor) is “The Devil Inside.” Words cannot express how excited I was for a new horror movie. I thought to myself ‘Yes I quite enjoyed those first person camera movies, the Paranormal Activities. Hell I even liked the knockoff Paranormal Entity’.
So I went to the movies and sat down to something so easy to predict that anyone who can’t figure it out has to be watching “Alvin and the Chipmunks: Chipwrecked” one too many times. “Horror fans hoping to start 2012 with a bang are about to be in for a very rude awakening,” states Dustin Putman of (Who-saw-this-coming?) Dustinputman.com
A movie I saw that I was certain would put manly tears on my face the way ‘Seven Pounds’ did, was “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close,” Mainly due to the fact that it was a post 9/11 movie, and I thought to myself, ‘Now’s the time, Tom Hanks made 9/11 something we can talk about as a society’.
Wrong again. I should probably start betting against myself for what’s going to be a good movie. “Thomas Horn plays that 9-year-old as a boy who’s somewhere between precocious and autistic,” said Scott Tobias of avclub.com
Now it’s not all bad. “Addiction Incorporated” brings light to the silver screen by bringing out a documentary out of left field. “If you wonder why the increased war on cigarettes—the pictures of black lungs, rotting teeth, emphysema (a painful and slow death)—credit Victor DeNoble,” said Harvey Karten of NY Film Critics Online. Even though this movie didn’t change my mind about cigarettes I still think this is something worth spending time in the theatres to see.
Whether you spent your winter break squirming away from your family, enjoying too much eggnog, or actually having a good time, remember this one thing: the movies that came out over the break were some of the worst movies of the season. I say this because ‘The Smurfs’ came out last year, and these movies are on par with how horrendous they are.
