Because what better time is there to discuss the worst films of 2008 than February of 2010?

ANOTHER GAY SEQUEL: GAYS GONE WILD

WHAT'S RIGHT: There's an amusing in-joke early on, with comedian Scott Thompson, the only openly gay member of The Kids in the Hall, making a reference to the limited casting opportunities for openly gay actors. There was also a bit of casting which may be an incredibly subtle conceptual joke -- Stan the merman, practically the only character who has no nudity or sex scenes, is played by an actual gay porn actor, Brent Corrigan (who looks disconcertingly like Zac Efron).

WHAT'S WRONG: A few years back, Another Gay Sequel writer-director Todd Stephens wrote Edge of Seventeen, an unusually fresh and satisfying gay coming-of-age indie drama, and followed it by writing and directing a little-seen but accomplished road movie titled Gypsy 83, about the friendship between a young gay Goth and his female best friend. The film's ultimate box-office failure reportedly inspired the filmmaker to try for overtly commercial turn within the gay movie realm, and the result was Another Gay Movie, a raunchy, same-sex answer to American Pie, which earned points for extremity but had surprisingly little that was actually amusing. Even ideas that had comedic potential -- Seann William Scott's horny "Stiffler" character from the American Pie films had its equivalent in a profane butch lesbian named "Muffler" -- suffered from the lack of genuinely funny material. Considering that Another Gay Movie was apparently successful enough (at least on DVD) to finance another Stephens project, it would have been nice of the filmmaker had used that clout to return to the sort of small-scaled, character-oriented story he's demonstrated genuine talent in, instead of making a raunchier and even less amusing retread of Another Gay Movie. There's a particular displeasure one feels while watching a sequel to a bad film, whether it be Charlie's Angels or Transformers, where the filmmakers used the freedom that success brings to take what was bad about the first film and make it even more so. The kind of broad stereotypes that are painfully unamusing in comedies made by straight filmmakers don't magically become funny when used by gay filmmakers, and it doesn't help that the lead actors are actually less memorable than the ones who starred (in the same roles) in the original Another Gay Movie. The only lead actor to return from the original was Jonah Blechman, who many years ago had a memorable role as Leonardo DiCaprio's gay friend in This Boy's Life, but now seems stuck in the most tiresome of campy roles. A comedy this unfunny is more depressing than most serious films, and the fact that there are talented people like Stephens and Blechman involved make it doubly so.

WHAT'S RIGHT: This is a remake of a 1999 thriller from Thailand whose protagonist was a deaf-mute assassin, and the idea of Nicolas Cage playing mute had a lot of potential (though one would miss his often hilarious vocal mannerisms, amusingly parodied by Timothy Olyphant in a scene from the recent A Perfect Getaway).

WHAT'S WRONG: Unfortunately, this remake makes the female lead deaf-mute and leaves the assassin unimpaired, so Cage is up to his usual tricks, but instead of one of his enjoyably eccentric performances (like Vampire's Kiss or the recent Bad Lieutenant remake), he does one of his one-note jobs, not helped by an especially unflattering hair style. Nothing in this film works (though Brian Tyler's score is adequate enough), not the action nor the suspense nor the romance, and especially not the distractingly murky cinematography. The film's only novelty is that it may be the first film to feature a sequence in which a young Asian guy learns martial arts from a middle-aged white guy.

WHAT'S RIGHT: Crista Flanagan (from MadTV) did an amusing job of parodying Ellen Page in Juno, and even the dialogue she was given (or improvised) was less appalling than the rest of the humor on hand.

WHAT'S WRONG: I am a sinner. I do not know what sin I committed, but it must have been a beaut for me to live through a movie year that featured not one but two new "comedies" from Friedberg and Seltzer, the team (in the sense that Leopold & Loeb were a team) that brought us Date Movie and Epic Movie. Disaster Movie may be the very worst of the bunch, though it's hard to find the precise criterion to judge this. Normally you can judge a comedy by how funny it is, but Friedberg and Seltzer specialize in a sort of anti-comedy where "humor" consists entirely of references to other contemporary movies and TV shows without any sort of comic interpretation. More than Epic Movie or Meet the Spartans, the inherent structure of a disaster film would seem to lend itself to parody (as it did with The Big Bus and the two Airplane films), but Friedberg & Seltzer squander those opportunities, with one particular lowpoint arriving when a series of superheroes make brief appearances with no comic impact (and why is Beowulf in the film in the first place, besides the fact that the Robert Zemeckis movie came out a few months earlier?). The only consolation is that unlike their previous films, all released by 20th Century Fox, this one was released by the much-smaller Lionsgate, so with luck their next one will be released only as a pirated DVD on a Philippine street corner.

WHAT'S RIGHT: This is a tricky one. The film has several attractive actresses in the cast, including Alicia Witt, Leelee Sobieski, and Amy Brenneman, and though none of them are giving their finest performances, they at least give us something to look at besides Al Pacino with a bad hairdo, trying to seem like a babe magnet. And though it won't rank as one of his finest works, I don't remember anything particularly wrong with Edward Shearmur's score (thought it's unlikely to replace Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow in the affections of his fans).

WHAT'S WRONG: Jon Avent was a major producer (Risky Business, Men Don't Leave) before he made his feature directing debut with Fried Green Tomatoes, a surprisingly good comedy-drama that seemed to portent an impressive filmmaking career ahead. Then came The War, Up Close & Personal, and Red Corner, three films whose only consistently strong elements were the original scores of Thomas Newman. He had a relative return to form with the compelling TV miniseries Uprising (featuring one of Maurice Jarre's final scores), about the Jewish rebellion in the Warsaw ghetto during World War II, but the high-concept, low-intelligence, no-thrills thriller 88 Minutes makes one long for even Red Corner. 88 Minutes has one of those gimmicky ideas that may have sounded wonderful in a pitch meeting -- Al Pacino is a brilliant psychologist whose nemesis, a convicted and imprisoned serial killer insisting on his innocence, warns Pacino that he has only 88 minutes to live -- but which doesn't remotely play well on screen. The script panders to its star in the worst way -- the 65-year-old (at the time of filming -- the movie remained on the shelf for an understandably long time) Pacino is surrounded by attractive, much younger women, all of whom think he's the bees knees (or cats' pajamas -- insert your own suitably passe expression here), and we're frequently told he's a master of his field yet he's never given anything actually intelligent or insightful to say or do, and the storyline hinges on his testimony against the killer but we never get any sense of how he was able to convince the jury of his guilt (because that might involve, you know, screenwriting). Not to mention such laughable details as the killer writing the number of minutes Pacino has left on the hood of a car (since he presumably knows exactly when Pacino is going to walk by that car).

WHAT'S RIGHT: I enjoy musicals enough, and am pleased enough that they have apparently returned as a viable Hollywood genre, that even a bad one can provide me with moviegoing pleasure (at least, until Friedberg & Seltzer make "Musical Movie"). Meryl Streep can actually sing (though if you were to base your opinion of her career entirely on this one film, you might not be convinced she can act), and even Pierce Brosnan, who can't sing especially well, gives it the old college try, doing his best to express his character's emotions through song rather than just squeaking it out, Everyone-Says-I-Love-You-style.

WHAT'S WRONG: Mamma Mia! proved to be a box-office smash, the highest grossing movie musical since 2002's Chicago, which if nothing else shows that my taste in modern movie musicals (Across the Universe and Sweeney Todd were two of my favorite films of the decade) is wildly different from that of the greater moviegoing public, as if that were in any doubt. I found Mamma Mia! terrible but tolerable when the talented cast (Streep, Brosnan, Colin Firth, Stellan Skarsgard, Julie Walters, Christine Baranski, Amanda Seyfried, Dominic Cooper) was singing and nearly unwatchable when they weren't. The first-time director (Phyllida Lloyd) directs all the actors at a relentlessly high pitch while providing none of the kind of visual elegance that make the best musicals so cinematically satisfying. The scenes of Walters pursuing Skarsgard are especially uncomfortable, while amongst all the bad writing, the pairing of a trite Colin-Firth-mistaken-for-gay comedy scene with the final revelation of Firth's character actually being gay demonstrate the witless, kitchen-sink quality of the writing overall.

WHAT'S RIGHT: The cinematography by Jonathan Sela (Flight of the Phoenix, The Midnight Meat Train) is first-rate, and many of the individual shots are quite striking. It's the kind of movie where if you just saw the trailer you might think it wouldn't be so bad (Michael Bay has made a lucrative career out of these).

WHAT'S WRONG: There have been so many films based on video games released in the last decade or so that you'd have to assume that at least one would be genuinely good. Beyond the fact that the visual nature of such games would seem to lend themselves to film adaptations (it's not like plenty of non-videogame movies aren't just a series of loosely strung together action sequences), statistically one would have to assume that at least one good film would have to emerge from the genre -- not just a passable time-killer like Lara Croft: Tomb Raider or Resident Evil: Apocalypse but something at least as good as, say, Die Hard 2. Max Payne continues, possibly even accelerates, the trend of suckiness in videogame movies, and what's especially galling is that the film is what we used to call "a gyp" -- the trailer's images of winged creatures suggests a supernatural thriller, but it turns out all these manifestations are just hallucinations, so what you end up with is merely a cop thriller with pretentions. Max Payne is one of those films where, despite all the technical competence on display, one watches it with the feeling that everyone involved saw the project as nothing more than just another paycheck to cash, and that's a depressing (if common) feeling to leave a movie with.

WHAT'S RIGHT: As with Disaster Movie, the performers at times make the film almost tolerable. Sean Maguire does an impressive, feature-length imitation of Gerard Butler in 300, while Diedrich Bader does as much as can be done with the line "Stop kicking people into the Pit of Death!"

WHAT'S WRONG: Of the two Friedberg-Seltzer atrocities performed upon the American moviegoing public in 2008, this was probably (slightly) less hideous, if only because the use of 300 as a source material gave the film a basic structure that their other exercises in free-form witlessness lacked. On the other hand, besides some obvious but still welcome jibes at 300's overpowering homoeroticism, the filmmakers (if I may call them that) fill a lot of the film's 86-minute running time with unfunny and instantly dated bits about contemporary TV shows like American Idol and Deal or No Deal. At one point, an actor playing Sanjaya, the flamboyant teenage American Idol contestant, gets kicked into the Pit of Death, a joke that wasn't even funny during the 30 seconds it was relevant. Some comedies may be dark, others may be sad, but the films of Friedberg & Seltzer are distinct among Hollywood comedies of being actively soul-destroying.

WHAT'S RIGHT: Matthew Libatique's cinematography is first-rate. This is the first Spike Lee film I can remember that didn't featured Lee's irritating trademark shot, where the actor is actually riding on the camera dolly and looks like he's floating rather than walking (a shot which nearly ruined an otherwise terrific scene in Lee's wonderful Inside Man), and its absence is welcome. Though Terence Blanchard's score is a bit repetitive, I really liked his main theme.

WHAT'S WRONG: As a filmgoer who sees virtually every major film released, I must shamefully admit that I have never seen Spike Lee's groundbreaking first feature, 1986's She's Gotta Have It. However, I've seen practically every fiction film of his since then (I missed his acclaimed documentaries 4 Little Girls and When the Levees Broke, and the poorly reviewed She Hate Me was in L.A . theaters so briefly that I missed my chance to see it -- I went to see it at the AMC Beverly Connection on a Monday night only to discover that the multiplex had permanently closed the night before) and felt they ranged from terrible to overrated, but his last film, Inside Man, was a delightful surprise, a witty and stylish urban thriller which called to mind one of my all-time favorites, the original Taking of Pelham One Two Three. As a fan of World War II stories, the prospect of a post-Inside Man Lee taking on the subject of the black soldiers who fought in that war seemed highly appealing, but the end result is one of Lee's worst and most indulgent films. The set-up (one of the soldiers recognizes a Nazi decades later at the post office and murders him with the pistol he happens to keep handy at his teller window) is ridiculous, the film (160 minutes) is endless, a ludicrous flashback about racism at an ice cream parlor is shoe-horned in for no good reason, and the main characters are so largely unsympathetic that the film comes off as an extremely unlikely tribute to the heroism and sacrifice of black soldiers in WWII. And that's not even mentioning the "adorable" little Italian boy who seems like he stepped out of a bad 40s film; I'd love to see Lee's reaction if a white director made a film in which a little boy called a black soldier a "chocolate giant."

WHAT'S RIGHT: The only positive thing I can say about this film, besides the unintentional laughs it provided, is that when Video Watchdog, one of my favorite magazines, did a roundtable discussion amongst their writers about the film, few of them had anything good to say about it.

WHAT'S WRONG: I have never been a particular fan of Dario Argento. I certainly concede that there are some impressively stylish individual sequences in his movies, particularly the films shot by top cinematographers like Vittorio Storaro (The Bird with the Crystal Plumage) and Ronnie Taylor (Opera). But I don't think I ever found anything in his films remotely scary, and the combination of unbelievable (even by supernatural horror standards) plots and much that is genuinely irritating (the dialogue scenes in an Argento film can grate on the nerves even worse than the Goblin music) have made his international reputation among genre cinema enthusiasts inexplicable to me. He makes DePalma look like Hitchcock, to say the least (I love DePalma, so I'm a bit biased). Mother of Tears is never scary, frequently annoying, and has no memorable visuals -- well, that's not really accurate. The scene where a lesbian is murdered by having a long, sharp pike inserted through her privates until it emerges from her mouth is certainly memorable -- I suspect I will never forget it -- but hard to justify under any circumstances.

WHAT'S RIGHT: The film is technically well-crafted. Rosario Dawson is gorgeous and charismatic as always, and the house where her character lives is apparently only a couple blocks from my own apartment, which is kind of a kick. Elpidia Carrillo, who was the Hispanic-actress-du-jour in the mid 1980s (Salvador, Predator, Beyond the Limit) has over the years become an excellent character actress, and she brings a sense of reality and emotional honesty to the film that is otherwise lacking, even though her plotline is as improbable as everything else.

WHAT'S WRONG: Will Smith's previous collaboration with director Gabriele Muccino, The Pursuit of Happyness, was surprisingly good -- the rare contemporary Hollywood film that dealt with the economic issues that many Americans face today, and though the "true" story was inevitably fictionalized somewhat, it had a modesty and verisimilitude that is all too rare in today's studio films. Unfortunately, Seven Pounds sacrifices everything that was good and moving in Pursuit for an absurdly contrived and implausible storyline (SPOILER: would a man planning to donate his vital organs after his suicide kill himself with a deadly toxin?), with the kind of gimmicky plot and structure that Hollywood execs mistake for great screenwriting. I was at least amused to hear James Horner's popular "danger motif" pop up briefly in Angelo Milli's score.

MORE BADNESS, TIMES TEN:

DECEPTION: A would-be erotic thriller with predictable, nonsensical plotting. Hugh Jackman produced as well as starred, demonstrating that taste in material is not among his many talents.

JUMPER: Director Doug Liman's Swingers, Go and The Bourne Identity are all terrific movies. Mr. and Mrs. Smith, not so much, and this sci-fi adventure, with Hayden Christensen as a smarmy douchebag with the gift of teleportation, is even worse. One would have thought Liman would be perceptive enough to see how utterly unlikable his protagonist was, especially with the much-more-charismatic Jamie Bell on hand as a fellow jumper.

THE LOVE GURU: Six years since the underrated Goldmember, and this is the best Mike Myers could come up with? Dr. Evil, why hast thou forsaken us.

MADAGASCAR 2: ESCAPE TO AFRICA: I enjoyed the original Madagascar much more than I expected to, but it is a good sign of the badness of this sequel that the least amusing character from the first film, the old lady that beats up the lion in the subway station, gets a major and even less amusing role in this one.

MADE OF HONOR: This movie wasn't even that good back in 1997 when they called it My Best Friend's Wedding; an early scene of Sydney Pollack (why, Sydney, why?) negotiating how often his new bride has to perform oral sex sets the tone all too well.

PROM NIGHT: Now that they've remade most of the genuine classics of '70s and '80s horror, now they're going after the crap, and this PG reworking of the Jamie Lee Curtis Z-movie is as misogynistic and mean-spirited as you'd expect from the writer of The Forsaken.

REPO! THE GENETIC OPERA: I wanted to love (well, like) this horror musical, sort of a low-budget, futuristic version of Sweeney Todd, and many of the cast can actually sing (Sarah Brighton, Anthony Head, Paul Sorvino), but it's an ugly looking mess with lousy songs.

RIGHTEOUS KILL: It's a cultural crime that DeNiro and Pacino should reteam for the first time since Heat with this silly, gimmicky thriller (more shockingly, from the writer of Inside Man) directed by Jon Avnet, but at least it's less sucky than 88 Minutes.

WHAT HAPPENS IN VEGAS...: Like so many of today's romantic comedies, neither romantic nor funny, and mostly really irritating.

I plan to have the Worst of 2009 finished long before February of 2011; of course, I also plan to win an Oscar for Original Screenplay, and you can see how well that's turned out. I won't get my Favorite CDs of 2008 columns done for many months, since I'm still maybe halfway through the CDs from that year (damn you, prolific labels!).