Yet another critic flames out

I was initally only going to add this link to my previous post, but I decided this was important...

Add Rotten Tomatoes to the list of critics (in this case a whole hoard of them) that have lost credibility with me (which is to say nearly all of them). The editors of RT announced their choices for best movies of 2010. Of the nine who listed their top 2 picks not one mentioned District 9. Although this is an annoying oversight, I realize there were some great movies this year, and would have been fine with agreeing to disagree... that is until I read through the list and found these flicks included instead:

1. Red Cliff
Uhhh what? First of all I saw this movie in its original 2 part, 5 hour release in Chinese and it was pretty bad. X and I talked about this and I don't think I'm overstating it when I say John Woo totally butchered the story, and turned this into a typical, corny, big-budget action movie (think Michael Bay) with a superfluous and implausible romance/tryst tacked on to help launch the acting career of a Taiwanese model who is almost too old for the fashion world. Already don't think this should be on a best movies list? But wait there's more! The guy didn't even see the real movie! He saw the version that was edited to two hours for US theatrical release- read dumbed down for an American audience that doesn't know anything about Chinese history or the masterpiece novel that the movie was based on.

This is part of a bigger problem with Americans and their (our) attitude towards China and Chinese culture. Without any real understanding or desire to dig any deeper, we just eat up whatever Hollywood and mainstream media feed us without bothering to ask why or how this corresponds to reality. Of course this has much deeper social implications, but this is not the forum for that. What I'm most mad about is how this lack of understanding, and more importantly genuine curiosity and rigor, has popularized and made profitable so many movies that qualify as SELLOUTS.

Indeed, even the people who are supposed to know better (like critics and people who hand out awards) fall prey to the same mentality and reward crap movies like Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, House of Flying Daggers (do not even get me started) and even Hero (this one is more tolerable, but still reflects the epidemic).

Even more infuriating is how these movies' commercial success has turned artists who used to be respected masters into corporate hacks or victims of type-cast , and more importantly obscured real stars and achievements in Chinese cinema. While working in Hong Kong in the 80s and 90s, John Woo made countless great action movies (Hard Boiled, A Better Tomorrow, Bullet in the Head, etc) that pioneered the gritty, gangster noir genre in HK before coming to Hollywood. Yet today, most people know him as the director of Mission Impossible II... Same thing with Jet Li, Sammo Hung, Chow Young Fat, Donnie Yen, and even to some extent Jackie Chan. If you really love movies, I implore you to please go to IMDB after you watch a movie with a Chinese actor or director, and check out some of his previous work (the ones with non-English titles). Not all of them will be good and most will require you to read subtitles, but I have no doubt you will gain a better appreciation of the talent and potential of these artists.

2. Star Trek
A little less indignant about this one. I would have given Star Trek a high BLOCKBUSTER, but to tell you the truth it and JJ Abrams is overrated. It's a fantastic reinvention of a historic but tired franchise, and featured some great characters (I especially enjoyed Uhura played by Zoe Saldana, and Spock played by Zachary Quinto), but at the end of the day it's just a fun action movie with a convoluted plot that was excused because it's a science fiction/fantasy story. All in all, more Transformers (the good one) than Dark Knight.

3. The Hangover
The MOST OVERRATED movie of the year. Yes I saw it. Yes it was outrageous. Yes I laughed at many of the gags (my favorite was the cop car with Mike Tyson's tiger). But is it one of the best movies of the year? Absolutely not. It's not even this year's funniest or best comedy, that in my opinion belongs to Judd Apatow's Funny People, which I liked better than his earlier and more over the top fan favorites. This is how the RT editor justified his selection:

"Yeah, we've seen raunchy comedies about men behaving badly before -- quite a number of them this decade, actually, and a few from director Todd Phillips -- but few of them have been as consistently funny as The Hangover, and none of them have raked in the kind of record-setting cash generated by this sun-baked tale of three groomsmen who lose their groom after a wild night in Vegas." (bold added by me)

He seems to imply that one of the criteria for judging a movie should be its box office numbers, or at least its revenue generating prowess compared to other films in the same genre... maybe he would like to nominate New Moon for being the highest grossing vampire movie ever. In the end I think the success of The Hangover can be attributed just one thing - The Great Recession. People were sick and tired of bad news and worrying about their jobs all year, and this was the perfect escapist movie. It did what everyone wanted to do: say a big FUCK YOU to all responsibility, go crazy, get wasted, black out and lose yourself for a few days and have everything wind up ok in a happy ending... you know like frat boys in college.

What do you think? What were your favorite movies this year? Happy to hear your thoughts...