Mary Agnes Donoghue | Through the Shattered Lens

There’s always a little bit of risk involved in making a list of the 16 worst films of the year. People take movies very seriously and, often times, the crappiest of films will have very passionate (and very ignorant) defenders. I was reminded of this in November when I wrote my review of The Leisure Class and I discovered that there actually are a few misguided dumbfug toadsuckers who actually enjoyed that movie.

But you know what? Even with that risk, I always enjoy making out my worst-of-the-year list. Let’s be honest: stupid people tend to like stupid movies. And it’s important to point out that stupidity. Only by pointing it out can we hope to defeat it. I’m sure that some people will disagree with some of my picks. After all, people initially disagreed with me when I announced that Man of Steel was the worst film of 2013. However, just 2 years later, most people now realize that I was right. There were also people who insisted, in 2011, that Another Earth was a great movie. Again, they now realize that they were wrong and I was right.

So, with all that in mind, here are my picks for the 16 worst films of 2015! For the most part, 2015 was a pretty good year for cinema. However, there were still a number of terrible films released and here’s 16 of them.

(Why 16? Because Lisa doesn’t do odd numbers!)

16) Stockholm, Pennsylvania (dir by Nicholas Beckwith)

15) Aloha (dir by Cameron Crowe)

14) The Lazarus Effect (dir by David Gelb)

13) The Woman In Black 2: The Angel of Death (dir by Tom Harper)

12) The Stranger (dir by Guillermo Amoedo)

11) Get Hard (dir by Etan Coen)

10) Fantastic Four (dir by Josh Trank)

9) War Room (dir by Alex Kendrick)

8) Tommorrowland (dir by Brad Bird)

7) Jenny’s Wedding (dir by Mary Agnes Donoghue)

6) The Gallows (dir by Craig Lofing and Travis Cluff)

5) Tooken (dir by John Asher)

4) The Last House on Cemetery Lane (dir by Andrew Jones)

3) Vacation (dir by Jonathan Goldstein and John Francis Daley)

2) The Leisure Class (dir by Jason Mann)

And finally, it’s time to name the worst film of 2015!

And the winner is….

1) Ted 2 (dir by Seth McFarlane)

(Feel free to also check out my picks for 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, and 2014!)

Agree? Disagree? Leave a comment and let us know! And if you disagree, please let me know what movie you think was worse than Ted 2!

Tomorrow, I will be posting my 10 favorite songs of 2015!

Previous Entries In The Best of 2015:

There’s an early scene in Jenny’s Wedding in which Jenny (Katherine Heigl) is talking to her roommate, Kitty (Alexis Biedel) about how difficult it is to spend time with her family. They all want to know when Jenny is going to get married. After all, her younger sister, Anne (Grace Gummer), is married. Jenny tells Kitty that she does want to get married and start a family and she wants to do it soon.

Kitty replies with something like: “I guess you’re going to have to tell them about us.”

And WOW! THAT WOULD BE SUCH A MIND-BLOWING MOMENT … if not for the fact that it’s 2015. Jenny’s Wedding seems to take place in an alternative universe where Glee was never a hit TV show, thousands of people never changed their Facebook avatar to a rainbow flag, Milk was never a box office hit, nobody’s ever watched a program on Bravo or seen that Ikea commercial, and the majority of Americans continue to believe that gays are some exotic group of people who exclusively live in New York, San Francisco, and Oak Lawn. Maybe in 2002, Jenny’s Wedding‘s approach to LGBT issues would have felt brave and groundbreaking but in 2015, it just feels heavy-handed and trite.

“Nothing will ever be the same again!” Jenny’s mom (Linda Emond) wails when Jenny comes out of the closet.

“I mean, we’re ordinary people…” Jenny’s dad (Tom Wilkinson) laments when Jenny tells him that she’s a lesbian and she’s going to marry Kitty.

“They must’ve done something wrong,” one of the neighbors is overhead gossiping after it becomes common knowledge that Jenny is getting married to a *GASP* woman.

Especially when compared to the many truly groundbreaking, touching, and thought-provoking LGBT-films that have been released over the past few years, Jenny’s Wedding is heavy-handed and utterly lacking in either nuance or insight. Watching it, I wondered who could be responsible for making such an old-fashioned film that seemed to be so totally out-of-touch with the modern world. Then I checked with Wikipedia and discovered that the film’s director is 72 years old and straight and that explained a lot.

I think the idea was for the viewers to be stunned that Katherine Heigl was playing a lesbian and I guess the viewers are all supposed to think, “If Katherine Heigl can be a lesbian, then anyone can be a lesbian!” And I guess that could have happened in 2002, though it still seems to be based on a massive misreading of the popularity of a performer who has, several times, literally been described as being “box office poison.” But this is 2015 and anyone who still believes that a character played by Katherine Heigl could never be a lesbian probably is not going to be watching a movie about a lesbian wedding.

As well, it doesn’t help that Katherine Heigl gives a performance that is brittle even by the standards of Katherine Heigl. Watching Jenny’s Wedding, I couldn’t help but feel that Kitty could do so much better.