In a New York/Vulture poll of 57 film critics, Gabriele Muccino and Will Smith‘s Seven Pounds has been named the worst film of 2008. Perhaps now that Seven Pounds has been fully reviled and discredited it’s okay to allow people to check out this mock poster, although please understand that it’s a complete spoiler.
Here’s a list of all the critics polled or quoted, along with their own lists of the year’s worst.
The other worst-of-the-year picks, going from tenth-worst to second-worst, is as follows: (10) Diane English‘s The Women; (9) Clint Eastwood‘s Changeling; (8) Frank Miller‘s The Spirit; (7) M. Night Shyamalan‘s The Happening; (6) Baz Luhrman’s Australia; (5) The Wachowski brothers’ Speed Racer; (4) Michael Haneke‘s Funny Games; (3) Jon Avnet‘s 88 Minutes; and (2) Mike Myers’ The Love Guru.
Here’s New Yorker critic David Denby on the reasoning behind his choosing The Curious Case of Benjamin Button as the year’s worst: “Director David Fincher and writer Eric Roth have taken a playful early story by F. Scott Fitzgerald and literalized and solemnized it to death. It’s a work of extraordinary craftsmanship devoted to an idea that’s dramatically inert. When Brad Pitt finally grows young enough to look like his actual age, he doesn’t have any memories of the ardency or anxiety of youth but only relief that he’s no longer a crotchety old man. Even as a young blade, he’s an old fart. It just doesn’t work. That people can find serious ideas about death and mortality in it suggests the power of weirdness to inspire fancy sentiment.”
