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February 17, 2008

The Most WTF Movie Moments From Summer 2008

September 11, 2008 03:41 AM EDT

views: 67 | comments: 25

A WTF moment can be jaw-droppingly good or theater-fleeingly bad, and this summer offered a healthy dose of both. Let´s take a look back, spoilers be damned (and plentiful, so stay frosty).

15. Wanted
Moment: Office etiquette
This comic book–based assassin thriller had style to burn, but it all came down to one glorious, iconic moment: Fed-up office drone Wesley (James McAvoy) home-rows his best-friend-slash-douche-bag, and the errant keys (and a tooth) spell out "FUCK YOU" in slo-mo. Stand up and applaud, ye office downtrodden.

14. Star Wars: The Clone Wars
Moment: Lucas detonates a franchise
George Lucas´ campaign—kick-started in 1999—to destroy everything you ever loved about Star Wars finally found its version of the A-Bomb: a purple, gay, cross-dressing, lispy Hutt named…Ziro. As in: There is now zero chance you still love Star Wars.

13. Step Brothers
Moment: Drum solo
After begrudgingly accepting that most comedies have to settle into a PG-13 safety zone, we did not expect a cameo from Will Ferrell´s nad bag so early into Step Brothers. Knowing that new stepbro Dale (John C. Reilly) treasures nothing more than his drum kit, Ferrell´s Brennan disgraces it with a graphic Swiffer rub with his skin marbles.

12. Hellboy II: The Golden Army
Moment: Pregnant pause
Let´s get this straight: Liz Sherman´s (Selma Blair) eggo is preggo with Hellboy´s kid, which means she did the thrust-and-nap beneath a hell-spawned demon with the mind of a 15-year-old? And a satanic fetus is now cooking inside her? And we´re supposed to go a rubbery one about this? Guillermo del Toro hit a lot of the right notes in HB2—this ain´t one of them.

11. The Incredible Hulk
Moment: Captain Britain?
Marvel Studios´ new directive to tie its franchises together yielded some great geek-out moments this summer (Nick Fury!), but the best was seeing British merc Emil Blonksy (Tim Roth) juice up on the same "super soldier" serum that created Captain America. Super-Blonksy goes toe-to-toe with the Hulk in an amazing tease of the future screen exploits of the Star Spangled Avenger.

10. Speed Racer
Moment: All of it.
Seriously: W. T. F.?

9. Death Race/Wanted
Moments: The prestige?
Academy darling Joan Allen calling Jason Statham a "cocksucker"? Oscar golden boy Morgan Freeman telling crooks to "shoot this motherfucker!"? Did we enter some kind of Bizzaro world? These people are usually hired to bring class to the proceedings, not to sound off like Gordon Ramsay pulling a T-bone out of the oven with his bare hands.

8. Hancock
Moment: Sucker punch
Obviously director Peter Berg didn´t get the studio memo requiring all trailers to spoil every plot point so the audience isn´t frightened by a "new idea" once in the theater. So kudos for keeping the "Charlize Theron is a superhero, too" plot twist under wraps (until now), and making the moment when she hurls Will Smith through her kitchen wall something truly rare: a surprise.

7. You Don´t Mess With the Zohan
Moment: Too hummuch
OK, we get it: Middle Easterners like hummus. But Adam Sandler drives this already dubious joke into the ground, through the earth´s core, around Satan´s Florida room, and back up through the Great Wall. The final straw was a hummus-loaded fire hose used to snuff out a blaze. In a movie filled with misguided jokes, this was the dumbest

6. Tropic Thunder
Moment: Dance, magic dance
It was a moment too head-scratching to necessarily be called "funny," but there it was: Tom Cruise—the bat-shit, couch-hopping Scientology savior himself—decked out in a fat suit and bald wig shaking his ass to a hip-hop beat. In a movie loaded with oddness, this moment took the cake.

5. Wall-E
Moment: Good-bye, Dolly
Pixar knocks it out of the park because they make kid´s movies that refuse to succumb to the sap that plagues the genre, but then they go cute overload by having lonely little trash bot Wall-E make doe eyes while performing a musical number for his lady love. The only ones not groaning were the ones who had gone into diabetic shock.

4. The Dark Knight
Moment: Who´ll be watching the Watchmen?
Even before the Batman epic began, our jaws hit the floor because we got our first glimpse at the movie destined to rock 2009: Watchmen. The movie´s trailer made its debut before Dark Knight, and we finally got to see what director Zach Snyder has in store for this dark, intense superhero mind fuck. And it looks pretty friggin´ good.

3. Iron Man
Moment: Tony Stark bares all
As Iron Man wound down, we had already experienced a movie as fast, funny, and awesome as we could have expected. Then it did us one better—Robert Downey Jr.´s Tony Stark stood before the press, tossed the note cards "explaining" the superheroics around his corporate offices, and unmasked before the world: "I´m Iron Man." Cut to black. An unexpected end that has us seriously hankering for the sequel.

2. Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull
Moment: Saucer men
The Indiana Jones movies have never been what you´d call "realistic," but they mixed historical mysteries with the supernatural in ways that never crossed the line into ridiculous. That ended the moment Indy and family gazed up through the South American jungle back lot at Universal Studios to a flying saucer rising from ancient ruins. Obviously, the line "no time for love, Dr. Jones" extends to the craftsmanship of this movie.

and number one

*Drum Roll*

1. The Dark Knight
Moment: The pencil trick
Following his bloody bank heist, the Joker (Heath Ledger) saunters into a roomful of Gotham´s most powerful gangsters and captures their attention with a simple sleight of hand: He makes a pencil disappear by standing it up on a table and then slamming a goon´s head down onto it. Ta da! No more pencil. No more goon. And no more doubts about who´s Gotham´s baddest MF´er. Legendary.