Academy members tend to maintain a high standard when going to the movies; this has traditionally prevented us from many unsavory experiences. But as the regular cinemagoer knows well, ‘Curiosity kills the cat’ when there’s always the odd turkey waiting to jump our protection walls. Last springtime and summer the films on offer seemed to be mainly shabby sequels, remakes and not so impressive 3D flicks, aimed at charging the audience a few bucks more, rather than to continue with the all-conquering revolution hailed when ‘Avatar’ began the new three-dimensional system. This state of affairs allowed waves of desperation kicking in, lowering our defenses and giving a chance to some films we would have otherwise never dreamed of watching.

We still managed however to avoid vampire fatigue by ignoring ‘Twilight’ and the look-alikes it has spawned. We also missed new king of trash M. Night Shyamalan, whose career carried on a downward spiral and faithfully gave us not one but two critically panned works; ‘The Last Airbender’ and ‘Devil’. Jennifer Aniston; Julia Roberts and the return of J-Lo kept on turning romantic comedy into two unspeakable words. And their counterparts Gerard Butler; Nicholas Cage and Denzel Washington did the same for the much maligned action genre. Luckily, we didn’t watch any of those; but we are sure they would have easily rivaled in poor quality and creative anemia any of the titles we did see.

Read on for our 10 worst cinematic experiences of 2010. Read the rest of this entry »