Battleship

They may have a point: This film was universally reviled as one of the worst movies on 2012. Bad writing, cheesy acting, plot holiness, painfully contrived attempt to connect to the board game-- it's all there and every bad thing said is pretty much true.

Nevertheless: The big budget effects are there on the screen, and some of them are pretty awesome. Admit it-- you saw the trailers and before you heard the movie stunk, you wanted to go see it based just on giant ships and armory aliens and destruction and mayhem, and the movie delivers all of those things in spades. There is plenty of visual spectacle here.

The characters may be cardboard (plucky woman, plucky black character, plucky large breasts, immature jerk-ish guy who must grow up and be a Real Man-- check, check, check, and check). And there's Liam Neesom, phoning it in from his car while he drives his check to the bank. But hey-- Neesom knows cheesy movies (seen Darkman lately) and still has more gravitas in his little finger than most actors have in their whole bodies on a good day.

The plot is weak, but not actually stupid. It sets rules and plays by them. And it is charmingly unironic in its love of soldiers and sailors and their general grunt-like heroics. So you get spectacle, dashing good-guys, unobjectionable lessons (try hard, be honorable, don't be a dick), and some decent adventure. If you saw it on Sci-Fi on a Saturday night, you'd think it was the best thing to ever appear in that time slot. Yeah-- if I'd paid top dollar to see it in a theater in 3D, I might be cheesed. But it will work just fine as a netflix rental.

Josie and the Pussycats

They may have had a point:

Actually, I'm not sure they did. Okay-- the usually delightful Parker Posey seems a little unhinged (and not in a method acting kind of way), and at the end of the day, the story would have made a fine half-hour cartoon episode. But still-- there is remarkably little to complain about.

And yet:

The movie's biggest problem is marketing-- it is a mashup of its cartoon source material and a reasonably clever piece of satire. It mocks the world of commercial musicianship awesomely, from the manufactured boy band DuJour (some great cameos here) with music as pointedly satirical of its genre as Spinal Tap's songbook was of metal, all the way to relentlessly hilarious product placement. This film never takes its meta-tongue out of its cheek, even when we arrive at a climactic moment that underlines how certain cameo players couldn't be brought back for this scene.

I'm not kidding. This movie is, at times, sharp and funny and lacks only the courage to completely jettison its kid-cartoon roots and simply swing for the fences. It's subversive and sly; it knows its plot is predictable, but is determined to make some fun on the way.

Also, the music is actually not a bad representative sample of what it pretends to be.