111 Movies Better Than “The Blind Side”

Worst movie ever nominated for Best Picture?

As proof of the absolutely horrible choice of The Blind Side for a Best Picture nominee by the Academy, I offer up one hundred eleven releases from 2009 that were better. In a year when the Academy decided to honor ten nominees instead of five for the Best Picture category, they still find a way to select one of the worst films of the year. Keep in mind that not all these films were good, just better than The Blind Side. Here are 111 that were better:

9
2012
(500) Days of Summer
17 Again
24 City

Genre-Hopping: Baghead

Our next genre-excursion takes us to the comedy/horror hybrid Baghead, a product of the mumblecore movement. More on mumblecore in a minute, but first let’s look at the story.

Four acquaintances with big screen aspirations escape to a cabin in the woods outside of Austin, Texas, to write the script that will get them noticed in Hollywood. The script they settle on is about a murderous man with a bag on his head (see also The Strangers) who terrorizes four friends staying in a cabin in the woods. But what happens when life begins to imitate art and a man with a bag on his head shows up to actually terrorize them while they hide in their cabin in the woods?

Genre-Hopping: The Peanut Butter Solution

The Peanut Butter Solution. Don't put it down your pants.

Thanks to GonzoGeek, I was able to engage in some radical immersion therapy this weekend wherein I confronted a childhood fear–creepy family film “The Peanut Butter Solution”–and came to grips with it’s hold on my psyche. Ideally, I would find that this odd Canadian import was not nearly so bad as remembered and put to rest memories of a movie that has haunted me well into my adulthood.

It didn’t quite work out that way…

Genre-Hopping and Hello

Hello everyone. My name is RJ and I watch too many movies.

Thanks to Bruce for inviting me to GonzoGeek, and I look forward to joining readers in a genre-hopping journey through films classic, infamous, and obscure. I’m a librarian, film lover, husband and father of two.  I live near a lake, but not on it as I am a librarian and enjoy the economic benefits the job entails.

For our genre-hopping experiment we’ll be discovering films streaming on the internet–legal of course–and old VHS gems stored in my garage that I need to get rid of. We’ll visit the neighborhood video store and make heavy use of a certain hard to hate direct mail service with a giant catalog of titles. We’ll survey everything from musicals to exploiation; from  Berkeley, Busby to Kauffman, Lloyd.

New additions to Genre-Hopping will be erratic, but hopefully not infrequent.

If you want to follow along, our first excursion will be the weird 80s made for children fantasy and Canadian import “The Peanut Butter Solution.” This is a movie, like “Time Bandits,” that if seen at an early enough age is more likely to be remembered as a nightmare than film. It’s also further proof of the axiom “Canadians don’t make happy movies.” (See also: “Last Night.”)

Thanks, Bruce and hello again to GonzoGeek readers.