Worst movies of 2010

I avoid bad movies like germs. If I'm not working, and if I think a movie might be bad, I'll no sooner touch it than I would a toilet seat in a bus station restroom. But I actually know a guy - nice guy - who has a mellow attitude toward bad movies. He says, "What's the worst thing that can happen? So I watch a bad movie, big deal." This fascinates me. I have never once considered thinking this way, any more than I've ever considered becoming a samurai.

So there are two attitudes here, and I invite you to choose between them, because it will affect how you receive this year's list of the worst movies. I consider a bad movie a kind of affront against time, and therefore an insult to mortality. If you could live forever, you should still never see "I Spit on Your Grave," but since you're not going to live forever, wasting two hours on an ugly, badly made revenge movie becomes infinitely worse.

But Charles - that's his name - thinks it doesn't matter if you watch "I Spit on Your Grave." We're all heading to the same place, anyway, so what difference does it make?

Now, I see that attitude as fatalistic and wasteful. But implicit in my way of thinking is the notion that there really is something elusive to be achieved here - either maximum relaxation or maximum productivity - and that bad movies can disturb that search. Meanwhile, the smarter goal may be to just relax (or just produce) and just be in that state, to let go and experience the pleasures of existence despite what movie happens to be playing. Point being: If it doesn't feel like that big an imposition, it will cease to be an imposition.

And so, depending on how you feel about these things, I offer you 10 movies that are either lethal wastes of a day's entertainment or harmless trifles that failed in their intention - except that these really failed. Gather all the failures together. Have them come out in bathing suits, singing songs and taking questions about world peace, and these movies would be the 10 finalists. They are listed in reverse order of shame:

10. Due Date: To whom much is given, much is expected. This one had director Todd Phillips, and actors Zach Galifianakis and Robert Downey Jr., and they still couldn't buy a laugh with this annoying and completely dishonest buddy picture.

9. Wild Grass: The latest from the 88-year-old French director Alain Resnais ("Hiroshima Mon Amour") was a muddled, zany and thoroughly tiresome experience, with two septuagenarians cast as 50-year-olds (for no reason but that they're part of Resnais' informal stock company) in the worst sort of experimental film, one that tried to cloak its vague commitment to narrative as a sort of avant-garde gesture.

8. The Losers: This was an action movie about a group of idiot male mercenaries who team up for a job with a dangerous woman of mystery and intrigue. She was played by Zoe Saldana, who seemed as mysterious and dangerous as a night retainer. This movie made sense only if you thought of the characters as prepubescent, stuck in what Freud called the latency period, hence the perplexed and scornful attitude to the one girl in their midst. Just a pathetic exercise.

7. Faster: Dwayne Johnson's career is going to be under a Rock if he keeps making meaningless, worthless, thrill-less action movies like this one, which demand nothing of him but to stand there and act menacing. This movie's arc of action was so distorted that the only way you knew the climax had taken place was by the after-the-climax music that played on the soundtrack.