Entertainment’s worst moments of 2013

WORST MOVIE

It’s a tie between two supposed comedies that revel in political incorrectness while committing the fateful error of being entirely unfunny.

InAPPropriate Comedy: ShamWow! TV pitchman Vince Offer’s vapid sketch comedy fiasco earned zero stars from me while burying Adrien Brody’s career by casting him as Flirty Harry, a flinty-eyed cop dressed in capri pants who sneers, “Go ahead, make me gay.”

Linda Barnard

Movie 43: When this gross-o-rama slithered unheralded into movie theatres last January, I described it my review as the worst movie ever made. My opinion hasn’t changed. Produced and co-directed by Peter Farrelly, Movie 43 is discharge from an overloaded sewer, a series of sketches attempting to one-up one another for bad taste. It’s also the biggest waste of talent in cinema history, with such stars as Hugh Jackman, Kate Winslet, Liev Schreiber, Kate Bosworth and many more punching a time clock for Farrelly’s creatively bankrupt laugh factory. My only regret is that I couldn’t give it a rating lower than zero stars out of four.

WORST CELEBRITY

Justin Bieber: Through bucket-pissing, brothel-visiting, unlawful graffiti, excessive partying, balcony spitting and misogynist song lyrics, our tiny national terror’s greatest crime is still his refusal to pull his damn pants up.

Malene Arpe

WORST GAME

Star Trek: With the arrival of the next generation of game consoles, it was a good year for gaming, as many stellar titles sent the old gen out with a bang. But that didn’t stop plenty of dreck from filling store shelves and hard drives.

Sure, everything is a matter of taste, but one game that easily sank to the bottom of the barrel was Seduce Me, a PC-only game that was supposed to be an erotic adventure, but instead is a silly card matching game that’s even more laughable than its premise.

But that’s not our worst, particularly if we take into account the unfortunate feeling of dashed expectations. Star Trek: The Game gave false hope to this life-long Star Trekfan for a decent action game featuring the young Kirk and Spock. A third-person co-op shooter with little personality, poor graphics and full of glitches, this was a bad game that went where too many games have gone before, and quickly ended up in the discount bins where it belongs.

Raju Mudhar

WORST STAGE SHOW

Fortune and Men’s Eyes: Birdland Theatre’s production of Fortune and Men’s Eyeshas to stand out as the worst stage show of 2013, despite some stiff competition from the Stratford Festival’s Romeo and Juliet.

Why was it so bad? For a variety of reasons. It made John Herbert’s classic piece of Canadian drama seem tedious and pointless, which it isn’t. It made a quartet of young actors look appalling, except for the brilliant David Coomber, who triumphed in this theatrical disaster. But, worst of all, it continued to destroy the once-promising reputation of Birdland Theatre, which used to do great shows like Assassins and The Last Days of Judas Iscariot. Stefan Dzeparoski — who also helmed 2010’s worst showSoulSeek — directs in the kind of self-indulgent style I would call Eurotrash if I didn’t feel so fondly about Europe. Stop this man before he kills again.

Richard Ouzounian

WORST ARTWORK

The Miraculous Journey: Got to hand it to Damien Hirst. He makes it easy. In 2013, though, he outdid himself in sheer crass over-the-top extravagance. In fall of this year, Hirst unveiled “The Miraculous Journey,” 14 enormous bronze sculptures tracing human in-utero development, from conception to birth, ending with a newborn baby boy, all parts intact. To give an idea of the scale of things, the baby is 46 feet long.

That this happened on the behest of the royal family in Doha, Qatar, one of a handful of terrifyingly flush Middle Eastern republics bent on using its infinite purchasing power to buy artistic credibility overnight, should come as no surprise.

“The Miraculous Journey” is either the apex of self-absorbed hubris or an extension of the monumental in-joke Hirst has been plying with increasing transparency his whole career. I’ve always felt his more recent work, especially, has been an elaborate critical performance about the stratospheric excess of the international art market, and a dare to the public at large to call him on it.

Oddly, no one ever did. And so we have “The Miraculous Journey,” which I can imagine to be a miracle, in Hirst’s mind, in that someone was willing to fund such a monumental simpleton’s fantasy, to the tune of $20 million no less. Damien Hirst does things because he can; and so long as there are deep pocketed sources who believe he should, the joke will ever be on us.

Murray Whyte

WORST INTERNET MEME

Harlem Shake: The backlash started in March. But the damage was already done. By early February, the Harlem Shake was a meme, a retina-singeing, eardrum-detonating series of copycat videos that proved talent was not a strict condition of popularity in 2013.

The dance craze inspired more grainy replicas than any other video this year as athletes, celebrities, soldiers and worker drones from every social rank gyrated in front of cameras, convulsing like they’d been jolted with billion-watt stun guns.

As the meme took hold, corporations rushed into the YouTube hinterlands. And the proletariat groused about the myth of grassroots virality. Or something like that. Not that it really mattered. Rich, poor, the Harlem Shake transcended class. Anyone could be a dancing fool provided enough sitting fools were willing to click.

Vinay Menon

WORST TV SHOW

Dads: Maybe it’s just funnier when you have cartoon characters being profane. Or here’s a novel idea — being borderline racist isn’t funny, period. One thing is for sure:Dads, the sitcom by Family Guy creator Seth Macfarlane and starring Seth Green, Giovanni Ribisi and Martin Mull, is the biggest television dud of 2013. The plot centres around two thirtysomething guys who have their lives interrupted when their dads move in with them. The show fails on so many levels that the rare zero percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes may actually be generous. Of course, that didn’t stop Fox from ordering another half a dozen episodes in October.

Tony Wong

WORST BOOK

The Demonologist: While anyone can write a bad book, it takes a bit of talent to write a truly terrible one. Andrew Pyper can write, but his relentless pursuit of blockbuster bestsellerdom lands him in a hot mess — one might also say, with a wink to one of 2013’s biggest bombshells, an inferno — of epic proportions in The Demonologist, a misguided attempt to channel the spirit of Dan Brown.

Pyper’s hero is David Ullman, an English professor specializing in Paradise Lost — he may well remind you of Brown’s Robert Langdon — who must drive across the U.S. unlocking a series of riddles in order to recover his daughter, who was kidnapped by a demon.

Like a lot of great bad books, the kind you actually enjoy, one wants to read The Demonologist as a parody. Of course, this makes its earnest tone even funnier. Indeed, the plot is so ludicrous and finally incoherent that one wonders if the whole thing was only meant to represent the frantic delusions of a bookish middle-aged man having a bad day.

Alex Good