8th Annual Slip-Me-A-Mickey™® Awards: 2021 Edition

Estimated Reading Time: 69 seconds

The Slip-Me-A-Mickey™® awards are a tribute to the absolute worst that film and entertainment has to offer for the year. 2021 was a particularly heinous one for cinema, so the Slip-Me-A-Mickeys flourished in a very target rich environment.

Again, the qualifying rules are simple, I just had to have seen the film for it to be eligible. This means that at one point I had an interest in the film and put the effort in to see it, which may explain why I am so angry about it being awful. So any vitriol I may spew during this awards presentation shouldn't be taken personally by the people mentioned, it is really anger at myself for getting duped into watching.

The prizes are also pretty simple. The winners/losers receive nothing but my temporary scorn. If you are a winner/loser don't fret, because this years Slip-Me-A-Mickey™® loser/winner could always be next years Mickey™® winner!! Remember…you are only as good as your last film!!

Now…onto the awards!

 Worst Film of the Year

The Tender Bar – A boring, dramatically incoherent coming of age tale that makes an episode of The Wonder Years look like Lawrence of Arabia. George Clooney may be the very worst director making big time Hollywood movies. His butchery of this film is done with a chainsaw and not scalpel.  

Being the Ricardos – This cheesy, ham-handed Hollywood humping manages to turn Lucille ball and Desi Arnaz into the two dullest people in entertainment history.

Eternals – This is the worst Marvel movie I’ve ever seen and it isn’t even close. That is quite an accomplishment in cinematic futility.

Space Jam: A New Legacy – You know what would be fun…to put a legitimately moronic meathead who can barely speak a coherent sentence, LeBron James, on-screen with a bunch of corporate intellectual property and let them play basketball. Watching LeBron’s hairline recede is more entertaining.

And the Slip-Me-A-Mickey™® goes to…

Space Jam: A New Legacy – Hey, look at that, at least LeBron won something this year.

Worst Performance of the Year

LeBron James – Space Jam: A New Legacy - LeBron is a mental and moral midget, but he’s also got the charisma of a pile of week-old dog shit…so he’s got that going for him.

Benedict Cumberbatch – The Power of the Dog – Speaking of dog shit…Benedict Cumberbatch, or as my friend Dave calls him, Bend-her-dick Cunt-her-snatch, is supposed to be a menacing old-school cowboy in this movie, but from scene one he’s sashaying around like he’s working it on RuPaul’s runway. If they’d cast the cowboy from the Village People in this role it would’ve been less obviously gay.

Adam Driver – House of Gucci – Adam Driver is a giant, walking, talking anus. When you put him in Italian clothes, with Italian glasses, and have him speak with an Italian accent, he morphs into being a giant, walking, talking anus wearing Italian clothes and glasses, that has an Italian accent.

Jared Leto – House of Gucci – Leto’s performance in this movie makes Father Guido Sarducci look like Sir Laurence Olivier. A master class in awful acting.

Lady Gaga – House of Gucci – Gaga made me gag-gag with her wandering accent and hyper-theatrical posing in this dreadful movie. It is one of the great tragedies of human kind that Gaga now takes herself seriously as an actress.

And the Slip-Me-A-Mickey™® award goes to…

Jared Leto – Leto is the Leonardo da Vinci of awful over-acting.

Most Overrated Film of the Year

CODA – CODA is a Hallmark Channel movie that somehow won the Oscar for Best Picture. It is the worst film to win Best Picture in the history of the Academy Awards. The script is awful, the direction amateurish, the acting, including Troy Kotsur, is painful to watch. It also astonishes me that critics didn’t eviscerate this film but instead praised its soft-peddled, after school special bullshit.

The Power of the Dog – Jane Campion is a shitty director and this is a shitty movie. Arthouse fool’s gold that fooled a lot of people…but not me. Trite, vacuous, vapid and venal, this movie is poorly written, poorly directed, poorly acted and just all-around poor.

West Side Story – Steven Spielberg can make any movie he wants…and he made THIS piece of shit? If I want to watch dance teams square off in embarrassing street fights, I’ll just watch the original, better version of the story. An entirely useless exercise in historical cinematic revisionism.

And the Slip-Me-A-Mickey™® goes to…

CODA – I wish I was deaf and blind so I’d never have to see or hear about this stupid movie.

Worst Big Budget/Blockbuster/Action/Comedy of the Year

Eternals - See Above.

Ghostbusters: Afterlife – A terrific movie if you want to destroy a long-loved franchise with talentless teens and a terrible script.

Matrix: Resurrection – The Matrix was great. But literally every Matrix movie since the original has gotten worse by at 75%. This abysmal piece of shit puts the franchise deep into negative territory.

And the Slip-Me-A-Mickey™® awards goes to…

Eternals – This was a tough choice as these movies are all abysmal, but sitting through the two hour and thirty-six-minute woke slog that was Eternals was utterly excruciating to the point of torture.

Worst Director

George Clooney – Ironically, Clooney is on one of the most impressive runs of futility for a director since the Joel Schumacher heyday. Just when you think he can’t do any worse, he puts out The Tender Bar, and proves you wrong.

Aaron Sorkin – Sorkin proved last year with The Trial of the Chicago 7 that he was one of the worst directors of his generation, and he keeps the streak alive with Being the Ricardos.

Chloe Zhao – Zhao won an Oscar last year for Nomadland. This year she showed off what an incredibly shitty director she is with Eternals. Good for her.

And the Slip-Me-A-Mickey™® award goes to…

All three of these bags of shit. They’re all fucking terrible.

Special Achievement in Cinematic Malpractice

George Clooney – Clooney’s ability to continue to make one movie more awful than the last is a tribute to the endless supply of suck-ups and sycophants in Hollywood and to Clooney’s delusional sense of self. The shitshow that is The Tender Bar is a testament, and should stand as a monument, to the hackery of the ultimate Hollywood asshole...George Clooney.

POS Hall of Fame –

The Smith Family

At the 2015 Slip-Me-A-Mickey™® awards, the Smith family were voted to the Piece of Shit All-Stars. This year they’ve made the big leap to become Piece of Shit Hall of Famers!

Here’s a brief glimpse of what I wrote back at the 2015 Slip-Me-A-Mickey awards regarding the Smiths.

“This year we got to hear from Jada Pinkett-Smith how her husband was snubbed by the Academy Awards because he was black. We also got to hear how Jada was boycotting the Oscars in a show of solidarity with other snubbed black actors…which was convenient since she wasn't invited (as Chris Rock hilariously pointed out). I have one simple request for the entire Smith family...Will, Jada, Jaden and Willow…please shut the fuck up and go away forever. Will Smith is an abysmal hack of an actor and a dopey embarrassment as a "rapper". Jada Pinkett-Smith is a fly on the shit that is Will Smith, she desperately needs to bottle her manufactured self-righteous anger, stop talking immediately and vanish with her equally obnoxious other half. Jaden and Willow are kids, so they have an outside chance to not be as malignantly narcissistic as their God-awful parents, but I gotta be honest… it isn't looking very good as they aren't off to the best possible start in not following in their egotistical parents footsteps.”

Well, well, well, looks like I hit the nail on the head six years ago regarding the shitbag Smith family.

The truth is Will “Limp Willie” Smith has always been one of the biggest pieces of shit in Hollywood, and now with his slap of Chris Rock at the Oscars, everyone else gets to see the reality that I’ve known for a long time.

Will has been a piece of shit from day one. He is a bad joke as a rapper and his music has been an embarrassment for all sentient beings from the get-go. His acting career has also been an embarassment from day one. Will Smith is now and always has been a shitty rapper, shitty actor and shitty person. He is, undoubtedly, an incorrigle twat.

Speaking of twats, Will’s wife, Jada, is a talentless, narcissistic whore who’s done a wonderful job of making a cuckold out of her impotent and equally talentless husband by fucking her son’s friend August Alsina. She’s also a wondrous mother who has churned out two of the most repulsive spawn in Hollywood – no small task.

Jaden Smith, Will and Jada’s son, tweeted in the aftermath of Will’s slapping Chris Rock, “that’s how we do it”. Oh, really tough guy? Well Jaden, I invite you to don one of your signature skirts, and then go out into the real world with your toothpick arms, slap somebody, and see what happens to your non-binary ass. I know you don’t know this because you’re an entitled dandy who has never been around a real man in your entire life, but the real world ain’t the Oscars or the movies, and you’re going to find that out the hard way if you ever prance out of your privileged bubble, bitch.

One can only hope that the Smiths, who as individuals and as a collective family, are the most noxious, odious and malignant narcissists in all of Hollywood, a stunning achievement, are sentenced to a life of being in each other’s presence. They deserve that torture, and we deserve that reprieve.

Congratulation Will, Jada, Jaden and Willow, you’re all well-deserving members of the Piece of Shit Hall-of-Fame! Now kindly go fuck yourselves you rancid cunts.

And thus concludes another Slip-Me-A-Mickey™® awards. If you are one of the people who “won” this year I ask you to please not to take it personally and also to try and do better next year….because remember…this years Slip-Me-A-Mickey™® award winner could be next year’s Mickey™® Award winner!!which are the final awards show on the calender.

The Slip-Me-A-Mickey™® awards are the final award show on the 2021 calender. That means that 2021, the most dreadful year in recent cinema history, is now, officially and not-so-mercifully, over. Thank the good lord….and I pray that 2022 saves us from the cinematic hell that was 2021. As always…I am not optimistic.

©2022

Space Jam: A New Legacy - A Review

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes 23 seconds

My Rating: 1 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: YIKES!

Space Jam: A New Legacy is just more proof that LeBron James is no Michael Jordan.

This dreadful kid’s movie is a piece of desperate, shameless, self-aggrandizing marketing masquerading as entertainment.

Space Jam: A New Legacy starring LeBron James arrived in theatres and on the HBO Max streaming service on Friday.

The movie, a sequel of sorts to Michael Jordan’s 1996 blockbuster Space Jam, tells the story of LeBron and the Looney Tunes characters having to win a basketball game against the villain Al-G Rhythm (Don Cheadle) and the Goon Squad, a team of computerized NBA and WNBA superstars, in order to save his family from some sort of eternal damnation.

It should come as no surprise considering LeBron’s meticulous, corporatized self-promotion in recent years, from his vociferous support of Black Lives Matter to his pandering to China, that Space Jam: A New Legacy is nothing but a relentless and shameless two-hour commercial for the LeBron brand and Warner Brothers’ intellectual property.

The original Space Jam was wildly popular back in 1996, raking in $250 million at the box office, no doubt because Michael Jordan was such an iconic and beloved figure at the time.

Space Jam: A New Legacy is no Space Jam. Watching Space Jam 2 is the cinematic equivalent of stepping barefoot in a pile of dog mess baking on a sidewalk during a heatwave. It’s so bad it makes the entertaining but middling original look like a cross between Citizen Kane and Star Wars.

The biggest problem with Space Jam 2 is that LeBron James, no matter how hard he tries…and he tries very hard, is no Michael Jordan. Jordan had an undeniable charisma and magnetism to him, both on and off the court. Even basketball fans who loathed the Bulls, still loved and admired Jordan back in the day. The same cannot be said of LeBron, who is a much more polarizing figure, and whose game, while stellar, is considerably less aesthetically pleasing than Jordan’s. It also doesn’t help that LeBron doesn’t have the movie star good looks or charisma of Jordan either.  

There’s no denying his greatness on the basketball court, but LeBron is not exactly Le Brando in front of a camera. For someone who has spent their entire adulthood being filmed and who does copious amounts of acting on a basketball court, it’s stunning to behold how painfully uncomfortable LeBron is on screen. They would’ve been better off casting a cigar store Indian in the lead role as LeBron is so wooden in Space Jam 2 he should be checked for termites.

LeBron is certainly a big problem for the movie, that said, he isn’t the only problem.

The film’s director, Malcolm D. Lee, is Spike Lee’s cousin, and his work on Space Jam 2, and his previous filmography, speak volumes to the insidiousness of nepotism.

Space Jam: A New Legacy also boasts a budget of over $150 million and yet remarkably appears decidedly low-rent, as the 3-D versions of the Looney Tunes characters look like unconscionably cheap amusement park mascots.

And then there is the nadir of the film, the Porky Pig rap, the less said about that the better.

Space Jam 2 is supposedly made for kids, but even for them the movie is emotionally, narratively and comedically incoherent. It’s also littered with references they’ll never understand. For instance, there’s a bit about Indiana Hoosiers basketball coach Bobby Knight throwing a chair at a ref, something that happened in 1985. There’s also a plethora of references to older Warner Brother’s intellectual property, like Casablanca, Mad Max, Austin Powers, The Matrix and Training Day, not exactly stuff a ten-year-old will understand or care about.

As for parents, or self-loathing childless adults, who watch Space Jam 2, they’ll quickly discover that the movie is an instantly regrettable, headache inducing, sensory overloading experience in corporate marketing run amok.

And despite all of that awfulness, my overwhelming feeling at the end of Space Jam: A New Legacy, was that I actually felt bad for LeBron. I know that is idiotic as I’m just some clown reviewing his movie and he is a billionaire basketball god and burgeoning movie business impresario, but it’s true.

What struck me was that LeBron making a blatantly self-reverential, hagiographic movie where everyone tells him he’s the greatest basketball player ever, and where he incessantly declares what a tough upbringing he had, how hard-working and disciplined he is, and what a devoted father and family man he is, is not a testament to his ego but rather a monument to his insatiable insecurity and need to be loved. This is the inverse of Michael Jordan, who was loved and validated by fans because he never needed their love and validation.  

LeBron has everything…NBA titles, Hall of Fame credentials, millions of dollars, adoring fans, a great family, and yet he still desperately needs validation. He left Cleveland for Miami in search of it. He left Miami for Cleveland looking for it. He left Cleveland again and came to LA on his quest. He embraced Black Lives Matter hoping for it. He sold his soul to China in an attempt to attain it. And now he tries, once again, to mimic Michael Jordan by making Space Jam 2 in the hopes of securing it…but for LeBron, validation will remain ever elusive.

Space Jam: A New Legacy is not going to make anyone who watches it feel good, including LeBron James. The movie may fill his pockets with money but it won’t make him feel loved and validated because it can’t change the fact that he isn’t Michael Jordan, and he never will be.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2021