8 movies I didn't care for in 2013

Counting down the 2013 movies I saw, from worst to best:

38. Gangster Squad



I wanted another L.A. Confidential or The Untouchables, but Gangster Squad is a cliché-ridden mess that can't decide if it's serious and brutal or a tongue-in-cheek lark.

The LXB adds to my list of favorite films

I'm going to take the week off from the LXB (I'm unqualified to talk about reality TV treasure hunters), but won't let that keep me from pointing out that last week's Top Ten Movies assignment was super popular and successful.

I especially love the themed lists that three of the members came up with, so I'll list those first.

• Top Ten Monkey Movies [Cool and Collected]
• Top Ten Time Travel Movies [Cavalcade of Awesome]
• Top Ten Vincent Price Movies [AEIOU and Sometimes Why]

But, as predicted, there were lots of movies that could easily have gone on my own list.

• Pee Wee's Big Adventure, Summer School, Back to the Future, and Ferris Bueller's Day Off [Flashlights Are Something to Eat]
• Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure and Monty Python and the Holy Grail [Life With Fandom]
• Can't Buy Me Love and The Avengers (I debated including The Avengers on my list, but decided I needed some distance from it to give it an objective ranking. I'm glad to see not everyone was that shy, because my feeling is that it deserves to be there.) [Random Toy Reviews]
• Terminator, Die Hard, and First Blood [Movie Hodge Podge]
• This is Spinal Tap [That Figures, who gets bonus points for also picking Night of the Demon.]
• Batman: Mask of the Phantasm, Aliens, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, and Batman (1966) [My pal Erik Johnson]
• The Crow [Jason Vorhees]
• Lean On Me [Team Hellions]

Some of those were picked by multiple bloggers, so I linked to the one I saw first. Seriously, the LXB roll call on this one is full of great films, so if you're looking to kill some time, you should check them all out.

LXB | March Madness: Bruce Lee vs John McClane

For the first three weeks of March, we're going to answer the question, one match at a time, of who would win if 12 movie tough guys were airdropped into an abandoned city and only one could escape.

I'm not proud of this, but I don't think I've ever seen a Bruce Lee movie all the way through. In a weird way though, that makes him more dangerous to me. He's purely legend, which makes him tough to beat in my mind.

On the other hand, I've been a John McClane fan since the first Die Hard and one of the things I love about him is his scrappiness. He simply refuses to go down and always comes up with a way out of impossible situations. His defining moment for me is in Die Hard when he's pinned down by the bad guys' guns, barefoot, and the only escape route is covered in broken glass. I still remember thinking to myself that he was totally screwed, because my mind couldn't conceive of running across that glass in bare feet. John McClane gets done what needs to get done.

But...against the legend of Bruce Lee? There's going to come a point where John has to stop running and hiding and planning and just fight. And there's no way that fight lasts longer than about five seconds.

Winner: Bruce Lee. (BUT: I want this to be participatory as much as possible. Can you think of a way that McClane comes back from defeat and figures out how to win?)