2008 Kaedrin Movie Awards: Best Sequel & Biggest Disappointment

The nominations for the 2008 Kaedrin Movie Awards were announced last week. This week, I’ll be announcing two winners every day, culminating in a post with my top 10 movies of the year and possibly some other wrap-up posts.

Best Sequel: The Dark Knight

It’s rare for a sequel to be better than or even equal to the original, but The Dark Knight is just such a movie. Batman Begins was a good movie, but The Dark Knight manages to improve on almost every aspect of what made Batman Begins work. I think comic book sequels seem to work a lot better than typical sequels… perhaps it’s the massive amounts of source material that filmmakers are able to pull from. Or maybe it’s because the origin story dominates the first movie, while the second movie focuses on more of a story with already established characters. Hellboy II: The Golden Army (another comic book movie) was certainly pretty good for a sequel (though it’s not as good as the Batman movies). I included Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay as a nominee, but that was more because I liked their first movie so much. I have an affinity for bad stoner comedies, but the latest Harold & Kumar installment left something to be desired.

Biggest Disappointment: Quantum of Solace

This is always a difficult award to pick. I tend to avoid bad movies, so the “winner” of this award is almost always a watcheable movie. This year, there were quite a few disappointments. Quantum of Solace takes the cake because I loved <a href="Casino Royale“>Casino Royale so much (see the 2006 awards) and was really looking forward to the latest Bond installment. Alas, it was not to be, as I noted immediately after seeing it. Nothing else this year inspired more disappointment, not even the new Indiana Jones movie, which was immediately forgettable (indeed, when I started thinking about this year’s awards and top 10 list, I almost forgot that this movie came out…). The Happening was poorly reviewed, but so were Shyamalan’s past two films and I really enjoyed both of those. Nevertheless, I didn’t expect it to be very good and even then I was surprised at how bad it was. Definitely the worst movie I’ve seen in the theater in several years. The other nominees weren’t exactly prizes either.

On deck: Best Action Sequences and Best Plot Twist/Surprise