Congrats aren't just in order for the winners of tonight's Film Independent Spirit Awards; major props go to Adam Sandler for an outstanding showing in today's Razzie nominations announcement, which found the Jack & Jill/Just Go With It star breaking the previous record for most personal Razzie nominations earned in a year. (Sandler won 11 nominations, while Jack & Jill itself earned 12.) Eddie Murphy, guess you're off the hook for the Year of Norbit. See the full list of fairly obvious nominees vying for Golden Raspberry (dis)honors after the the jump and leave your predictions below.
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The year is drawing to a close, which means that it is time to start thinking about all the things you did not accomplish in 2011. (That Ghostbusters 3 script? Still unread. That copycat Wedding Crashers crime you committed in college? Still unresolved in court.) But before you do that, let's take a look back at some of my favorite Movieline stories that punctuated this remarkably unproductive calendar year.
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Hark, a new film hath unseated The Help for the #1 crown! All it took was Steven Soderbergh's hypochondria-inducing Contagion, a picture that will surely also boost worldwide sales of Purell during flu season. And while there's no love lost in seeing last week's Shark Night 3D and Apollo 18 drop precipitously down in the ranks, the heartstrings pull for Warrior, a finely acted MMA film that only got a fraction of the theater count of its competitors, and performed accordingly. But! At least it fared better than Bucky Larson...
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It's not like Bucky Larson: Born to Be a Star aspires to be Citizen Kane, or Monty Python and the Holy Grail or even Wedding Crashers. All it wants to be is a silly, raunchy comedy about the rise of an extremely unlikely adult-film actor. That it fails so spectacularly in this regard makes it almost something special -- not only is Bucky Larson incredibly unfunny, it's also squeamish in a manner that makes you wonder if either writers Adam Sandler (who produced the film via his Happy Madison company), Allen Covert and Nick Swardson (who plays Bucky) have somehow never actually seen porn, or if they subcontracted the script out to a group of 8-year-olds with only the vaguest idea of what it entails. The latter would explain how incidental sex is to what's theoretically a movie all about it, from an early scene in which we learn that our hero has never masturbated or even heard of the concept, to the porn career he establishes, in which he never actually comes into contact with his costars.
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In order to catch Stephen Dorff and Nick Swardson during Comic-Con, Movieline had to brave the converted parking lot Camp Playboy, an artificial turf-lined space where dozens of scantily clad Playboy model types (day players, mostly) flitted about during our chat about Bucky Larson: Born to Be a Star, in which Swardson plays the world's unlikeliest porn star. In other words: The perfect setting.
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