Worst movies I saw this year:

5) Brave
4) Amazing Spider-Man
3) Prometheus
2) Chernobyl Diaries
1) Battleship

Best of the year: Skyfall, Pitch Perfect, Life of Pi, Django, Argo, and Twilight: Breaking Dawn Part II. If Dorkman can list Dredd I can list Twilight.

Worst: The Chernobyl Diaries and The Raven.

Most disappointing: Snow White and the Huntsman and Perks of Being a Wallflower

I strongly disagree with you guys about the opening of Zero Dark Thirty, for a couple reasons.

First, this is a movie about the hunt for Osama bin Laden. You have to open with the reason why we're hunting this guy, right? You could argue that everyone knows going in, but let's look at it from a movie perspective for a second. 9/11 is basically the inciting incident. I think that the opening scene of Zero Dark Thirty was the most tasteful way possible to acknowledge the events of 9/11 without veering too far into deliberate emotional manipulation.

I get that you guys feel uncomfortable with using footage of real tragedies to tell a fictional story, as you've expressed in the past, but this is different. Would you rather they show news footage of planes crashing into towers? Of course not, and I agree. That would have come across as a very obvious attempt to rile up the audience and get them to hate bin Laden, which is unnecessary anyway. So video footage is out. Should the 911 calls have been faked? Recorded by actors? To me, that seems entirely inappropriate and disrespectful to the people who actually died on 9/11. Yes, this entire movie is actors re-creating events from recent history, but to fake the voices of innocent people who died in a national tragedy? That's crossing a line.

So where do we end up? Mixing together a collage of 911 calls from inside the World Trade Center on the morning of 9/11. You have to acknowledge it in some way, and this was pretty clearly the least they could do.

I also didn't like Trey's comparison of this film to a 3rd grade class telling the story of the Pilgrims. Really? That's the attitude they should have taken? They should have come to work every day and thought, "Well, we're just a bunch of assholes who don't really matter telling a story that we're not worthy of telling." Why shouldn't they take themselves seriously? I feel like Trey really undersold the journalistic work involved in telling this story, as well as the professionalism of everyone involved, and that's not fair. Zero Dark Thirty is a very mature, straight-faced telling of history, and I admire it for that.

Perhaps the better way to open the film would be to dramatize the first responders. Forget the 911 calls and overused crash footage. Focus on the people who first responded to the events, then bookend that with Seal Team 6 as the "final responders" if you will.

Maybe somebody on Seal Team 6 even had a firefighter uncle in New York that day. If you're going to make shit up, that would be a better thing to make up than the fantasy that torture produced actionable intelligence.