Can we add music as manipulation – movies where the musical score tells you what emotion you’re supposed to be feeling?
I’ll second this with one big proviso: you have to notice that your emotions are being manipulated.
Music in movies goes back to the 20’s, right? There are several awards each year for variations on the theme of music and the part(s) it plays in movies.
If you find yourself needing to own the soundtrack, then music must have moved you in some ways. However, if you own the soundtrack and can’t remember the main actors, the director, the plot or anything else about the movie, chances are you were manipulated more than you thought!
It didn’t occur to me how much music there was in Schindler’s List until I started humming the theme. Then I realized how much the music influenced my emotions. But SL is a great movie in spite of the music.
All you have to do to get the full brunt of what AuntiePam’s main point is, is to watch some of the popular movies from the 40’s and 50’s (even more recent ones, too) to see/hear how heavily the poor acting, bad dialog, crummy directing, relied on the insistent music to push you towards some feeling.
The prime example: Westerns. Whenever the bad guys or the Indians (same thing) were up to no good, you’d get the dun-dun-dunnun-dun music to let you know it.
Quoted for truth. They “failed to engage” on an epic level. In fact, I’ve apparently seen the three movies more than once. I know I’ve seen them at least once, because my husband wanted to see them in the theater, and I love him more than I hate George Lucas. But apparently, I’ve watched them with my sister as well, with the Riff Trax (www.rifftrax.com). I do not remember this at all. The movies so failed to engage me, they just washed over my brain. I was reading about memories this weekend for my film theory class, and one thing that came up again and again was that memories are created/reconstructed by/with emotions. I had absolutely no emotional response to these films, and so I just cannot remember them.
All of the movies I would characterize as bad are ones that fail to elicit any sort of emotional reaction.
Couldn’t disagree with you more. For example, aside from being white teenage males, Alex Keaton and Marty McFly were nothing alike.
And Will Ferrell was wonderful in Elf.
A good movie is a movie you like, and a bad movie is one you don’t. Everything else is justification.
There’s also the “So bad it’s good” category. Let’s not forget THOSE.
(As an example: Overdrawn at the Memory Bank. It’s HORRIBLE. So bad, it’s awesome.)
I tend to loathe movies that are predictable and formulaic–you know, the ones where you can guess the ending after you’ve seen the first ten minutes, and you know darn well you’ve seen it several times before.
Oh, what the hell.
I saw about 15 minutes of this the other night on IFC. There’s a point where they make it to the top of a mountain overlooking a valley (possibly the Mojave desert, but I don’t know). I read the synopsis so I knew what was going on and I’m looking at this scene thinking “If they had any brains about them (and if they realize they’re lost at this point) they would just sit their asses down and wait until night time to see where any electric lights would appear, then walk towards them. At the very least, they could probably see where some roads are by looking for headlights.”
Well… they didn’t. They walked down the mountain and out of my life for I switched the channel, eye-rolling at the idiocy of the script. But then again, if they had any sense to begin with, they wouldn’t be in that situation.
I have to add that one’s criteria for judging the (personal) value of a movie will evolve significantly depending on how many movies one has seen.
Me, for example, I’ve seen countless thousands of movies. As a result, my tolerance in the “but it’s just supposed to be stupid and fun” category is very, very low. I can understand why other people enjoy them, but when I’m so familiar with the form that I can predict not just scenes and not just dialogue but the timing of the editing before it happens, my enjoyment goes down considerably.
As such, my appreciation for films has changed over the years. I’m unable to watch movies that are ostensibly entertaining in a generic way; I get bored and fidgety. I’m looking for, and I label a film good or bad based on, different qualities:
Does it do something new? Does it show me something I haven’t seen before, or find a novel way to treat a conventional element? I’m a lot happier watching a highly original if ultimately unsuccessful movie than I am watching a movie that works in all the particulars but that does nothing new. Or, in other words, I don’t mind watching a bad movie if it manages to come up with a new way to be bad (e.g. Spike Lee’s She Hate Me).
Does it illuminate the form? Is it conscious of itself as a film, and does it expand on, or contemplate, the possibilities of the medium? The authorial switch in Adaptation is the classic example, but more recently No Country for Old Men turns the thriller genre inside out and shines a light on the audience’s relationship with stories in that narrative family. Further, I would argue that The Truman Show has a lot of script problems, while the superficially similar EdTV is slicker more “entertaining,” but the formal qualities of the former make it a more worthwhile watch than the latter.
Is the film a personal expression of an interesting filmmaker? Lots of people raved about Pan’s Labyrinth for its fantasy elements and fairy-tale qualities, and those are worthy of note, but I was most impressed by the film’s place in the Guillermo del Toro canon. He’s a filmmaker with a particular vision, and a particular point of view, beyond just the monsters-and-magic design elements; and Pan’s Labyrinth is a potent summation of his artistic and thematic preoccupations to this point in his career. From this perspective, even an inarguable failure like Mimic is valuable viewing.
(And conversely, to more directly answer the OP, someone like Brett Ratner is a bad filmmaker because he literally has nothing to say. His films are empty exercises in stylistic impersonation: junk food, basically. I don’t eat at McDonald’s and the last Ratner movie I will ever see was Red Dragon. From the perspective I’m describing, a Brett Ratner movie is a bad movie by definition.)
Of course, most people don’t relate to movies like this, so I don’t expect a lot of people to agree with me or get where I’m coming from. And that’s fine; I’m not trying to change anybody’s mind. I’m just explaining where I’m coming from, as well as providing a heads-up to people that if you see as many movies as I have, your point of view may change a bit.
My personal criteria is that if it’s bad enough that you can’t even get enjoyment out of making fun of it, you have just watched a bad movie.
golf clap
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“Comedy” films where the jokes are weak.
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“Surprise twist” movies where the end is obvious a mile away.
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Dull, plodding plots where nothing very much happens.
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Annoying characters that you’re supposed to like, but who make your teeth itch. Star Wars episode 1 was bad because it had Little Awful Ani, AND Jar-Jar.
Like? (just curious)
Like The Village, for a start.
Well, to jump in here and help out a bit: take Kiss The Girls. They try to set up a mystery: who has been kidnapping these girls and killing them? Who, mind you who? And then you realize that there are three ‘name’ stars in the movie, and two of them are the main cop character (Morgan Freeman) and the girl who managed to escape the killer (Ashley Judd). Gee, I wonder who the killer will turn out to be.
Or the relatively recent Angelina Jolie vehicle Taking Lives, about which the less said the better.
Both good examples.
I wasn’t being snarky,just wondering.
For me, it’s plot holes. If I spend more time pausing the DVD to comment about a plot hole than I do watching the film, that’s a bad movie.
Reference : Awake. So many holes in the plot, they could have threaded the projector with it.
Slight hijack, but have you seen him in the guest star role he had on Scrubs? If not I would definitely suggest checking it out, because it changed my opinion of Michael J. Fox.
I’m by no means a cinema aficionado, so my “bad movie” categories are essentially two:
- A movie that’s not entertaining, i.e. I derive no enjoyment from watching it, whether that enjoyment is direct, i.e. laughter, suspense, etc… or whether it’s the enjoyment that comes from pondering issues raised in thought-provoking movies. This is completely subjective, and is fairly, although not completely dependent on Point #2.
Some example movies in Category 1:
Armageddon
Return to Oz
A View to a Kill
any number of chick flicks my wife watches
2. Badly done movies. Ones that might have been entertaining, but due to bad acting, writing, cinematography, editing , etc… are just not entertaining.
Examples of Point 2:
Armageddon (badly written and far-fetched, even on stuff they should have got right)
A View to a Kill (lamest Bond plot yet, and Moore was unbelievable at his age)
Yo, CanvasShoes, before this thread of yours gets off the first page, in case you haven’t spotted this other thread yet, look at List 5 GOOD Movies and 5 BAD Movies for what a sampling of Straight Dope movie fans think are Good and Bad movies.
As I suggested earlier, individual tastes apply heavily.