True enough, but not quite–you can know a movie is bad, but still enjoy it (I like most of the Harry Potter films because of sentiments attached to the books and time in my life when the films came out. As outstanding cinema they don’t stand up.)
And you can know a movie is good, but not enjoy or appreciate it. I cannot get interested in Citizen Kane no matter how hard I try. It’s a film I have heard too much about to be able to watch “fresh”.
Of course you can also not enjoy a bad movie and be enthralled by a good one…
I think that in popular usage “bad” really does mean nothing more than the person speaking didn’t like it.
In reviewer mode, “bad” means that it failed to do what the producer/director/actor/writer wanted it to do. Usualy this is “make money” or “emotionaly engage” but there are other possibilities there.
I usualy use the second form. To me the 1-3 Star Wars movies are so aweful because they were supposed to be these huge sci fi films and were instead boring cardboard cutouts talking about politics. I do love the riff trax of them however.
Since no one has said it yet, Pauly Shore has been in some good movies. In The Army Now and Son-In-Law are both quite enjoyable comedies unless you personaly hate Pauly.
I don’t quite agree with that. I think by most measures Road House and Point Break are bad movies. I recognize this. I still enjoy the hell out of them, and even watch Road House on a pretty regular basis. But I would never try to convince anybody they were good films.
What I want from a movie is real emotions. This is why sequels tend to suck all the time, because directors copy everything from the first movie except the emotions.
Die Hard is a good film because it is about an average guy having a really bad day. The emotions are amplified by the plot, where terrorist happen to attack the building McClane is visiting and hold his wife hostage. The action might be unreal, but it is rooted in real emotion, which people can relate to.
Die Hard 4 is a bad film because they left that part out. DH4 is just about Bruce Willis blowing shit up. It doesn’t have that same mentality of the first Die Hard where everything just seems to go extremely wrong for John McClane.
The same thing for X-Men 2. The first hour of the film was about people dealing with a society that hates who those people truly are. Those are feeling that many other people have to deal with, and can relate to. X-Men 3 just delivered the action, and wasn’t as good of a film because of that.
True emotions aren’t always enough. The movie still has to be entertaining. **Stalker ** dealt with real feelings about religion, but it was still extremely dull. I still have no idea what the visual aspect of the film medium added to the story. It is probably a movie that someone who studies a lot about film can understand, because if Tarkovsky was trying to say something visually, it went way over my head.
If a movie is original or has a decent message, then that is a plus, but not a basic requirement for me.
The difference between the two statements is vast and so many professional reviewers and amateur commentators confuse the definitions of the two.
There are many films that are called bad that are simply not intended for everyone. Films trying to please as many people as possible (and in turn satisfy Miller’s definition of good) are precisely the types of derivative, lowest-common-denominator productions that cause all the complaining about the quality of Hollywood’s work.
There is nothing wrong with big, dumb, loud movies that you don’t have to think about. A movie that uses cheesy music, cliched happy endings, obnoxious effects, one-dimensional archetypes and overly simplistic dialog can be a good movie provided it uses these tools knowingly and it uses them effectively.
Personally I think Armageddon is a good movie because of that. It accomplished precisely what it set out to do. It’s not perfect of course, but on balance it’s a good film even with all the hamfisted Michael Bay details because they were intentional and effective. This doesn’t mean that everyone has to enjoy it, but as a vehicle to display over-the-top effects and to have actors playing the characters we know and enjoy it was a success. Had this movie set out to be profound I’d have called it a failure and a bad movie. Had it set out to be a social commentary I’d call it a failure and a bad movie. Had it set out to be innovative science fiction I’d call it a failure and a bad movie. It delivered exactly what was advertised.
Sunset Boulevard is a great film that’s chock full of reminders that we’re watching a movie, right up to the moment where faded queen of the silver screen Gloria/Norma blasts through the fourth wall to deliver some of the best closing lines ever:
I think it was Gene Siskel who said that if a documentary of the same actors having lunch would be more interesting than the movie you just saw, you just saw an unambiguously bad movie.
Well, there are different values for “good,” and what makes a movie good is going to change according to what the observer values in a movie. I’d argue that, if you like Road House, then Road House is a good movie, at least, for a very narrowly defined definition of “good.” If you like cheesy melodrama, hammy acting, ludicrous dialogue, and the sight of Patrick Swayze’s nekkid butt, then Road House is a good movie. If you don’t, then it’s not. Now, if you’re recommending the movie to someone else, you’d probably be well served to offer up the caveats about what you consider to be “good” about the movie, because not everyone is going to share that particular view of what counts as “good.” But then, the same can be said for any quality that a person might admire in a film.
I’m not defining “good” as “pleases the most number of people.” In fact, that’s almost (but not quite) exactly the opposite of how I’m defining it.
Do you find that this level of “jadedness” ( for want of a better word ) compromises your enjoyment of older films you’ve seen multiple times? i.e. can you still enjoy something like Harvey that you’ve seen umpteenth times or has it become so old hat that it has permanently lost its allure ( assuming you liked Harvey to begin with )? Similarly does that mean that films that are new and exciting fade quickly for you once you’ve absorbed them?
I know you watch movies you like multiple times, but then you’re a film maven and I imagine you always have. But do you find even with good films you now burn out quicker than you once did, on average?
Well it’s the necessary conclusion of what the big studios do. They love guys like you.
Here’s the thing, lets assume that you have a scale of 1 to 10 for movies you liked and movies you didn’t like. Movies greater than 5 on that scale you liked and therefore are “good” and therefore will be positively reviewed and recommended by you. Now, a movie might be able to score a 9.5 on your scale, but by doing so they’d alienate people with different tastes. If they instead include more lowest common denominator aspects which lower your enjoyment of the movie, say to a 6 on your scale, they will gain people that are lured by that stuff. It will be easier for them to get a whole bunch of 6s and therefore they will try to appeal to a broad a number of 6s as possible.
Except that I wouldn’t consider a film that got less than 7 to be “good.” And I wouldn’t be going out of my way to recommend the 7’s. You seem to making a lot of assumptions about me, and the idea that I rate movies on scale of 1 to 10 is by far the least egregious.
There’s no such thing as a “bad” movie or a “good” movie, it’s all just people’s opinions. Everything that’s been listed here are just various people’s criteria for how they personally judge “good” or “bad” movies.
For me, “Memento” was a horribly, horribly bad movie. It was bad beyond description. One of the main reasons was that after about five minutes, it was clear that I couldn’t give a rat’s ass for what happened to any of the characters. They were all just so irredeemable bad that a gun to my head couldn’t force me to care.
And that is one of my personal main criteria: If I don’t care about the characters, I can’t care about what happens, and so I can’t care about the movie, and so it’s bad.
Another example, mentioned in the OP, is the last (or third, however you count them) “Star Wars” movie. The way whats-his-name (Anikin?) turned to the dark side was just so laughable, so sudden and unbelievable and without any shred of actual motivation that I just couldn’t care anymore.
For me, the definition is simple . . . and complicated. Basically, if I feel that there is a discrepancy between what the filmmaker intended and what he achieved, I consider it a bad movie. Similarly, if a filmmaker seems to be dishonest about his intentions (even to himself; artistic naivete: cf. Spielberg). This cannot be quantified, of course, and is extremely subjective. But if I come to feel, watching a film that I’m being lied to or patronized, then I tend to dislike the film.
The obvious exception to this “rule” of artistic “gap” is camp, like Ed Wood. Those are the rare films where the artistic naivete, the discrepancy between intention and result, is somehow offset by a surfeit of enthusiasm and ingenuousness. Still a bad film, but not an insulting one, and still enjoyable.
Not to answer for Cervaise, but since his response could almost be appended word-for-word to my far less thoughtful one, I’ll answer your question for myself.
As someone who was equally “jaded” before I even began working in a video store—since which time I’ve watched, at minimum, a thousand movies a year—this question of jadedness has recently been a topic of cogitation for me.
First, a little math: for most people, when you, let’s say, compile a year-end list of ten best movies, you’re choosing those ten from probably far fewer than 100 movies seen that year (even 100 means an average of almost 2 per week). For me, I’m choosing from over a thousand movies. So a movie has to adhere to a much more rigid set of metrics to make it into those final ten. So, yeah, I tend to dismiss more movies than your average viewer. Like most people considered (mistakenly) to be movie “snobs,” in other words, I tend to dislike most movies. Because, after all, 90% of everything is crap. So yeah, if a customer asks my opinion of a movie, there are 900 movies a year I’m likely to give a bad review too. My percentages are no different from those of most movie watchers, but 900 thumbs-downs, percentage or not, comes off to the less thoughtless customer (or Doper) as simple snobbery. When, as a quick glance at the math proves, it’s not so much snobbery as simple jadedness; a disease of numbers, not of elitism.
The reason I’ve been thinking about this lately is that my general preferences have changed somewhat over the last ~couple years of 3-4 movies a day. I’m good and sick and tired, for example, of quirkly little faux-indie family dramas like Juno, Margot at the Wedding, The Savages, etc. Any movie in that genre is going to have to come up with something pretty dang fresh to rise above the 90% of crap. For some reason I haven’t quite quantified yet, Lars and the Real Girl is about the only such movie to have done so, for me, this year.
Another change in my movie tastes brought about by this jadedness is that I have a much higher tolerance for dumb, shit-blows-the-fuck-up movies (The Marine, Shooter, Shoot ’Em Up are among my recent favorites) and low-grade horror (like Inside, Borderland, Megasnake). Now this apparent lowering of standards is, I think, a direct result of my “jadedness” (though Cervaise’s response seems to be the opposite, so I think it would be interesting to discuss this in more detail). I think this is because, while 90% of these movies are still insupportable crap, there’s that 10% that seems to break through. When I try to analyze why I enjoy these schlocky Z-movies, the closest I can come is that the ones that I do enjoy all seem to convey a certain joy of filmmaking. A sense, somehow, that the people making these movies are just as jaded as I am, so they can think of no better way to have fun than throw a bucket of pig guts and chicken blood onto a scantily clad co-ed lit by a rented light. That sense of fun is what makes that 10% enjoyable to me. (Although, to be fair, some of these movies still display a seriousness of subtext, like Romero’s zombie films. You can’t get much more Z-grade gross-out than Cannibal Holocaust, but its social seriousness is undeniable, and makes it a very interesting movie on more than just the exploitation level.)
So, like Cervaise, when I watch a movie, my enjoyment of it—which can happen on many different levels, from dryly intellectual to viscerally fun—is usually going to be due to something unique (if I read his response correctly) somehow breaking through that 90%—at minimum—of jaded-making crap that’s out there.
(Sorry this response is so fragmented: I’m writing it at work, through a hail of distractions.)
