Seb's Web

In the past couple of months I have watched, gawked at, sat through, and got annoyed at several bad movies. It got me thinking at what makes a bad movie… well, “bad”. It’s probably easier to define great movies. They are made with care; there’s craftsmanship, attention to detail, great effort put into them. A great movie is an artists’ vision taken to its end, or a collection of artists and artisans working and collaborating to produce something that stirs you, that you will remember, that ultimately makes you feel something that sticks with you for a long time. Bad movies can be anything.

Take, for example, this dung from 2010 that the beetle Luc Besson scripted: “From Paris With Love“. Since Besson wrote it you definitely expect some silly action aimed at 15 year olds, a sprinkle of French saucisson and some hot actress bringing in cheesy lines – and probably some . But wait! What could have been a forgettable summer flick becomes an unforgettable dumpster fire with the addition of John Travolta. Sporting a ridiculous goatee and 50 extra big macs around his waist, the man from Xenu is in the role of an American spy hunting terrorists in Paris – so of course not five minutes after landing he starts shooting and blowing up the French capital. Just check out the poster. You know it’s going to be bonkers when you haven’t even pressed Play and Johnny’s already firing a bazooka…

Is it a good movie? No… It’s a pointless action flick, it works pretty well, and surprisingly Travolta actually carries most of the movie. Not sure how it comes off for Americans, but it seems like such a cliche for an American to come to Europe, guns blazing, chasing terrorists by himself… And yet it was made by a Frenchman. Well, it must be hard for Besson to understand the irony since he has such a hard time with the concept of consent, among other things…

Let’s go to Midsommar, one of the most loved but also hyped movies of 2019. I only watched it this year, and I went with the Director’s Cut, which was a mistake. Memo to me in the future: only watch the DCut if there was studio interference, or there were extraordinary circumstances (see Justice League vs the Snyder cut). Because this was such a navel-gazing exercise by Ari Aster, 30 minutes extra for a movie that should not have crossed the 2-hour mark. Was it a bad movie? Well, no, this ticked all the boxes for what constitutes a great movie… But this is where our premise breaks down, because the phrase “Kill your darlings” exists exactly for such works of art. Not everything needs to be included.

Half an hour extra on a psychological horror just drags and drags and drags… I was absolutely mesmerised by the visual, the score was good, the moments of tension were done well, Florence Pugh’s acting was stellar. But holy Moses, did the editor not step in at any moment to give Aster a smack on the head? I’m sure the original was better, or at least not worsened by the length, but my experience of Midsommar was Bad. Well, there’s actually a better word for it, which makes it worse than bad, it was boring!

Being boring is an art crime. The whole point of art is to move you, to make you think, to provoke you or just to get a reaction, however small. Those huge mono-colour paintings in modern museums are good art because they’re not boring. If the reaction is “woah” or even “this is stupid, I could have painted that” then at least it’s a reaction. If the reaction to an art piece is “can I go now?” or “how long is this shit?”, then it’s bad art.

There’s a particular movie which I hate because of this. Sofia Coppola’s “The Bling Ring“. It annoyed me to hell. And before anyone says it’s good art because it provoked a reaction, I hate it because it’s one of the worst movies I ever sat through, and one of the very few for which I debated if I should leave the cinema or not. I never leave the cinema though, no matter what. If I sat through “4-3-2” at 15 years old and the 3h snoozefest Sieranevada at 25, I can sit through anything. I almost got up at The Bling Ring though. It’s 90 minutes of nothing, a decent premise, a major production, a good director… making what amounts to nothing more than a high-budget re-enactment for the news. I’m sure some people like it, but I do wonder if those people believe it to be Great.

Now… we can’t talk about bad movies and not talk about The Room. The King of all bad movies. And it’s a stinker, from start to finish, from all points of view. Dull cinematography, stale acting, awkward editing, amateurish script, bad dubbing, an attempt at a soundtrack… But holy shit is it not dull at all. I think it was Roger Ebert who said something along the lines of “People trying to be funny are never as funny as people trying to be serious and failing“. This movie really tried to be a serious movie and it failed on all fronts – which made it not boring and absolutely amazing. It’s so bad it’s meta, which is why there’s a docudrama about it with James Franco, and a tribute for it with Bob Odenkirk.

• It’s hard to get a good definition for what a bad movie is.
• Is The Queen’s Corgi bad? For most people, yes, it will be a dreadful watch… but play on an iPad for a five year old and he’d enjoy the heck out of it.
• What about Disaster Movie? It’s the movie equivalent of a fart sound, and there are plenty of fart jokes in the movie itself… But would you be ashamed to play it when you have friends over for some drink? Not necessarily, it can lighten the mood by what a disaster it is. It’s like a Christmas Cracker joke – the point of it is not to crack you up, but because it’s so bad and cheesy, the joke is on… the joke, so it manages to lighten the mood for everyone.
• Moving on, is Cats bad? Yes.
• Are those Hallmark movies bad? You know, the one where some American chick dumps her work-obsessed boyfriend, she’s got trouble at her big New York job so she goes to a Greek island, meets a Swedish prince, one of her parents dies but leaves her some kind of project, and then she does it with the help of her quirky friend, and it all wraps up with a happy end on Christmas Eve? Eh, they’re the equivalent of elevator music, they’re not going to win any awards, they’re aesthetic but predictable… But your mom loves them, so that’s great.
• There’s also that special category of “WTF, why did this get made?”, like Fred: The Movie, or The Revenge of Kitty Galore, or Moana (2026). The discount bin of film-making. Ok, we can call them trash. They certainly have an audience…
• Some don’t have an audience at all, like Zyzzyx Rd, which got $30 at the box office (dollars, not millions). It might be great, but you couldn’t pay me to watch it though…
• Personal taste surely comes into it as well, and don’t call me Shirley. I absolutely hated Anchorman, and thought it was one of the least funny movies I have ever seen. I can’t put my finger on why, I just thought everyone in it was so cringe and unlikeable it was a pain to watch until the end. But people love it, and that’s fine. I know people who hated Airplane, which I found hilarious. But that’s… not fine.
• Speaking of subjectivity, I find Now You See Me to be objectively bad and don’t understand how people love it. You only need some minimal knowledge of magic and illusions, or just common sense, because everything they do is reduced to “we’ve done it in post-production, because it’s impossible in real life”. I guess this doesn’t annoy others though, because it has a whopping 7.2 on IMDb.
• Another piece of cold garbage I caught recently was Chasing Papi, which was so unremarkable I can’t even remember the main point of the film – which was probably just 30-year old Sofia Vergara appearing on screen. That says something about how dreadful the film was…
• There’s Passengers, a movie so inconsistent that some guy on YouTube realised it would have worked just by editing it to reverse the plot twist.

This article could go on forever, but I’m hangry and suddenly remembered how much The Bling Ring annoyed me and I lost my train of thought. Props to Sofia Coppola, by my own definition that movie was a work of art.
There’s a ton of movies, a lot which suck and aren’t worth wasting time on. As to what really makes a movie bad, I’m going to paraphrase Tolstoy here: All great movies are alike; all bad movies are bad in their own way.