In Praise of Bad Movies
We Filmwell writers are aficionados of the kind of films most people never hear about: foreign movies, realism, character-driven stories – the little, the obscure, the transcendent. Sure, we like our blockbusters, but sometimes it’s the little films that really sit in your soul.
But that’s not what I’m thinking about today. My husband works in film and we love these moderately obscure movies, too. After all, we spent New Year’s Eve at the Che roadshow at IFC, we purposely sought out an all-region DVD player, and we’ve trekked into Manhattan for 9am screenings of films like Silent Light. But a few years ago – after a marathon Kieslowsi film festival at Lincoln Center which involved seventeen Kieslowski films inside of a week – we instituted a tradition we gleefully call Bad Movie Night.
On Sunday nights, we settle into the couch with a few good beers, a bowl of popcorn, and a bar of good chocolate and watch a double feature of “bad movies.” That doesn’t mean truly bad movies (although we have seen a couple of those, notably Smart People and Towelhead), but often it’s a couple of mediocre Hollywood flicks that we weren’t willing to pay $12 per ticket to see, or decent comedies from the 90’s. They’re usually movies that can be summed up in a few phrases, such as “it was funny” or “stuff blows up.” Think Men in Black. Think Baby Mama. Think RocknRolla.
We watch two films at a time because, as we found out one fated night that included Get Rich or Die Tryin’, if one of the films turns out to be truly horrible, the second one often seems magnificent by comparison (in this case, it was that Keanu Reeves classic for the ages, Constantine).
I’m thinking about these movies today because, due to a variety of reasons, we haven’t seen any new movies for a while. But we’ve managed to keep Bad Movie Night intact. Now that Netflix streams over our MacBooks, the possibilities are nearly endless. It’s difficult to sit through a The Wind Will Carry Us or Climates on a late night at the end of a busy week. Sundays are the perfect evening for mindless double features, as we approach a new and busy week.
One unexpected result of Bad Movie Night is I’ve been reconsidering my views of bad movies. My movie-watching experience has been mostly shaped by the past decade, in which the romantic comedies that I think will actually endure are not Confessions of a Shopaholic, but Judd Apatow’s flicks. It’s a decade in which American indie cinema became a genre, not a description of a way of funding movies. It’s a time in which things like mumblecore came and went.
So when I approach some of the movies from the 90’s that I missed on the first go-round – like Men in Black or When Harry Met Sally – I bring some of my expectations to the table. I expect it to be melodramatic, poorly written, one-dimensional, like a lot of what is made in those genres today. I’m always surprised when I genuinely enjoy these films, and not just because they’re entertaining, but because they’re pretty good. (Sometimes.)
I also find that my appreciation for truly great film increases when I’m not spending all my time watching it. That’s not to say that the only great films are all quiet, slow, and subtitled – after all, two of my very favorite films are Waiting for Guffman and Stranger Than Fiction – but sometimes a steady diet of serious means we lose our sense of humor. I love a fancy french toast stuffed with creme fraiche and sprinkled with freshly-picked blackberries, but I’d probably love it less if I didn’t also eat bagels with cream cheese pretty often.
Find yourself getting burnt out on great film? I recommend a Bad Movie Night.
Is this where I confess how many times I’ve seen Top Secret!?
No… no… I’m just not brave enough yet.
Alissa, your youth is showing!
From the puffy hair to the yuppie lifestyles, When Harry Met Sally… is a classic ’80s film, not a ’90s film; and I suspect many people would argue that the transformation of “indie” from a financial reality to an easily categorized genre of filmmaking took place somewhere between the box-office success of sex, lies and videotape (’89) and the Oscar sweep of The English Patient (’96), with a couple of Very Important Tarantino Films (and countless imitators thereof) in the interim. Certainly that was the period in which the once-obscure Sundance festival became the place where modest, unassuming movies like The Spitfire Grill (’96) could begin to get $10 million distribution deals and the like. (And all of this was paralleled by the mainstreaming of “alternative” bands like R.E.M. and the commercialization of Nirvana and other “grunge” musicians in the early ’90s.)
Peter: it’s true, it’s true. I just realized you’re right about When Harry Met Sally – I had it in my mind that it was a 90s film purely because it’s a romantic comedy and Meg Ryan is in it.
But I think the idea of “indie” has really burgeoned into a full-fledged genre in the last ten years or so, though I guess you could argue either way. When I hear people in the NY scene talking about indie film, they usually mean something like Little Miss Sunshine or Me and You and Everyone We Know – quirky and offbeat. That’s not from people who actually know what they’re talking about, but from the general movie watching public. Is it not exactly slick and formulaic? Then somehow, it’s indie.
I dunno, the mainstream embrace of “quirky and offbeat” has been around at least as long as The Full Monty (’97), and of course Hal Hartley was doing “quirky and offbeat” back in the ’80s, before arguably peaking with Amateur (’94) and/or Henry Fool (’97).
Granted, the general movie-watching public tends to have short memories. But that’s where critics get to come along and help fill the gaps.
Haha, oh, The Full Monty. Chuckle. (Though that’s definitely not in the same quirkiness category as Me and You and Everyone We Know, or something that seems to be irrevocably associated with it in my mind: I Heart Huckabees.)
Yes, it’s definitely a function of the movie-watching public’s short memory.
Well, even I Heart Huckabees has its roots in the director’s earlier films like Spanking the Monkey (’94), Flirting with Disaster (’96) and Three Kings (’99), all of which got some critical love as I recall.
Jeff’s reference earlier today to Noah Baumbach’s Kicking and Screaming (’95) reminds me also that “indie film” back in the ’90s was practically synonymous with Eric Stoltz, who had roles big and small in a virtual armada of “quirky and offbeat” movies. When I interviewed Baumbach back then (on page 8 of the PDF file linked below), we even joked that “Eric Stoltz movies” were becoming a genre unto itself.
http://www.library.ubc.ca/archives/pdfs/ubyssey/UBYSSEY_1996_03_08.pdf
FWIW, I haven’t seen Me and You and Everyone We Know yet, so I can’t comment on specific points of contact (or the lack thereof) between that film and other films.
Ah, you definitely should!
If only more people realized “Men In Black” for the classic that it is.