It hurts so good!

Have you ever seen a bad movie that tricked you into watching it by macerating about like it’s a good movie? I don’t just mean the blurb on the back or picture on the front of a DVD. It has good actors, an interesting plot, talented writers, and somehow it just falls short. It’s as though someone said to everyone involved with the film, “Here’s a piece of paper. Here’s a set of scissors. Turn this piece of paper into two piece of paper.” Twenty minutes later there’s still one piece of paper and everyone is like, “I really don’t know what happened.”
I think the ultimate example of this is Elizabethtown. I think I could actually write a short book on all the things wrong with this movie. James Cameron makes good films. That’s not an opinion; it’s a fact. One would assume that a project he felt so passionately about would be excellent. The cast wasn’t the worst; Susan Sarandan and Kirsten Dunst are well trained actors who carefully choose most of their roles. They wouldn’t be in a movie that completed sucked? Right? Then there was Orlando Bloom. Okay, I admit he should have been a big red flag, but he’s no Keanu Reeves, so I gave the film a chance. By the end, I decided that it might have made three separate and fairly decent movies; however, all together it was like a circus train on fire in a war zone.

The Fantastic 4: Rise of the Silver Surfer is another example. Somehow they managed to make one of the most fascinating comic book characters (The Silver Surfer) into one of the most frustratingly boring.

On the other hand, some movies that should be awful actually turn out to be amazing. Case in point: Wanted. To quote John Stewart, “By all accounts, this movie should suck.” The previews and plot set it up to be just another flashy, action packed, special affect ridden monstrosity that would rake in a ton of money during the summer movie season. Yet, there was something almost impossible to place, that made it really good. Granted, the cast (Angelina Jolie, Morgan Freeman and James Macavoy) were all excellent actors, but Elizabethtown managed to slip pass the crap radar all the way to cinemas. I think it had something to do with the way it didn’t take itself too seriously. It was almost as if the movie was saying, “I know this is ridiculous and could never happen, but don’t you wish it could?” It owned its own implausibility and dared audiences to take the journey from start to end.

The third film type that manages to evade quality classification is those that are so “bad”, they loop all the way back around the circle to “good”. Wanted was almost like this, but one of the best examples of this is Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, i.e. "Indiana Jones 4". It was so dead-pan, over the top and serious that it ended up being completely hilarious. I found myself guessing the most outrageous direction the plot could go and time and time again found myself being correct. I felt vindicated and entertained. Without a doubt, the films that best demonstrates this quality of film were made in the 1980’s. Earth Girls are Easy, Night of the Comet, anything with Muppets, the list goes on and on for weeks of flicks to satisfy every mood and audience.