The Cinema of Inadvertence, or Why I Like Bad Movies
hedgehogreview.com
hedgehogreview.com
Evidently-educated fellow enjoys trashy movies, seeks to justify tastes at some length (>5K words) with reference to usual movies (Plan 9), usual critical touchstones (Hume, Foucault, Sontag). In the final scene, no firm conclusions are drawn, and the author wanders off. We are secretly afraid he will return some day, perhaps to ponder further.
You'd think the immodestly-named "Institute for Advanced Critical Studies" would prefer a new take on a stale discussion, or indeed have an editor on hand. Evidently not.
Facile dismissal, no content.
Did you think that me having made the same thing magically absolves others?
Some might be. By generally I go at length to explain my points, even devolving into long threads and summing up things to make my point better understood.
And while I might characterise some person in the news or some industry figure, I never name call others in a discussion. I try to rephrase what I wrote to make my point clearer, in sub-thread upon sub-thread, even when I am called names. Thought a certain "fuck the poor" mentality in some comments does grind my gears.
It doesn't help that in usually to the left, continental European, and conservative side of things, which it's triply unpopular with a large part of HN demographic. Though in regular programming/tech things I'm fairly vanilla (though people have thought of me as an Apple shill).
That said, I had a look at your comments to see if I rubbed you off the wrong way in some thread. Are these representative of the non "unnecessarily unpleasant" way we should be writing?
As a fellow bad-movie aficionado, I've narrowed my taste to prefer bad movies that the makers are very proud of and defend until their dying days. Passionate low quality movies, especially ripoffs, are uniquely appealing to me which is why I love Italian cinema from the 70s and 80s (not to mention the other, often more exploitative Italian genres of the same era). The other niche I've found enjoyable are those makers who know they are low budget and do the best with what they have (Golan/Globus, Charles Band, Roger Corman, etc). Both of these types of bad movies are so prolific that you'll never watch them all, and they are what keep me using Prime and Tubi much more frequently than Netflix.
And then. And then we got to meandering about mid-text. Like watching a blind pig in the backyard looking for an acorn, I was rooting for the author and felt we would get somewhere useful at some time.
I did not feel that we arrived there. Or rather, perhaps, we were so befuddled by the time we revisited the author and his dad that all was left was some general feeling of pathos that loving bad movies invokes. This is a clear thesis that did not require us visiting the myriad places we visited along the way.
Bad movies show us we all suck. Everybody makes mistakes. When a life, or a movie, is done with passion, sometimes that suckage transcends mere badness and leaves us all a bit wiser and happier.
I'm glad I read it, but holy hell it needed a better editor.
> And then. And then we got to meandering about mid-text.
I felt the author was off to a good start and lost the essay's fabric when discussing gender and sexual orientation with regard to Susan Sontag and camp but didn't connect those threads back to main pattern of discussion.
The essay disappointed me given how much it asks its readers to invest.
Asimov has obvious technical shortcomings as a writer but his strengths more than compensate. Meanwhile much of Heinlein is so bad it's unbearable. Argue if you like, but don't claim that this opinion is unanimous.
Well, duh. We don't consider someone competent in something if they don't have basic skills and put the hours in to study/try it. So why would art criticism (whether professionally or to have a "good taste" as a consumer of art) be different?
If it's a privilege, it's the same kind of privilege required to be anything: a cook, a runner, a historian, a programmer, etc. Yes, you need to have time to do those things, and for most you also need literacy. Heck, you also need the same time and literacy to be an musician, a novelist, etc -- so it only makes sense it would need time to understand the craft and recognize good ones.
Someone working their ass off because they're poor, might never be able to e.g. read enough books, study how the genres work, read about their history, and ultimate develop a good taste in literature.
But that's a problem we should fix at the equality/free time front. Not a problem with having a taste in art requirements being "snobbish".
As for snobbishness, you have it backwards: no one is saying that snobbishness is required to have good taste, but that the privilege required to develop good taste results in good taste being, or being labeled as, snobbish.
That's the case for all kinds of things that are not jobs but people still want to have an opinion on.
Besides, your very distinction is based on the idea that a job someone happens to work is the same as the field they want to work or have an opinion on. Which is not always (even rarely) the case.
If I work at McDonalds but aspire to be a programmer, surfer, rapper, journalist, writer, director, whatever getting competence to criticize/have an opinion about that other field (or, even more so, land a programming gig) also requires that I have a free time from "how I make my living".
>As for snobbishness, you have it backwards: no one is saying that snobbishness is required to have good taste, but that the privilege required to develop good taste results in good taste being, or being labeled as, snobbish.
And my point is, there's no "privilege" or no more "privilege" than any other endeavour one needs to spend time to learn and understand. Everything takes time and effort to achieve, why would "good taste" be any different?
Is being a surgeon "snobbish" because you need to study to become one? Plus unlike learning about art, it takes not just free time, but decade of attending classes, plus lots of money.
Somehow the page opened for me at the point, halfway through, where he starts crapping on the movie adaptation of "A Wrinkle in Time" for what seem, to me, to be really weird and deeply personal reasons.
Aaaaanyhow, as a fan of bad sci-fi movies (I just watched "Galaxina" last night, gosh what a turd of a film!) I gotta insist that you can't read too much into them.
Maybe future psycho-historians will glean important insights into the human condition from "Escape from Galaxy 3" (Oraclon! King of the Night!) but I don't think the Institute for Advanced Critical Studies will.
In here at 8.17, is an India film that I watched given that it was a remake of an earlier cult classic in Hindi cinema.
The remake is so bad that I actually liked it!!! I then realized that some of these worst movies need to be watched with a different lens, the movie I referred to I watched with a humor lens comparing it with the classic, that made it a laughter riot, which is why I liked it.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_films_considered_the_w...
Army of Darkness intentionally bad? What what what?!? That movie is fucking fantastic.
The only bad thing here is that the director got way bigger budget than he was used to, and really didn’t know how to spend it properly.
The end result is still great though.
And it's still intentionally campy and crudely made.
Btw, the magic words are "Klaatu barada nikto" -- which is a funny reference to a sci-fi movie.
It is entertaining. I don't always need a "good" movie, just entertainment. A lot of movies are like this, and that's OK.
I find books to be a much better medium if I want the good story
It’s over the top in all the right places and surprisingly well paced.
But they're good popcorn flicks. Sit back, and enjoy the ride, no matter how stupid, ridiculous or convoluted it gets. Plot holes are things to laugh at, not getting your attention caught by.
I'd probably start here [0], and then probably move over to Kaiju and Kung Fu.
Popcorn flicks are a great thing for a weekend when you're worn out.