Assignment 9: This is Atrocious
Posted by Austin Cinephile
Every week, we will be posting a prompt related to cinephilia, and some of our founding members will contribute a short response. Hopefully you, our dear readers, will feel compelled to respond in our comment section as well. This week’s prompt was:
What makes a horrible film?
So, this is Austin Cinephile, a place for the collection of essays about cinema love, not cinema hate. Negatively isn’t exactly what we’re aiming for. That said, love and hate are often intimately intertwined (just ask my ex-wife), and one cannot experience one without the other. Daniel once wrote, in his now-famous Lord Love a Duck review, that “You’ve got to constantly watch bad cinema in order to truly understand good cinema.” This is an important thing to keep in mind.
Further, great cinema is a pursuit, an adventure that is often wrought with mediocrities along the way. We must all see bad film as the plague that it is, and be able to move past it in order to find the gems of the screen.
This week, we explore what characteristics, energies, and events lead to uninspiring cinema.
Daniel
What makes a movie horrible? The absence of ambition! Lack of soul! Uninspired participation! A movie is bad if the people involved are not wholly committed to the cinema as an institution which must constantly be built up and torn down. A movie is rotten if the actors are concerned with themselves and their performances, if the producers are trying to make a derivative work, or if the director hasn’t seen any Renoir films.
Reject bad cinema. Discredit those who espouse the virtue of a film that is anything less than brilliant. The creative spirit should be embraced above all else. Encourage experimentation and expression. Shun mediocrity.
The effect of a horrible film is emptiness. There is no list of techniques for a bad or good film. Only ideas! Only heart! Bad cinema takes us nowhere, it contributes nothing, and it should be stomped out.
Michael
I can’t say I’m pleased with this prompt. The question is just so large and nonspecific that to attempt to answer it would result in answers just as unwieldy, over generalized, and surely dull. A horrible movie is a movie with a bad script? With bad acting? Poor direction? Dull cinematography? Horrible sound? All of the above? As film critics it is our job to examine cinema, to assess what works and what doesn’t. But this job is executed on a film-by-film basis. What works in one film might fail horribly in another and vise versa. There are no steadfast rules for what makes a great film or a horrible one. That is the beauty of cinema. There is a near infinite number of techniques for all aspects of the production process just waiting to be arranged in interesting and effective ways. And maybe therein lies my broad, overgeneralized, nondescript answer. Good movies are those that utilize the tools of cinema, employing them in effective ways and with inspiring results. Horrible films do not do this. They either underuse their tools or apply them in uncreative ways.
Steph
My roommate and I recently watched (me for the third time, her for the first) New Moon. During our viewing, I realized that I am the Paula Abdul of film critics. I want to award way too many points for effort, and it’s difficult for me to write off a film as “horrible” if I can find even just one or two elements I enjoyed. I wouldn’t call New Moon horrible, for example, because I think its cinematography has some really lovely moments, some of its supporting actors are quite good (Michael Sheen’s role gets better every time I watch it), and Alexandre Desplat’s score is sublime. Unsurprisingly, then, if I were to make a list of films I consider horrible, it would be a relatively short list.
However, for the purpose of this exercise, I want to focus on a very subjective element of film viewing that often affects our opinions more than I think we realize: our expectations. It is nearly impossible to watch a film without them. Perhaps you’ve read the novel the filmmaker is adapting; perhaps you read a review or heard two people talking about it on the subway; perhaps you’re familiar with one of the actors or the director. Even a knowledge of the cinematic calendar (brainless blockbusters in the summer, award-bait in the winter) can influence your expectations as you walk into that cool, dark space.
I often have a hard time judging movies to be terrible if they exceed my low expectations. A few years ago a co-worker of mine at the independent video store where I work recommended that I see a film called Dedication. Mandy Moore featured prominently on the DVD cover, and since it had gone straight to DVD, I didn’t have high hopes. However, I was pleasantly surprised by Billy Crudup’s performance and some of the unusually phrased dialogue, and I found myself liking the film more than it probably deserved, objectively speaking.
Of course, the inverse of my expectation hypothesis also holds true. If my high expectations for a film are disappointed, my opinion is often harsher than the film deserves. I was so unexpectedly delighted by Iron Man that I went eagerly into the theater for its sequel. I suppose what I saw was adequate. Robert Downey Jr. seemed to be having fun, and he’s a magnetic enough presence that I wasn’t bored. But I wanted fireworks and instead I got noise, and I left the theater discontented and glad I hadn’t paid for my ticket.
Are audience expectations and the extent to which they influence our opinions fair? Perhaps not. Filmmaking is a complicated art. A film is created and shaped by so many different people that writing off an entire film as terrible seems simplistic. And yet terrible films exist, and they are sometimes produced by brilliant filmmakers. Instead of being dismayed, maybe we should be relieved. Perfection is a lot to expect of anyone, and if we can forgive our filmmakers their flops, perhaps we can also let ourselves off the hook every now and again.
Stephen
In general, a horrible film is one in which art is entirely sacrificed at the altar of commerce. Consider the most recent target of critical vitriol: the action-romantic comedy. Films such as The Bounty Hunter, Killers, and Knight and Day are not bad simply because the dialogue is pedestrian, the actors uninterested and uninteresting, and the directing nonexistent, but because the very genre and its structure seem to be the calculated result of audience testing and demographic polling.
It is as if we now have films written, directed, and produced by the marketing departments of the major studios, scattershot contrivances with a few explosions here and some supposedly witty repartee there, meant to be enjoyed by men and women of all ages. This is the cynical mood prevailing in the film industry today. No one can afford to make a film for a specific audience, to take a risk on a film that seems unmarketable to all but a few select groups of moviegoers. Thus, we are given horrible films, films that please everyone but challenge and inspire no one.
However, only a naif would argue that the filmmaking process must always and only be motivated by aesthetics; the film industry has been carefully balanced between beauty and greed since its earliest days. Attention must be paid to those horrible films that exist on the other end of the spectrum from profit-driven drivel, which result from the failure of executives and producers to step in and stop an enthusiastic but misguided director from running a film into the ground. We call these films self-indulgent. For a recent example, one need look no further than Jim Jarmusch’s The Limits of Control, which played like an inside joke between the director, Tilda Swinton, and about three other people. Here, Jarmusch tried to sell a meandering film with no narrative thrust and what can only be called character anti-development by tossing in some faux-philosophical notions and a few meditation scenes. I, for one, wasn’t buying it.
Of course, this brings us to the one advantage self-indulgence has over commercial indifference. My co-writer Daniel Metz happened to love The Limits of Control; all the things that did not work for me worked quite well for him. Therefore, I would argue that, while an agreement can usually be made about horrible mainstream schlock, self-indulgent films are often treasured by some and hated by others. I loved Darren Aronofsky’s The Fountain, but pretty much everyone else said it was self-indulgent rubbish. This points to the ultimate difficulty of this week’s question: if a few people swear by an artistically ambitious film and defend it all costs, does that automatically exclude it from being as “horrible” as those commercial films? All I know is this: Daniel thought The Limits of Control was one of the ten best films of last year, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t horrible.
