The social scientists have the ingredients down to a precise formula. What exactly it is that goes into a bad good movie?
But they are on much less certain ground when it comes to the polar opposite, the good bad movie.
I think we can all agree on the first category, the bad good movie. Any signs of the following symptoms ought to raise alarm bells within the moviegoer, and if one or more are present it is perfectly acceptable, even in polite company, to sprint out of the theater pronto. Here goes:
- Subtitles.
- A notable lack of car chases, prison breakouts, exploding weapons depots, gritty bonding between males.
- The presence of whimsy or despair, or whimsy helplessly bonded to despair.
- Arch, convoluted dialogue that says so much more than it appears to on the surface, though in truth, it doesn’t even do that very well.
- The presence of long, slow shots tracking the muted expression on the main character’s face, a face that often makes an absolute point of registering hardy anything at all which, as any student of bad good movies can tell you, is a sure signal that there’s all sorts of turmoil seething away under the surface and out of sight.
- The presence of long, slow shots of Nature when she is not exactly at her best, but instead has a drab, dirty light gray or smeared brown type of thing going on, very unflattering, that is meant to convey that nature is not your friend, and that everything else being equal, she wouldn’t mind if you dropped where you stood and entered the next stage of the Great Circle of Life. Don’t count on her, that is what these long slow shots convey.
- The absence of Bruce Willis, Sly Stallone, Vin Diesel, Russell Crowe, or that one action movie guy who makes baldness look like something to shoot for, not to avoid.
- Did I mention the absence of prison breaks? Oh, wait, I see it right up there above, but it bears repeating.
- Frenzied, or furious, I suppose either word will do, you choose, frenzied or furious eruptions of emotions from this character or that as though those same emotions have been kept down for so long that they have somewhat curdled or turned inward on themselves.
- The presence of characters who say things like ‘your emotions have been kept down for so long it is as though they have somewhat curdled or turned inward on themselves.’
Any of these, as I say, either singly or in combination, are a sure giveaway of a bad good movie. They will have you studying the fabric of the chair you sit in, wondering how it is that they decide how many seats to put in each theater and how many they ship at one time and if there is any assembly required once they get to the theater, and dwelling on the great questions of our time, such as if you spelled the word ‘exit’ that you see on that red sign over there above the door backwards it would read tixe, and why hasn’t anyone come up with a definition for tixe yet, which would be a perfectly good word? Funny business when you think about it, this word-creation business, damned funny.
Run, lad, run.
You’re in a bad good movie.
You know you are supposed to like it, you know that everyone says that it is good for you, you know that it is so unpleasant that it ought to improve your mind or your moral fiber.
This latter point is in accordance with the theory that you are better off training for a race in a thin atmosphere or strapping weights onto your ankles when you run, under the belief that a body starved for oxygen or unnaturally weighted down – in this case with the flat and dreary glumness of the movie – will naturally develop muscle fiber at an advanced pace.
As I say, there is little disagreement or even discussion on these matters, they are pretty well settled in the scientific literature.
There is much less harmony of opinion on what exactly goes into a good bad movie, one of those you flip on at home after a long day and sink gratefully into your easy chair with a sigh to watch, that would be you doing the sighing not the chair, well, at the outer limit of metaphor maybe both, anyway, the kind of straightforward, colorful, chirpy, explosive, wisecracking, tumbling, noisy nonsense that knows that life is brief and our course through it is uncertain, and if you can’t at least make the damn thing
bright, then what can you do?
Most social scientists build from The First Principal of Good Bad Movies, also known as the Flaming Lava Continuum, which takes as its fundamental premise that any movie with flaming lava in it is worth at least a certain amount of your time.
It states that on a horizontal axis left to right the further you move away from wide angel views of a figure standing alone on a seashore and shaking his or her fists at the heavens and the closer you move towards scenes of flaming lava (some say pythons or mummies or pterodactyls but we stick here with the more traditional language), the better off you are.
Here’s a partial list of items that must by all means be included in a good bad movie:
- Dinosaurs.
- Guns that have a nickname.
- Sly Stallone, Vin Diesel, the bald action guy, or Russell Crowe.
- Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson.
- Two men who start out as enemies but through a series of crazy adventures end up fast friends.
- Car races, car chases, cars blowing up, cars dashing off of bridges, cars flying through the air.
- Godzilla or King Kong or both, as well as greatly enlarged versions of your common moth, housefly, rat, dust mite, bedbug, ant or other pests ordinarily of a household nature and you would think of a pretty mild temperament, but whose great enlargement has apparently unleashed all sorts of turmoilish emotions that they don’t at all mind expressing with vigor (frankly running dangerously close to characters whose emotions have been kept down for so long that they have somewhat curdled or turned inward on themselves, but we give them a pass in this one instance due to the startling nature of the circumstances they find themselves in.)
- Perfectly nice fellows being thrown to the lions in the Roman Coliseum until a slave uprising takes over the empire and slays the emperor.
- Quicksand.
- Any form of time travel.
- Billy the Kid, Wyatt Earp and especially Doc Holliday.
- Ancient tribes that have nonetheless evolved the art of women wearing makeup and batting their eyelashes at the hero from the future.
- Street urchins.
- Mad billionaires or financiers.
- The Colossus of Rhodes or any other of the Seven Wonders of the World.
- Greek gods taking human form just to mess around with fate.
- Card sharps, tricksters, magicians, fortunetellers, carnival barkers, and curse-leveling Gypsies.
- Fog-shrouded moors.
- Any large stone building, preferably the size of a castle.
- Archers, gladiators, catapults, boiling oil.
- Witches. Soothsayers.
- Smart-talking female sidekicks who aren’t as tough as they put on.
- Extreme meteorological events that take place far outside their natural environment, such as tidal waves upon the plains of Kansas.
This isn’t cut and dried. For instance, one of the more ‘out there’ theories asks what would you do with a movie that contains Bruce Willis or a Monster Arachnid…
but is also subtitled? It’s a quandary, and such topics are dissected with the greatest subtlety.
Well, we could talk all night, and some of the best minds of our generation have done so, at conference after conference, seminar after seminar, symposium after symposium.
Oh, no one disagrees about the individual items, they’re well-accepted and indeed, the list could grow to twice its length.
What we all go round and round about is how to get them all into the same movie. – lsm