What People Are Getting Wrong This Week: Good Vs. Bad Movies
March is Oscar month, when Hollywood’s handsome millionaires gather to congratulate each other for being so great while simultaneously taking on the foolish task of declaring to posterity which films are the best. So now is the time to talk about bad and good films and the fact that no one, not even eminent professionals in the film industry, can know for sure whether a particular film is good or not.
In an inspired counter-program to the Oscars, the Criterion Channel released a collection of 14 Golden Raspberry-winning films for streaming in March. These “worst of the worst” films prove that a film’s “badness” can be just as incomprehensible as its “goodness.”
Crash : When the “best picture” is actually terrible
If you consider the history of the Oscars (and ignore the subjective nature of our relationship with art), most Best Picture winners are “good” films, bland, mediocre, and most of them stay that way over time . Titanic , I think, is a good film. Like Chariots of Fire , something like that. But some films, for cultural reasons that can rarely be predicted, swing wildly from “best” to “worst” or vice versa, depending on the cultural world in which we live when we watch them. Sometimes critics, audiences and the “industry” think that a film is not only good, but the best , but later find out that it is actually terrible. Crash , for example, went from great to trash in less than 20 years.
When Crash was released in 2005, it was seen as a bold exploration of race in America, a film that wasn’t afraid to “go there” as we said back in 2005. , but doesn’t deserve a better movie than Brokeback Mountain ” is bad, but actively, undeniably, aggressively terrible.
Even though the footage was the same then as it is now, few people noticed how obvious, trite and amateurish Crash was in 2005. on us. Crash has a message , and this is where it goes from mediocre to odious. Despite its promise to “keep it real,” as we said back in 2005, Crash is designed to appease its liberal white audience rather than confront them. His message goes something like this: “Racism is bad, mmm-okay, but you’re good because you don’t give a damn.” Or, as critic Clarissa Lowry noted : ” Crash is the dad from the beloved movie Get Out .”
So how did Crash hide his sentimental grayness well enough to win the Oscar for Best Picture? This is partly due to the popular narrative device of the time, non-linear storytelling, but mainly because the Academy consists almost exclusively of the father from Get Out. The target audience for sensitive mid-budget films about race is the father in Get Out , and he won’t miss an opportunity to congratulate himself on not being a racist , especially on Oscar night.
“Cruise” and “Freddy Got Too Much”: When “Bad” Movies Are Actually Good
I’ve seen the entire Criterion Razzie collection, and a case could be made for the value of any of these films (with the exception of Gigli , a film that receiveda 6% score on Rotten Tomatoes and is still overrated), but two to me The films that most deserve a re-watch were revealed: “The Cruise” and “Freddy Got Too Much.”
Directed by William Friedkin, whose credits include The Exorcist, The Boys in the Band and The French Connection, 1980’s Cruise is a vibrant neo-noir crime drama set among the BDSM scenes of New York City. York before AIDS. Al Pacino plays a detective who goes undercover in the Leather Dad scene to catch a serial killer.
“Cruise” is a tense, fast-paced and entertaining thriller, but critics hated it. At first I thought that perhaps the graphic depiction of violence and kinky male sex was too much for critics in that less enlightened time, but it turns out there was another reason for Cruising’s critical bashing: it was mostly about the victim. events around him.
While the film was in production, Cruising became the center of a now-forgotten controversy. Gay activists protested over concerns that the film would stereotype all gay men as hedonistic and violent fetishists. After the film’s release, many critics decided that Cruising’s mysterious ending and the inscrutability of its protagonist were the result of the director succumbing to external pressure. Some criticized it for its portrayal of gay people, and some critics appeared to be simply homophobic.
But looking through the lens of 2024 and unaware of the controversy it once caused, audiences can look at “Cruise” on its own merits and finally see the unflinching, tense and gripping thriller/psychological study that was always there. It’s a matter of opinion, but Cruising seems to take great pains to honestly reflect the struggles and alienation gay people faced at the time, making it clear that the small subculture is not representative of gay people as a whole. Al Pacino’s unclear ending and he-or-isn’t-him journey for Al Pacino’s protagonist feel less like the ramblings of a frightened director and more like an attempt to illustrate how complex sexuality, violence and identity can be. Three fingers up.
Freddy Got Fingered is a masterpiece
Upon its release, Tom Green’s 2001 comedy (I think) Freddy Got His Fingers was almost as harshly criticized as Gigli . Critics called it scatological, childish, annoying and unfunny. As Roger Ebert put it, “This movie doesn’t scrape the bottom of the barrel. This film is not the bottom of the barrel. This movie isn’t below the bottom of the barrel. This movie doesn’t deserve to be mentioned in the same sentence as barrels.”
All of this is true, but it was also ahead of its time. Greene’s shtick was the first major appearance of the wave of anti-comedy that would go on to fuel The Eric Andre Show, The Tim & Eric Show and much of the Internet. His jokes are not meant to be “funny” in the traditional sense of the word, but rather off-putting and meta-funny. It’s funny because he keeps doing weird things that aren’t funny, making us question the nature of comedy and maybe laugh at how stupid and over the top it is.
But even if you don’t share the viewpoint of the anti-comedy pioneer, there’s a deeper level to Freddy Got Trapped , one in which the boundaries between life and art are stretched and frayed like never before. Jokes about sucking horses or drinking eau de toilette aside, Freddy is the story of an unfunny weirdo who manages to irritate Hollywood assholes into giving him millions of dollars to make TV shows, which he promptly spends on annoying people. This is the true story of Tom Green, and “Freddy’s Fingers” is both a fictional account of his journey and its outcome. Tom Green says, “The men in suits actually gave me $14 million to make this movie, and I’m going to spend it on a comedy with no jokes, no characters, and no point other than being annoying for 90 minutes. Now watch me roll around in deer guts.
Many films strive to be subversive, but few actually subvert the artistic expectations of their genre. Freddy Got Fingered yes, but 2005 audiences and critics saw Tom Green’s antics and missed the point. “It’s not even a joke” meant “this movie is bad” back in 2005, but it “sounds different” now, as some people told me in 2024. I don’t know if “Freddy Got Fingered” is actually brilliant. , but it’s much more interesting than Crash .