Podcast

Sunday, September 16, 2012

Beginning Tomorrow: Truly Terrible Movies Week…

Recently, we’ve a long run of really-low-quality Hollywood blockbusters, but at the same time we’ve had a rising culture of movie-reviewer intimidation, coming from three directions:
  • From studios, who have always tried but are now succeeding more than ever.
  • From entertainment editors, who are afraid that if the reviewer pisses anybody off that the paper will just cut the section altogether
  • And, most disturbingly, from fanatic trolls who have started mass-emailing death threats to any reviewer who lowers the Rotten Tomatoes ranking of their favorite movies. 
As a result, even artless sludge like The Hunger Games adaptation and Dark Knight Rises get sky-high rankings on Rotten Tomatoes, just because they aren’t terrible. 

So all this begs the question: Just how bad does a blockbuster have to be to get savaged by the critics these days?  You need to make a movie that fails on absolutely every level, that’s physically painful to sit through...You need to make John Carter and Green Lantern. 

I rented these movies this summer and watched each of them with my jaw on the floor.  I realized that I had discovered two timeless masterpieces of awfulness.  Since they both failed in similar ways, I’m going to spend this week drawing lessons on what not to do from this gruesome twosome. 

(Quick note: fans of movies like these tend to attack critics from two sides, either saying, “Your can’t criticize it if you haven’t read the books!” or, “You’re only criticizing it because you won’t accept that it’s not exactly like the book!”  So allow me to say that I have read and enjoyed the source material for both movies, but I’m only a casual fan in both cases.)

So we’ll begin tomorrow with the biggest revelation I had while watching these, which is applicable to every type of movie… 

6 comments:

James Kennedy said...

This is going to be the best week ever.

Hans said...

I'm looking forward to this week's posts too, although I actually thought John Carter was pretty fun to sit through in the theater. Certainly it had major flaws, but I thought the biggest flaw was its marketing. It really seemed to play like a pre-Star Wars science fiction epic and was enjoyable on that level.

Harvey Jerkwater said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Harvey Jerkwater said...

Autopsies of failed work are so very helpful. "That book/movie/whatever was terrible! Oh, that's why? Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. That'd be a big problem for any work to have. A big flaw that, uh, can be, uh, found in...my...latest...uh... (cough) I'll be right back." [Runs off to computer, muttering profanity]

j.s. said...

I'm kind of hoping you'll soon catch up with some of the better films you missed last year too like TAKE SHELTER. And of course I'd love to see what rulebook posts result from a screening of THE MASTER -- or perhaps just your meddler revision.

Matt Bird said...

Okay, J.S., I admit I failed to watch "Take Shelter", but how about you-- did you sample "The Sandbaggers"?