We were talking in one of our classes the other day about bad or "cringe" films that are so bad they're "good"... I'm still struggling to grasp the concept. Is this essay on point?
I worship at the altar of trash, by which I mean that I am one of those cinephiles with a fondness for bad movies. Perhaps I am underselling the corpus I have in mind by calling it merely “bad,” and understating my sect’s feeling by calling it merely “fondness.” The movies my fellow-cultists and I most esteem are not just bad but incredibly, impressively terrible—scrambled, technically maladroit, incomprehensible at the level of basic plotting—and we are not just fond but obsessed, digging through piles of bric-a-brac at thrift stores in hope of uncovering forgotten VHS tapes from the eighties, scrolling to neglected corners of YouTube with the goal of alighting on some near-unwatchable monstrosity with thirty-two views and a handful of affronted comments.
But we, too, are discerning; we do not approve of just any bad movie... Neil Breen, New Yorker
Robert Orr, sec. 2.
ReplyDeleteI believe it is time you were introduced to the Sharknado series. There is a certain hilarity about films that treat themselves as having much higher quality than they obviously possess. As for the essay, I would not count cheesy movies among the same catagory as whatever horrors might be found in the back corners of youtube.
Max Lynch Section 2
ReplyDeleteI see bad movies that are so bad they are good as more of an example of how sometimes to fail at such an extreme can take just as much effort/work than performing really well. Take the movie Airplane for example. The comedy and jokes in the movie are all really bad and really corny but they flow so well with the natural dialog in the movie that it almost makes the horrible jokes funny because of how unexpected they are. I feel like the essay only slightly captures the essence of how doing something really well and doing something really terribly both take an extreme amount of effort.