
The Cinema of Inadvertence, or Why I Like Bad Movies - tintinnabula
https://hedgehogreview.com/issues/eating-and-being/articles/the-cinema-of-inadvertence-or-why-i-like-bad-movies
======
goodmachine
I feel like I've seen this particular movie a million times. Here is the plot:

Evidently-educated fellow enjoys trashy movies, seeks to justify tastes at
some length (>5K words) with reference to usual movies (Plan 9), usual
critical touchstones (Hume, Foucault, Sontag). In the final scene, no firm
conclusions are drawn, and the author wanders off. We are secretly afraid he
will return some day, perhaps to ponder further.

You'd think the immodestly-named "Institute for Advanced Critical Studies"
would prefer a new take on a stale discussion, or indeed have an editor on
hand. Evidently not.

~~~
coldtea
I feel like I've seen this particular comment a million times. Here's the
recap:

Facile dismissal, no content.

~~~
justin66
Right, like this:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17418864](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17418864)

~~~
coldtea
Yes, like this...

Did you think that me having made the same thing magically absolves others?

~~~
justin66
No, I think your posts are often unnecessarily unpleasant and I thought the
obvious hypocrisy here might cause a brief moment of self-awareness.

~~~
coldtea
> _I think your posts are often unnecessarily unpleasant_

Some might be. By generally I go at length to explain my points, even
devolving into long threads and summing up things to make my point better
understood.

And while I might characterise some person in the news or some industry
figure, I never name call others in a discussion. I try to rephrase what I
wrote to make my point clearer, in sub-thread upon sub-thread, even when I am
called names. Thought a certain "fuck the poor" mentality in some comments
does grind my gears.

It doesn't help that in usually to the left, continental European, and
conservative side of things, which it's triply unpopular with a large part of
HN demographic. Though in regular programming/tech things I'm fairly vanilla
(though people have thought of me as an Apple shill).

That said, I had a look at your comments to see if I rubbed you off the wrong
way in some thread. Are these representative of the non "unnecessarily
unpleasant" way we should be writing?

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21225106](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21225106)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21026695](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21026695)

------
kodablah
> We bad-movie watchers have our own anticriteria, the sorts of badness we
> prefer.

As a fellow bad-movie aficionado, I've narrowed my taste to prefer bad movies
that the makers are very proud of and defend until their dying days.
Passionate low quality movies, especially ripoffs, are uniquely appealing to
me which is why I love Italian cinema from the 70s and 80s (not to mention the
other, often more exploitative Italian genres of the same era). The other
niche I've found enjoyable are those makers who know they are low budget and
do the best with what they have (Golan/Globus, Charles Band, Roger Corman,
etc). Both of these types of bad movies are so prolific that you'll never
watch them all, and they are what keep me using Prime and Tubi much more
frequently than Netflix.

------
DanielBMarkham
This was well-written, and I enjoyed a huge hunk of it, especially since I
also love bad movies. I felt as if the author was getting somewhere.

And then. And then we got to meandering about mid-text. Like watching a blind
pig in the backyard looking for an acorn, I was rooting for the author and
felt we would get somewhere useful at some time.

I did not feel that we arrived there. Or rather, perhaps, we were so befuddled
by the time we revisited the author and his dad that all was left was some
general feeling of pathos that loving bad movies invokes. This is a clear
thesis that did not require us visiting the myriad places we visited along the
way.

Bad movies show us we all suck. Everybody makes mistakes. When a life, or a
movie, is done with passion, sometimes that suckage transcends mere badness
and leaves us all a bit wiser and happier.

I'm glad I read it, but holy hell it needed a better editor.

~~~
cobbzilla
Maybe it was the literary form, like “Editorial of Inadvertence”? Emulation of
the subject would be a silly “meta”.

------
jmmcd
> Before science fiction became respectable—indeed, inescapable—any fan could
> still tell you that Robert Heinlein and Theodore Sturgeon, and before them
> Stanley Weinbaum, wrote circles around Arthur C. Clarke or Isaac Asimov.

Asimov has obvious technical shortcomings as a writer but his strengths more
than compensate. Meanwhile much of Heinlein is so bad it's unbearable. Argue
if you like, but don't claim that this opinion is unanimous.

~~~
jmilloy
I was curious about this, too. Was there a time when that was a more or less
unanimous opinion? Maybe "wrote circles around" is meant to be a very specific
judgement?

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coldtea
> _It takes some amount of privilege to take part in the conversation that he
> describes. A person needs literacy and free time, for starters_

Well, duh. We don't consider someone competent in something if they don't have
basic skills and put the hours in to study/try it. So why would art criticism
(whether professionally or to have a "good taste" as a consumer of art) be
different?

If it's a privilege, it's the same kind of privilege required to be anything:
a cook, a runner, a historian, a programmer, etc. Yes, you need to have time
to do those things, and for most you also need literacy. Heck, you also need
the same time and literacy to be an musician, a novelist, etc -- so it only
makes sense it would need time to understand the craft and recognize good
ones.

Someone working their ass off because they're poor, might never be able to
e.g. read enough books, study how the genres work, read about their history,
and ultimate develop a good taste in literature.

But that's a problem we should fix at the equality/free time front. Not a
problem with having a taste in art requirements being "snobbish".

~~~
jmilloy
It is privilege not because it requires time, but because it generally
requires _free_ time, outside of how you make your living. You can't
apprentice as someone who consumes art.

As for snobbishness, you have it backwards: no one is saying that snobbishness
is required to have good taste, but that the privilege required to develop
good taste results in good taste being, or being labeled as, snobbish.

~~~
coldtea
> _It is privilege not because it requires time, but because it generally
> requires free time, outside of how you make your living._

That's the case for all kinds of things that are not jobs but people still
want to have an opinion on.

Besides, your very distinction is based on the idea that a job someone happens
to work is the same as the field they want to work or have an opinion on.
Which is not always (even rarely) the case.

If I work at McDonalds but aspire to be a programmer, surfer, rapper,
journalist, writer, director, whatever getting competence to criticize/have an
opinion about that other field (or, even more so, land a programming gig) also
requires that I have a free time from "how I make my living".

> _As for snobbishness, you have it backwards: no one is saying that
> snobbishness is required to have good taste, but that the privilege required
> to develop good taste results in good taste being, or being labeled as,
> snobbish._

And my point is, there's no "privilege" or no more "privilege" than any other
endeavour one needs to spend time to learn and understand. Everything takes
time and effort to achieve, why would "good taste" be any different?

Is being a surgeon "snobbish" because you need to study to become one? Plus
unlike learning about art, it takes not just free time, but decade of
attending classes, plus lots of money.

------
rapnie
In Belgium and The Netherlands we have The Night of Repulsion. Very funny, and
successful.. look at the Wikipedia article for some more candidate repulsive
flicks:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nacht_van_de_Wansmaak](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nacht_van_de_Wansmaak)

------
chha
Mandatory mention: Rifftrax and Mystery Science Theater 3000. They opened my
eyes to truly bad movies, and have provided hours of entertainment since
discovering them via a friend 15 years ago.

~~~
michelpp
There's also The Film Crew which is Mike, Kevin (Servo/Bobo) and Bill (Brain
Guy/Crow) doing their thing. Hi-Keeba!

------
carapace
Er, Phil Christman really doesn't get "A Wrinkle in Time".

Somehow the page opened for me at the point, halfway through, where he starts
crapping on the movie adaptation of "A Wrinkle in Time" for what seem, to me,
to be really weird and deeply personal reasons.

Aaaaanyhow, as a fan of bad sci-fi movies (I just watched "Galaxina" last
night, gosh what a turd of a film!) I gotta insist that you can't read too
much into them.

Maybe future psycho-historians will glean important insights into the human
condition from "Escape from Galaxy 3" (Oraclon! King of the Night!) but I
don't think the Institute for Advanced Critical Studies will.

------
deepaksurti
The list of worst films ever made. [0]

In here at 8.17, is an India film that I watched given that it was a remake of
an earlier cult classic in Hindi cinema.

The remake is so bad that I actually liked it!!! I then realized that some of
these worst movies need to be watched with a different lens, the movie I
referred to I watched with a humor lens comparing it with the classic, that
made it a laughter riot, which is why I liked it.

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_films_considered_the_w...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_films_considered_the_worst)

------
asjw
Bad movies without mentioning Troma entertainment movies (like the iconic
toxic avenger) or "Il bosco 1" (evil clutch in English) or Peter Jackson's bad
taste?

------
_bxg1
That was more than I bargained for; I usually don't have the attention span
for an hour-long read on the internet, but it kept me engaged.

------
PaulWaldman
What if the movie is intentionally bad? How enjoyable is satire like Army of
Darkness?

~~~
josteink
> What if the movie is intentionally bad? How enjoyable is satire like Army of
> Darkness?

Army of Darkness intentionally bad? What what what?!? That movie is _fucking
fantastic_.

The only bad thing here is that the director got way bigger budget than he was
used to, and really didn’t know how to spend it properly.

The end result is still great though.

~~~
coldtea
> _Army of Darkness intentionally bad? What what what?!? That movie is fucking
> fantastic._

And it's still intentionally campy and crudely made.

Btw, the magic words are "Klaatu barada nikto" \-- which is a funny reference
to a sci-fi movie.

------
tus88
But would you sit through Transformers?

~~~
Broken_Hippo
Yes. All of them, and will watch subsequent ones. Oh, they are bad, sure. But
it doesn't matter as they are entertaining and they aren't _that_ bad. The
actors aren't horrible, the sound is good, and the story is good enough to get
you to the next scene - and when it isn't, there is cool stuff to look at. The
bad stuff doesn't really distract in the moment, while one is suspending
disbelief, so it works out.

It is entertaining. I don't always need a "good" movie, just entertainment. A
lot of movies are like this, and that's OK.

------
danielovichdk
Is there a list somewhere, so I can see where I could start to induldge into
this fascinating hobby. Thx

~~~
daodedickinson
RedLetterMedia.com

~~~
smnc
This series in particular: [http://redlettermedia.com/best-of-the-worst-
archive/](http://redlettermedia.com/best-of-the-worst-archive/)

