Friday, January 21, 2011

Not "So Bad It's Good..." Just Bad. But Good.

I was listening to The Geekbox yesterday on my drive back home from San Diego, and (as is often the case) there were some interesting discussions about geek culture and other nerdy things. It was an older episode, so the guys were talking about Tron: Legacy. One of the podcasters (is that a word? What is the term for that?) basically came on and dropped a few "colorful metaphors" about how terrible he thought this flick was. He then proceeded to go on for a good deal of the session talking about all the things he liked about it. I thought that was pretty interesting: He HATED this movie, yet had a long list of enjoyable moments from it.

Certainly this isn't a new concept, but I've been thinking more and more lately about movies that are clearly not very good, yet are still a heckuva lot of fun. I think sometimes folks get so into picking apart a film and finding its flaws (or having a bad movie shove those flaws directly into their SOULS) that sometimes the question "yeah, but am I having fun?" never comes up. The film is poorly made, and thus TERRIBAD.

This idea was bouncing around in my brain, so I thought I'd ramble about it for a bit and see if any discussion popped up about it. Also, I wanted an excuse to post this awesome essay about the 1980 Popeye live-action film. I think that author details this idea better than I ever could.

... I still really liked Tron, too. Cheezy as it was.

3 comments:

Erick Flaig said...

Bad can very entertaining! MST3000 made a career out of it.

Commander X said...

... and quite a career it was for them, too. Most of those (hilarious) movies really were pretty unwatchable as they are; they're just fun when you laugh at 'em.

I don't know, I still believe some "bad" movies can be more (enjoyable) than the sum (quality) of their parts.

Unknown said...

have to agree with you there