Does Watching "Bad" Movies Affect How We Watch "Good" Movies?

[LilCerberus]

Strange time once, when I assumed the duration of a movie determined whether it was good or bad.

OT: Been thinking a lot about time lately.

Coming off the recent 48hr Film Project, It's got me wondering if it's the amount of time & effort put into a film.

[Kaseykockroach]

Dark Knight Rises is not a good movie. Just getting that out of the way.
That said, we obviously go into Troll 2 with different expectations than we do Detective Story. That's really all it is.

[fulci420]

I grew to appreciate the art of acting through my exploration of b pictures. Until you see truly horrible acting (and a lot of it) it is hard to appreciate how much skill and finesse many of the successful working actors posses even if it is sometimes in sub par films. At its best acting looks effortless but you need to see it at its worst to really understand how much talent it requires.
Screenwriting is similar in that you only recognize it when its really good or really terrible, in the middle it becomes invisible.

[JoeTheDestroyer]

I try to watch every movie with a clear mind.  I don't think of what the film is supposed to be, or hold it up to the standards of its predecessors, whether or not I should be in a "good" or "bad" movie state of mind, etc.  By the end, I usually have a clear reason why the movie is worth watching or not.  I don't tend to notice "bad" movie elements in good movies, or vice versa.  I just take the movie for what it is, and if I wind up enjoying for whatever reason (even if that reason is that the movie is so ridiculous that it's fun to watch), then I consider it worthwhile. 

[Flangepart]

RE: Rifftrax and the like, I find that they have done some films that I like as is. Not many, mind you...
Star Trek 2, for example. Like it fine, love the music and FX, as well as a good hammy time by Kanh and Kirk.
It's s film, that to me, does not NEED riffing to be good, and that's a part comedic deal with riffing.
A film that you can forgive its weaknesses, that's a good flick. A bad flick often needs the sugar of humor to make the lemon juice go down.
And a flim like MANOS...that takes a LOT of 'sugar.'

[Chainsawmidget]

And a flim like MANOS...that takes a LOT of 'sugar.'

That's a funny way to spell "booze". 

[the ghoul]

I find that I generally prefer "bad" movies so much that I usually cringe at the mere thought of having to sit through a "good" movie.

Funny, but true.

[Nakuyabi]

Well, I do notice we mostly use "bad movie" here to mean one of two things:

1. The special effects failures, bad writing, and bad acting due to the low budget and no-name cast and crew kept this film from being popular/financially successful.

2. Despite a nice big budget, lots of famous and talented actors, and a really top-notch crew writing, directing, and producing it, the movie was painful to watch.

Big-budget movies tend to have an advantage over the low-to-no-budget movies in being watchable simply because money is a powerful motivator for talented actors to exercise their talents. Case in point: Star Wars might not have been such a big hit if not for Alec Guiness, who didn't think much of the story and just wanted a paycheck, and Harrison Ford, who also just wanted a paycheck and really didn't like the character of Han Solo very much. A nice fat paycheck for each of them helped make the franchise the incredible success it came to be.

Low-budget movies, by contrast, are always hit-or-miss with a lot more missing than hitting for the simple reason that they don't have the money to motivate people that way. When they're good or at least fun to watch, it's almost always because the writers, directors, producers, and actors (often one person doing several of these jobs at once) managed to motivate themselves enough by some other means to turn in a good performance anyway.

Certainly, if I know the movie I'm seeing is high-budget or low-budget, I do come to it with different expectations. If it's high-budget, I expect to see a lot of that money up there on the screen: glamorous actors, lots of amazing special effects, a well-honed script from a well-known writer, and lots of talent all around. Failure in any of these areas is a lot more noticeable simply because I know the people in charge had the means to hire the best people for each of these jobs, and if people aren't doing their jobs, one has to wonder why anyone is paying them.

With low-budget flicks, I don't look so much for glamor or special effects as for effort and originality. After all, if it's made on a trifling budget, you know the cast are probably mostly friends and family members doing the writer and/or director a favor. A good story and some sincere acting can atone for a multitude of cheesy special effects, moments when the film drags, and dubious production values. If the story or the acting are too flawed to be any good, obvious effort can still go a long way toward at least making the movie entertaining to watch. ("Hey, I guess she figured out she can't act, 'cause now she's taking off her clothes!")

One effect watching "bad" (lower-budget) movies has had on me as far as watching the "good" (higher-budget) movies is cross-pollination: if some of that big budget was obviously wasted on a no-talent hack writer, a little hamming it up and chewing the scenery the way low-budget actors do when they obviously can't think what else to do can really be fun to watch. (See: Jeremy Irons in Dungeons & Dragons (2000)) Likewise, if the acting is a bit substandard, a truly good or at least quirky and off-beat story of the sort one sees in low-budget movies might still make the movie worth seeing. (Logan's Run (1976): cheesy, yes, but it's still fun to watch a tyrannical supercomputer running a dystopian society as it blows all of its circuits from losing an argument with its own mind-reading equipment.)

As for the low-budget movies, if they manage to look high-budget on a shoestring, you get the best of both worlds. With today's cheap computer graphics software, we're starting to see more of these than we used to. Monsters (2010), which looks like it had about a hundred times as much budget as it actually did, is one such movie, and Suspension (2008) managed to get some real mileage out of building a whole science fiction story around a very effective time-stopping special effect using some inexpensive video editing software.

If I get none of these benefits from a given movie, well, having had to wade through a lot of crap to find movies worth keeping has given me a certain level of pain tolerance for total garbage such that I can manage to sit through almost any movie... once. (Never again, Maladolescenza (1977), never again!) Then, of course, I get to open a can of beat-down on it in a nasty review and warn other people away from it just so I can watch more foolhardy individuals disregard my advice and duly suffer the consequences.

[Pilgermann]

I like to think I'm picky but I'll watch anything.  ANYTHING.  I actually genuinely enjoy watching Manos without the riffing.  I'd watch Sledgehammer 100 times before I'd watch say, American Beauty again. 

I think the way that b-movies affect my view of mainstream cinema is that I find much more creativity or get to see something that I'd never see in mass-marketed stuff.  There are some movies that are so advanced on a technical level and well-acted but this somehow makes flaws in the script or whatever seem much worse than a film that's shaky all-around.  I dunno, I can't always clearly explain my reasons for enjoying a movie and not enjoying another, it really boils down to whether or not I'm engaged and entertained so maybe there's no direct effect.  I love Chinatown dearly.  I love The Last Slumber Party dearly.  *shrug*

[AndyC]

It seems as though watching the "bad" movies - sometimes actually bad, sometimes just old, obscure, low-budget or weird - can hone a person's critical thinking skills for watching all movies, and provide additional insight into what makes a movie good. We can look beyond a bad movie's shortcomings and decide whether it's good for what it is. Likewise, we can strip away the window dressing from a good movie and judge how much genuine merit it has. Subjectively speaking, of course. We can find redeeming qualities in the most incompetent movies and manage to be entertained, or get bored and frustrated with a movie everybody's raving about, because the emperor really has no clothes.

Compare that to the sort of trained seal who watches a steady diet of new Hollywood movies, thinks they're all great, and won't even give a movie a chance if it isn't in colour, or it doesn't have a big star in it. Or, for that matter, compare it to the snobs who reject Hollywood blockbusters, but demand that movies be skillfully-made works of art. The bad movie fan can watch this, that and everything in between, and apply different standards where appropriate. And in the end, all that matters is that we've been entertained.

[Mofo Rising]

I'm in agreement with AndyC here. Watching bad movies is a learning experience about what makes films work (or not).

I've always had a dream that if I taught a film class (never going to happen), that I would make it a point to show movies that fail on every level.

One of my central life philosophies is that our failures are more instructive than our successes if we are willing to learn from them. "The cautious seldom err."

I would rather watch a movie that tries and fails than watch a movie that shoots for nothing. That being said, I would also rather watch a film that succeeds beautifully. But nobody ever got there by being afraid to fail.

[66Crush]

Let me put this in perspective for everybody. IMO 98% of all movies released each year are bad movies, not "bad" movies, just movies that suck! They have overblown budgets because of unnecessary and often ridiculous CGI effects just to get our attention. The media then pummels us to death with the movies we are supposed to like, especially comedies that aren't funny and dramas that feature pretty people who can't act (I call this Oscar porn, because it's Hollywood's way of keeping talented but ugly people from getting recognition). That leaves us with 2% of actual good movies.

[Nakuyabi]

That leaves us with 2% of actual good movies.

That's if it isn't 1%. The statistical bright side to all of this is that there have been something like several million movies made, so there must be multiple tens of thousands of good ones at the very least.

[Saucerman]

AndyC perfectly summed up what I was going to say clarifying my original post.  I think through not only watching, but legitimately studying trash cinema, I've developed a deeper appreciation for what actually goes into creating a film.  And with that, I think I'm going in to "good" movies with an eye for what went in to it, and coming away realizing the "good" movies have the same formulaic plots, riddled with plot holes, clunky dialogue and hammy acting as "bad" movies. 

[66Crush]

That leaves us with 2% of actual good movies.

That's if it isn't 1%. The statistical bright side to all of this is that there have been something like several million movies made, so there must be multiple tens of thousands of good ones at the very least.

I was mainly thinking of the big Hollywood movies and the few indies that some big stars will appear in for artistic merit. I think there are a lot of good movies that either never see the light of day, go directly to DVD or are released in the overseas market. With all of these movies competing for our attention some just get lost in the shuffle.