Why I Love Bad Movies
We all consumed a lot of content in 2020. For better or for worse, 2020 is the year that the screen won. What’s the point of fighting an uphill battle against our blue-light-glowing devices when they’re now our only window to the outside world? If your entire work, social, and cultural life is online now, there’s no battle to be fought. The screens have won.
However, there is still a battle, one that each and every one of us fights daily, probably multiple times a day. The choice is no longer to stream or not to stream, but in an online world with so many choices, so many platforms, and so much incredible work out there to be seen, how’s a girl to choose? When I have everything from my childhood favorites on Disney+ to the prestige television of HBO Max at my fingertips, decision fatigue can turn the activity of the evening from enjoying a movie with dinner to spending an hour toggling between the tabs of every streaming platform I’ve successfully secured a password to.
Before the pandemic (a phrase I loathe to use but please don’t make me un-ironically say “the before times”), I had an arts and culture spreadsheet. I tracked when new movies were coming out in theaters, the releases I was most excited for on each streaming platform, and opening nights of plays and musicals I wanted to buy tickets to. Yes, I am very Type A, and to answer your second question, I’m also a libra. This spreadsheet was actually very helpful and kept me pretty constantly entertained when I would come home from long days of work and on those oh too rare full days off.
By mid-March, this spreadsheet was rendered affectively useless. I was caught up on all my favorite shows, there were no opening nights to look forward to, and I had nothing but time. Since then, I have watched some truly phenomenal film and television from the comfort of my couch. Some, like The Queen’s Gambit on Netflix, I ate up with the rest of the world and, like all the best TV shows, generated interesting and insightful conversation. It also provided comfort- it was intense, but relatively low stakes (no one’s gonna die playing chess), and I readily fell in love with the characters. The scene where all of Beth’s friends call her before her final match against Borgov lives rent free in my mind. Others, like Soul, Pixar’s latest high concept emotional rollercoaster on Disney+, while undoubtedly a work of art and worthy of a careful and attentive watch, left me longing for a comfortable seat in a movie theater. I don’t own a TV, and seeing the beautifully rendered images of The Great Beyond and, for that matter, of New York City, on my 13-inch (read: very dirty) laptop screen was, to no fault of the filmmakers, disappointing.
But between the golden age of bingeable television and exciting would-be blockbusters, I found myself repeatedly gravitating towards the same type of content. While I definitely had phases of leaning into the comfort of my favorite romantic comedies (since the pandemic began I have watched Plus One three times, Palm Springs twice, and When Harry Met Sally and Pride and Prejudice I don’t know how many times), or childhood favorites (my summer was defined by re-reading and re-watching the entire Harry Potter series… and swiftly kicking JKR off the pedestal she’s occupied in my mind since I was seven), I couldn’t help myself from seeking out the only type of content that would never disappoint me. Films that had no nostalgia to live up to, no award chatter to turn my critical brain into high gear, no social media hype to put me in fear of disappointing my friends’ glowing recommendations. And that, my friend, is bad movies.
Bad movies were a balm for my soul during times when even my favorite sitcoms couldn’t make me laugh. There’s something delightfully cathartic and, I admit, a little bit schadenfreude fueled, about watching a flop unfold before my eyes. I don’t mean films like Hulu’s The Happiest Season, which could be described as enjoyable but kind of disappointing, or anything that is genuinely offensive. I mean the type of movies that are written, acted, and edited so poorly that it borders on camp. These people had to know that what they were creating was garbage… right?
A prime of example of this is the Netflix duology After and After We Collided. The films follow Tessa, a freshman in college and all around good girl, as she begins a romantic entanglement with sexy British bad boy Hardin. For what it’s worth, these movies are based on the books of the same name by Anna Todd, which are based on her fan fiction stories about Harry Styles. It doesn’t really matter, but the knowledge brings me joy.
These movies aren’t just bad, they’re atrocious. The writing is just one cliche after another and the acting does absolutely nothing to elevate it. I honestly don’t want to say too much because I really cherished the experience of going into this with almost no expectations and finding that what little knowledge I did have was exceeded- it was worse than I could have imagined.
Another horrible film I’ve enjoyed recently was Holidate, Netflix’s all-purpose holiday season romance that premiered earlier this year. Playing on one of romantic comedy’s all time greatest tropes, fake lovers to real lovers (I see you Bridgerton and To All The Boys… fans), it follows Sloane, a cynical young professional, and Jackson, an, I shit you not, AUSTRALIAN PROFESSIONAL GOLFER, through their pact to be each other’s dates for every major holiday. Naturally, one thing leads to another, and the film ends with a public romantic proclamation, another rom-com staple. I know a lot of people did not feel that this movie crossed over from just bad to enjoyably bad, but I loved every second of this movie. Not to mention it gave us Kristin Chenoweth in the role she was born to play, the slutty aunt.
My final bad movie watch of 2020 was a time-sensitive and ambitious project. It came to my attention a few days ago that all five films in The Twilight Saga would be leaving Amazon Prime today, and for me this only meant one thing. I had to watch all five before New Year’s Eve. Over the course of three days, I revisited the stories that I was briefly but intensely obsessed with for about a year in middle school. For those of you who are not millennial young women or didn’t know any teenage girls from approximately 2005 to 2012, Twilight and it’s three sequels (the final chapter of which was divided into two for film) follows Bella Swan, a very average but also not-your-average girl who falls in love with an 100+ year old vampire named Edward Cullen. These books and their film adaptations are, without a doubt, bad, and I actually do have many qualms with the moralistic undertones of them (the subliminal pro-abstinence and anti-abortion messages of the Twilight books can be unpacked in a later blog post), there is something incredibly fun about watching a young Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattison, two actors who have come into their own in the indie scene as well as in their fair share of blockbusters since the release of these films, try to navigate the clunky writing and cardboard cutouts of characters they were dealt. Not to mention all the other random A-listers that somehow got involved in these projects- from Dakota Fanning and Lee Pace to multiple Olivier-Award winner Michael Sheen, OBE, and now Academy-Award Winner Rami Malek. What a wild ride it is, watching all those talented folks pretend to be vampires. Actors are truly a different breed.
I realize that all the bad movie recommendations I have procured for this list are romances, as that is my pop culture area of expertise, but every genre has their own train wrecks, and I encourage you in this, the year of our lord, 2021, to seek out the worst movies in your genre of choice. After a year that really can only be described as The Worst, take solace in some spectacular failures. Find comfort in their resilience. And, honestly, just laugh at something for an hour or two.