March is Oscars month, and Hollywood's millionaires gather together to congratulate each other on how great they are, while they get down to the silly business of declaring for posterity which movie is the best. So this is the perfect season to talk about bad movies vs. good movies, and no one, not even the most awesome movie industry professionals, can truly know whether a movie is good or bad.
In response to the Oscars, Criterion released a collection of 14 "Razzie"-winning films in March. These "worst of the worst" movies prove that a movie's "badness" is just as unpredictable as its "goodness."
Crash : When "Best Picture" Is Actually Scary
If you take the history of the Academy Awards into account (and ignore the subjectivity of our responses to art), most Best Picture winners are "good" films, in a buoyant, mediocre way, and most will stay that way for a long time. a state. Titanic is a good movie, I think. Chariots of Fire is also a good movie. But some movies, for cultural reasons that are rarely predictable, vacillate from "best" to "worst" or vice versa, depending on the cultural world in which we watch them. Sometimes critics, audiences, and "industry insiders" all think a movie is not only good, but the best , only to later learn that it's actually terrible. For example, Crash went from best to trash in less than 20 years.
When it was released in 2005, Crash was considered a courageous look at race in America, and as we said in 2005, it was a movie that wasn't afraid to "go there." But " Crash " is really bad -- not "okay, but not as worthy of a Best Picture win as " Brokeback Mountain " bad, but actively, undeniably, aggressively bad.
Although the visuals were the same then as they are now, few noticed how obvious, corny and amateurish 2005's " Crash " was. The characters in this movie are armchair tropes who exist to lurk in shallow, sensational, "racist" little stories and preach to us. " Crash " has a message , and that's where it goes from mediocre to abhorrent. Despite the film's promise to "keep it real," as we said in 2005, " Crash " aimed to comfort its liberal white audience, not antagonize them. The message it sends is something along the lines of "racism is bad, but you're good because you don't care". Or, as critic Clarice Lovery points out: " Crash is How to Get Away with Murder 's dad's favorite movie."
So how did " Crash " manage to mask its own mediocrity to win the Best Picture Oscar? Part of the reason was the popular non-linear narrative technique at the time, but the main reason was that the Oscars were almost entirely composed of dads from " How to Get Away with Murder ." The target market for a sensitive, mid-budget race-themed movie is also the father in " Get Out , " , he never misses an opportunity to congratulate himself on not being racist , especially on Oscar night.
Parade " and " Freddy: When Bad Movies" Become Great Movies
I've seen all of Criterion's Razzie series, and there's no way any of these movies would be highly recommended (except Gigli , which with a Rotten Tomatoes score of only 6% is still overrated), but there are two movies that stood out to me Impressive and most worthy of reconsideration: Cruising and Freddy Got Fingered.
" Cruising " is directed by William Friedkin, whose masterpieces include " The Exorcist, " " Boys in the Band " and "The French Connection. " , is a heavy-duty crime drama/black humor film set in the pre-AIDS New York BDSM community in the 1980s . Al Pacino plays a police detective who goes undercover in a leather daddy scene in order to catch a serial killer.
Parade was an intense, fast-paced, riveting thriller that critics hated. At first I thought that in that less enlightened era, film critics might find it hard to accept the film's graphic violence and perverted male-male sex, but it turns out that "Cruising" was panned by critics for another reason: it Mainly victims of peripheral events.
During the production of the film, Cruising was at the center of a now-forgotten controversy. Gay activists protested over fears the film would stereotype all gay men as hedonistic, violent fetishists. After the film was released, many critics believed that the enigmatic ending of " Cruising " and the inscrutability of the protagonist were the result of the director succumbing to outside pressure. Some critics panned the film for its depiction of gay men, while others may be homophobic.
But through the lens of 2024, without any knowledge of the controversy it once caused, viewers can consider " Cruising " on its own merits and ultimately see it as consistently unflinching, tense, and compelling. Thriller/psychological exploration. It’s a matter of opinion, but Cruising seems to go out of its way to do justice to the struggles and alienation faced by gay men at the time, while also making it clear that one small subculture is not representative of gay men as a whole. The ending of the film is not clear. The male protagonist played by Al Pacino vaguely talks about his mental journey. However, this does not seem like a timid filmmaker who is complacent. On the contrary, it better illustrates the complexity of sex, violence and identity. . Three thumbs up.
"Freddy Got Known " is a masterpiece
Tom Green's 2001 comedy (I guess) Freddy Got Fingered was met with almost as much backlash as Gigli . Critics found the film sleazy, pale, obnoxious, and not funny. As Roger Ebert said, "This movie is not bottom. This movie is not bottom. This movie is not at the bottom of the barrel. This movie doesn't deserve to be mentioned in the same bucket." ".
These are all facts, but it was also ahead of its time. Greene's gimmick was the first widespread emergence of the anti-comedy wave that would power The Eric Andre Show, The Tim and Eric Awesome Show , and much of the Internet. His little tricks should not be "funny" in the traditional sense, but should be offensive meta-funny. It's funny because he keeps doing weird things that aren't funny , making us question the nature of comedy and perhaps laugh at its silliness and excess.
But even if you don’t believe the anti-comedy vanguard, there’s something deeper about Freddy Got It that stretches and shreds the boundaries between life and art in a way that’s never been done before. Putting aside the gags about cutting horses or drinking toilet water, " Freddy " is about an unsmiling weirdo who pisses off Hollywood schmucks into giving him millions of dollars to make a TV show, which he then squanders Stories about annoying people. This is the true story of Tom Green, and " Freddy Got Stung " not only fictionalizes his journey, but also tells the result of his journey. Tom Green said: "The guy in the suit gave me $14 million to make this movie, and I was going to spend it on a movie that had no jokes, no characters, and was nothing but annoying for 90 minutes. A comedy of meaning. Now watch me roll in the guts of a deer."
Many films aim to subvert, but not many truly subvert the artistic expectations of their genre. Freddy Gets did just that, but audiences and critics in 2005 only saw Tom Green's antics and missed his larger significance. "It's not a joke" meant "This movie sucks" in 2005, but now it's "extraordinary," as someone is said to be saying in 2024. I don't know if " Freddy Got Gone " is genius, but it's a lot more interesting than " Crash ."
