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clachnaben) wrote2019-02-04 04:36 pm
Bad movies
For today on the February posting meme asked by la_dissonance my favorite piece of bad media
AHA! My sword had been turned back on me!! I must answer the question I love asking everyone else!!
Okay, I love asking people this question because I love to hear people gush about something they know is badly made but they love anyway because it’s often such a particular kind of joy, a Can you believe?? Kind of deal and I love that. Also I usually ask it as “what’s your favorite bad movie” because I don’t watch a lot of tv but I do watch A LOT of movies, and I love getting more bad movies to watch. So I have a good handful of these. (Igmore any weird formatting, I am experimenting with using markdown)
- the tv show Luther
But? You say, Luther has won a bunch of awards!! Surely it’s not BAD?
Have you watched Luther? Like, properly? Paying attention to the plot? And not thinking “Man Idris Elba is good at his job”? Because IT’S BAD and has successfully HOODWINKED people into thinking it’s good because it has a bunch of amazing actors in it. Whoever writes it is a great dialogue writer with absolutely ZERO sense of cause and effect. Things happen completely at random. There are no consequences to some actions, and then other actions have consequences completely at odds with scale or proportion. Events unfold without rhyme or reason. Characters disappear and re-appear. THE PLOT MAKES NO SENSE. EVER. there’s like four or five seasons or something and there is never a S I N G L E coherent plot in the whole thing.
However, I still love the first season because Idris Elba could make a paper bag seem like a compelling plot. And it has occasional moments of brilliance, like Luther adopting teenage victims, and his chemistry with ruth wilson’s character. They got rid of everyone I cared about so I stopped watching but trust me, it’s Bad Good.
- The Queen Latifah film “Beauty Shop”
Apparently this is a spin off/sequel to a different film called barber shop, but I didn’t know that when I watched it while studying at uni and watching the bottom of the barrel stuff on Netflix.
The plot of this movie is simple: Woman wants beauty shop, woman gets beauty shop, woman has beauty shop. A couple other things happen around it but that is the main thrust. Queen Latifah is great in it, Djimon Hounsou plays Queen Latifah’s hot neighbour/electrician/piano-playing love interest. Kevin Bacon is in it?????? There’s an extremely weird metaphor about racial integration when her white friend comes to work for her and a different set of weird metaphors about queer people when she employs a guy. (To be clear: good, welcoming, nice metaphors, just also super weird because it was the early 2000s and everything had to be a joke) It is an extremely inexplicable movie, with a really cheesy and badly thought out plot but is SO much fun and like an easy balm on my brain.
- Thor: The Dark World
Before Ragnarok I thought this was the best thor NO LIE. okay well some lie because I recognise it is Not That Great and is like 70% space magic techno babble but it contains natalie portman being a badass, and many many funny jokes, and also a really good cgi battle scene in greenwich. The loki dying in the dark world scene is extremely E X T R A and bad and so much of this film is just way too extra and way too much space magic. Frigga’s knife fight is worth it though. I like it a lot even though it is p r e t t y bad.
And last but MOST not least:
Kate and Leopold
One the one hand, Kate is a traditional romcom heroine with a high-powered magazine job who doesn’t have time for love. On the other hand, her crazy ex (played by Sabretooth from XMen) has discovered TIME TRAVEL by ACCiDENT through a WORM HOLE in the BROOKLYN BRIDGE and Leopold, His Grace the 3rd Duke of Albany, accidentally travels to now. Or well, not now, 2001. And then the movie is about 30% romcom stuff and the OTHER 70% is Leopold in a time-travel fish out of water comedy. The movie makes no sense. The script makes no sense, the plot makes no sense, Meg Ryan’s character doesn’t seem to even like Leopold (played by HUGH JACKMAN, I might add) at all but still decides to travel back in time TO BEFORE THE INVENTION OF PENICILLIN with him. This movie is amazing purely for the experience of saying to yourself what the fuck? what? the ? fuck?
Honourable mentions:
- Jupiter Ascending (many people have commented on this, but, of course, the bees)
- Dangerous Beauty (woman in old timey Venice becomes prostitute, loves every second of it, saves the city of Venice, later gets accused of a witch and all her clients love her too much to let her be a witch)
- Pacific Rim (obviously amazing in many ways but uh the bit with the space sword is Too Much and we must all learn to live with that)
- The Magnificent Seven (shoot-em-up action movie PRETENDING to be a beloved western, Ethan Hawke has a stabby boyfriend)
- Last Holiday (another Queen Latifah film made of joy and a bad plot).
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