What's up with bad movies?

I have been informed that Napoleon Dynamite is only funny if you smoke a pound a weed beforehand.

I thought "A Mighty Wind" was hilarious.

I love those mocku-mentaries though.

I haven't seen Napoleon Dynamite but I've heard both that is is terrific and it is awful.

Depends on how old you are, I think. "Napolean Dynamite" seems strictly for the young college set altho' my freshman didn't like it. His buddies did, tho.

Napoleon Dynamite is great if you grew up in a small town in the Midwest any time in the last 30 years.
It brings back memories of those boring days riding the school bus and eating tater tots at school lunch while Gramma was off riding her motorcycle in the gravel pits.

Mighty Wind was OK but not nearly as funny as "Best in Show." Not everyone is familiar with 60's folk singers but we all know about dog shows.

I'm curious if these two movies are examples of bad movies drewdad has seen, what are the great movies are he's seen? Could be there are those on the boards who don't like those movies.

I wonder if Ed Wood deserves a permanent thread here.

I absolutely agree that taste in movies varies greatly; these two just completely missed the mark with me. And I leave room for the idea that I just didn't get 'em.



We used to see a lot of movies; having a baby reined us in quite a bit.

Movies I really enjoyed? (Stuff I'd watch over again, partial list, no particular rhyme or reason as to why I thought of these)

Matrix; Monsters, Inc.; Lilo & Stitch; Adaptation; American Beauty; Groundhog Day; (That Eastwood movie w/ Sean Penn, Kevin Bacon, Tim Robbins); The Unforgiven; The Shawshank Redemption; Office Space; Sling Blade; A Fish Called Wanda; Monte Python and the Holy Grail.


Movies that were OK, but wouldn't want to see again:

Most thrillers (Bourne movies, for example); Rushmore; Bridget Jones; Troy; How to Lose a Guy in Ten Days; Master and Commander; Monte Python and the Meaning of Life.

"A Mighty Wind" was brilliant, but maybe you had to around during the folk music era to enjoy it. Besides, anything with Eugene Levy and Catherine O'Hara gets my vote anyday...

Loved A Mighty Wind. Honked and snorted all the way through it. The interviews about how Eugene picked his hair just slayed me.

That's a fairly respectable list of good to great films -- I guess it's the title of your discussion that's puzzling. There's always been a plethora of really bad films (ones that the critics and audiences reject), in the Golden Age, they were called B movies. I don't find it's much different then but one doesn't see B movies repeated (many of them were allowed to deteriorate are are forever lost). With cable, broadcast TV and DVD, one can expose themselves to all sorts of questionable fare from the past fifty years. The way to avoid that is to take some time and read reviews, including user reviews, say, on IMDb. You can't go by the clerk at the counter at the rental store. NetFlix offers links to critics and user reviews before one adds the film to their queue. In the end, it's merely subjective whether one person believes a film is bad or not.

That's kinda my point. I did read reviews on these films. And I like quirky movies (Memento comes to mind).

But in IMO the pacing was slow and the characters were unlikeable, and the plots nearly non-existent.

Ebert's ratings were mediocre; maybe I need to place more faith in him.

What's funny about a farmer randomly shooting a cow with a shotgun? I mean, it's not like they built it up and then he just cracks; the guy just randomly shoots his cow for no reason.

I've found that if you select three movie critics that seem to always appeal to your taste and trust all three to guide you away from mediocre films, you're unlikely to miss any you want to see and they can keep you from wasting two hours of your time. Quirky doesn't always mean great -- they can be unusually bad or just not to your taste.

I've run into many people who say they love comedy but can't wrap their heads around a farce or anything remotely absurd. While I'm not touting Napoleon Dynamite as a tour-de-force, I'm puzzled as to why you seem to know that this farmer shoots the cow for no reason or why his motivation is cinematically required, especially to be funny.

I think this scene was there to illustrate the remoteness of Napoleon's world (especially culturally) and give you another framework (not just our own) within which to assess Napoleons "weirdness." (I mean, in that context, is he really that weird?) I felt all along that the farmer had his own good reason for shooting that cow, so compelling and obvious to him that there was no reason to wait for the school bus to pass by him.

The humor, really, had nothing to do with the cow being shot, but with the uncomfortable feeling of the school children seeing it, not knowing why, and the imaginably wild speculation that must ensue. By not making the reason evident, the filmmaker has put you right into that bus with the children.

I can enjoy a good farce. "Noises Off" comes to mind; one of funniest movies I've ever seen. (I was fortunate enough to catch it in the theater).

But this reminded me more of a movie about depression. Everyone walks around with flat affects. The never truly seem involved with anything. They have no passion. Napoleon dances at the end, but it was too formulaic for me.


Funny is definitely in the eye of the beholder. As for motivation, I'm not saying that one couldn't make a movie that is just a series of random events, even individually funny ones, but I think you'd have a hard time making it more than the sum of its parts. Think "America's Funniest Home Videos." One or two good bits, with a lot of padding. Do you really want to watch it over again?

Being absurdly funny is hard. Think Steven Wright. Not many comedians can do what he does. And, admittedly, not everyone likes him. The filmmaker just missed the mark with me.

Finally, a very good assessment of why someone doesn't like a film in understandable terms. The test of a good comedy is whether it makes one laugh or not and not just sporadically. Of course, there are comedies that are more subtle and are looking to make one smile to themselves over the protagonist's situations. The point is usually that life has all sorts of pitfalls to leap over and some fall in the hole time and time again before they realize, "Life is just one goddam thing after another and death is a Cabaret."

Part of what affects my opinion about films is the back story behind it.

Napolean Dynamite was made on less than $200,000 and had to meet the Mormon code of conduct. Hence no swearing, sex or violence. For a very low budget film with these restrictions it was one of the best. I have certainly seen $200 million films that were worse.

I think the key to liking Napolean is in being able to relate to him. This is a "coming of age" film of which we have seen lots over the years; "American Graffiti", "Pretty in Pink", "Ferris Bueler's Day Off". I didn't think American Graffiti was that great but I couldn't relate to it being a teenager growing up in the Midwest at the time. College aged kids like Napolean because they aren't that far from the "geek in HS" in their lives.

I probably liked the film because I could relate to the isolation of growing up in a small town and the absurdity that goes with it.

As for the cow incident, I am sure I see it a lot differently then others that didn't grow up in farm country. The kids on the bus were "town kids" in my opinion. A farm kid would know all about death and the need to get rid of animals. The absurdity comes from the difference in the farmer's matter of factness and failure to see how anyone could react to something that "needed to be done" followed by the over reaction from the kids.

If you thought this was a bad movie Brandon the sublety of it passed you by.

Unless you meant Ed Wood THE PERSON he was a pretty oddball character with no discernable film making talent, but the Depp/Landua film of his life was a masterpiece.

I think, especially without title quotation marks, that Brandon meant the director. He is the uncrowned king of bad movies and the comedic biopic certainly exploits what is essentially true. Having hung around the LA, Hollywood sci-fi crowd in the Fifties and Sixties, I met all of those people including Vampira. The movie is a classic and not just a cult classic. Wood himself was more than just odd -- he was the antithesis of the "creative" neurotic.

I love the way you phrase your answers LW