Skip to main content

Posts

Showing posts from May, 2012

"Good movie" vs. "entertaining movie"

Have you ever noticed how the concepts of "good movie" and "entertaining movie" seem to be completely independent of each other? It's not even unusual to see movie reviewers on the internet post or say things like "it was quite entertaining; don't get me wrong, it was a bad movie, but I still liked it." (For example, the latest instance of almost exactly this that I have seen was a review of the movie Battleship .) This kind of statement feels completely contradictory to me. Now, don't get me wrong. There are two kinds of "enjoying a bad movie": Enjoying a movie because it's so bad, and enjoying a movie regardless of it being (allegedly) bad. I'm not talking about the first type of movie here. Movies like Plan 9 or The Room can be enjoyed because they are so hilariously bad. It's just outright amusing to see, for example, toy flying saucers being dangled from clearly visible fishing lines, an actor who's ve