As most of you know, I have loved movies for my entire life, and as a result, I watch a lot of them. This obviously means that I wind up watching more than my fair share of mediocre or awful ones, despite my not-quite-best efforts to avoid this happening. But bad movies really come in two very different varieties.
The first sort of bad movie is the movie that merely fails. It doesn’t have a great concept. It has weak writing. The acting is poor. Production is off. Whatever. Movies that simply fail are extremely common. And I can usually tell within about twenty minutes whether a movie will end up being just plain bad. But this kind of movie doesn’t bother me so much.
The sort of movie that really upsets me is the one that has a great concept which is then somehow subsequently squandered in its execution. These are the movies that break my heart because they raise my hopes only to dash them in disappointment. This is the sort of movie I wish had never been made, if only so that the concept could be preserved undefiled until a competent artist could render it to its potential.
Ordinary bad movies that were never going to be good merely waste my time. But great ideas that are ruined, like opportunities missed, make the world itself seem more bleak precisely because they give me a grief-inducing glimpse of how much more beautiful it should have been.
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