We Love Our Sucky Movies, But They Shouldn't Suck Too Much

Are you seriously making fun of my movie, biatch?! 

 This is going to be a short, fun post*, mainly because:

a) It was my "bad" workweek this week, which happens every other week. And by "bad," I really mean "good," because lots of freelance is a wonderful little pony that I will never put down. Still, work = fried brain.

b) My blog posts are devolving into tl;dr.

c) Who doesn't like fun!

The cover of the NY Post caught my eye at House of Bagels this morning:

As you can see, Lou Lumenick didn't really care for Movie 43, awarding it "minus four stars." As I waited for my toasted rye salt with a schmear, I perused his divine excoriation of the film, which boasts a rather astonishing roster of A-list actors (WTF, Kate Winslet and Richard Gere?!) and 12 directors, including the usually reliable Peter Farrelly, Griffin Dunne, Bob Odenkirk (no!), and Brett Ratner (ah, now this is starting to make sense).

The first 45 seconds of the movie's trailer should tell you pretty much what you need to know if you can't sit through the entire clip:

At first I thought maybe the Post reviewer was being especially crabby — it's been really cold here in New York, and everyone's got serious cabin fever that's upping the cantankerosity ante big time. But Movie 43 isn't faring too well on Rotten Tomatoes, which assigned it an indisputably rotten 5 percent**. Richard Roeper calls this movie "the Citizen Kane of awful"; a reviewer from the Toronto Star labels it "the biggest waste of talent in cinema history." You can't argue with the Tomatometer.

Look, it's January. This is traditionally the worst month of the year in terms of movie quality, and more-discriminating film buffs usually spend the first portion of the year catching up on all the Oscar nominees they missed. Movie 43 is warming exactly no one's cockles — except for the Washington Post, the lone "fresh tomato" that gushes that this "near masterpiece of tastelessness ... elevates the art form of gross-out comedy to a new height."

Yet I'm always fascinated when a movie TOTALLY bombs. Film is highly subjective, and when one manages to universally insult every critic and average Joe in existence, that's a remarkable achievement. But when does a bad movie become a really bad movie? What makes the difference?

You can't count box office flops that really aren't that bad to begin with, especially if they eventually ascend to cult-favorite status and are actually pretty good and spawn passages that their (usually male) fans throw around verbatim at parties and card games and barbecues. Office Space, Better Off Dead, and The Big Lebowski fit neatly into this category. If you've never quoted The Dude or told anyone you want your two dollars, you haven't lived.

Then there are the "entertainingly bad movies" that Lou Lumenick references: critically panned films that still somehow find an eager audience in the DVD and premium-cable market because of their inherent camp value. Evil Dead II with a dashing young Bruce Campbell, R. Kelly's Trapped in the Closet (I got sucked into this one a few weeks ago on IFC, of all places), and The Wicker Man (the Nic Cage remake, not the rather well-regarded original) can't be considered "good" by any stretch of the imagination — but man, are they GOOD.

There are also those inexplicably good/bad movies, films that are neither especially inspired nor campy, but yet still show enough heart to be sufficiently redemptive. Booty Call — a pleasant surprise I snuck into with my boyfriend in 1997 after seeing critical darling Donnie Brasco — qualifies, as does the ridiculously sweet and affecting Just Friends with Ryan Reynolds and Anna Faris. I also can't quit National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation. Against my better judgment, it's become an annual holiday staple. Clark Griswold means well, and you just have to go with it.

The most interesting bad movies, though, are the ones that evoke a collective groan from everyone on Earth but somehow still resonate with you and maybe one lone, generally venerated movie critic. That A.O. Scott likes Freddy Got Fingered as much as I do, even though absolutely no one else did — well, that's validation. I'm still waiting to get in sync with the notoriously contrarian Armond White and confess our shared love for a universally loathed cinematic crapterpiece. The stars haven't aligned yet. I know it's going to happen.

I haven't seen Movie 43, but I've seen the trailer and read enough of the reviews, so I'm comfortable in pulling a Spike Lee and saying it doesn't meet any of the above benchmarks for a "good" bad movie. It's not good-disguised-as-bad, it's not campy bad, it doesn't have a heart (or soul), and I haven't figured out what adult audience this would resonate with. That's the difference.

But films like Movie 43 aren't without social value. Art constantly gets reassessed, so I'm curious how something like this may be viewed in 20 or 50 or 100 years. I don't think much will change in this case, but you never know.

We also get through life easier if we assign a proper purpose to all things, even the extraneous crap that gets stuck in the cinematic colander, so I'm officially on the record as a fan of legitimately bad movies — even if I (probably) won't ever watch them. Clever viewer comments provide much-needed comic relief at the end of a long workweek (courtesy of The A.V. Club: "Movie, 43; audience, 0").

We also get to keep reading fabulously scathing reviews. I derive as much pleasure, if not more, browsing reviews of movies that received a "0 percent" rating on Rotten Tomatoes as I do viewing the "100 percent" ones. Please go slumming this weekend, Anthony Lane. Movie 43 is waiting, and so are we.

Bad Movies That Prove I'm Not a Movie Snob Because I Like Them and They're Really Entertaining So STFU

• Freddy Got Fingered (11 percent critical rating on Rotten Tomatoes)

• Martin & Orloff (47 percent)

• Half Baked (29 percent)

• Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (50 percent)

• National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation (63 percent — this now has a "fresh" rating)

• Just Friends (42 percent)

• Broken Lizard dumbassery: Super Troopers (35 percent), Beerfest (40 percent)

• Booty Call (25 percent); also favorably reviewed by Roger Ebert

• Most Farrelly Brothers' vehicles, other than Movie 43: Kingpin (50 percent) and Me, Myself and Irene (48 percent), as well as the more critically acclaimed Something About Mary (83 percent) and Dumb and Dumber (63 percent)

*Not short after all, but fun!

**Rotten Tomatoes isn't an ideal statistical barometer, for a variety of reasons, but it's the aggregator we've got for now.

The Day I Ran Away — And Why We Keep Running

There are some boxes you should never open (we know what happened to Brad Pitt in Se7en), but Pandora's box of music-genome goodness is always worth exploring. Thanks to the Internet service's wondrous algorithms, Bob Seger's "Against the Wind" commandeered my Eagles channel the other day while I was plodding along on a freelance project. It's a song I heard a zillion times growing up, but I never listened to it very carefully because, well, I was 9.

I paid more attention to Bob's forewarning his time around. I realize now that he had been graciously offering us a prescient salve for life's difficulties, a preemptive strike that I soundly rejected for the flashier ideologies of Duran Duran, early INXS, and Lipps Inc. (ROI on "Funkytown" = zero). Seger's words finally hit me in their intended metaphorical way (ZOMG LIFE GETS HARDER AND MEANER AS YOU GET OLDER!), as well as in their more literal sense — if I have to run against even a slight breeze up whatever mountain exists in Tuxedo, N.Y., in June's Spartan Race, I'm screwed.

I started thinking about what drives people to run in marathons and in the more frivolous "adventure races" I enter on occasion, and all the running against the wind we do in our daily lives, and all the running we do in general. We run away from stuff — crappy jobs, confrontation, relationships (some of which we shouldn't have run from, others that rightly spurred Usain Bolt-like sprints). We run to stuff: to friends for advice, to the grocery store, to the hills.

In fact, an international consortium dedicated to promoting higher standards of living and social progress worldwide through entertainingly useless memes recently produced the graphic shown below, which concisely explains what people around the globe run to and what they run from. You'll have to click on the source link to see a magnified version, because I need to run to The Learning Annex's next image-resizing class.

Anyway. Many of us regularly run amok (at least I do), run our mouths (at least I do), run ourselves ragged (OK, I'm stopping), run interference (for friends, colleagues, partners, children), run for office (not me, but maybe you). Some people run with the bulls, though I might not be able to be friends with you if you do that, because that's just mean. Despite our best intentions, we can't stop running with the devil, running afoul of the law (let's talk about that over a beer sometime), running on empty (world record-holder here), and my personal favorite, the Tom Petty–inspired runnin' down a dream.

Some of us even run away in the Looney Tunes sense, complete with accompanying bindle stick and petulant foot-stomping. I "ran away" once, though you could never really run away in the small town where I grew up. At the time of my transgression, my mom was an engineering student at Columbia University, and my dad worked there, running the heating-and-cooling system that kept students and faculty in relative climatic comfort. I hated visiting this steamy underground labyrinth, because there was a lot of hissing and sputtering and other ghoulish HVAC sounds, but especially because my dad had told us that he could sometimes hear the resident vermin scurrying about when it got quiet(er) at night. He would usually take me to Mama's Place for lunch on these visits, though, if I kept my whining to a minimum, and Mama's Place had the best steak fries.

But Columbia University's boiler room isn't why I ran away. Monday through Friday, my parents endured a miserable four-hour roundtrip commute from the North Shore of Long Island to Harlem and back in their industrial-gray Dodge Ram van. Before you get too excited ("Seriously, you had a Dodge Ram van?!"), let me note that it wasn't a cool Dodge Ram van with pinstripes or a sunroof or reclining leather seats.

This is what it looked like:

We also had a shit-brown Ford Pinto, similar to this one:

Now that you have a sense of the Dickensian vehicular times we lived in, back to the running-away narrative (I didn't skip out because of our automotive situation, either, though that was another challenge in Lenox Land — our neighbors were rolling, literally, in Rolls-Royces and Bentleys). My parents worked hard, disappearing down the unforgiving Long Island Expressway every day for their hellish 15-hour slog, and they were generally (and understandably) pretty cranky during the workweek. Being the selfish, self-absorbed jerks we were, my brothers and I had no appreciation for such toil. We wanted our Hi-C and Hamburger Helper, and we wanted it now.

Spring semester, 1985. One of my mom's instructors assigned a complex final project that involved building a circuit board from scratch. This wasn't like one of those flimsy snap-circuits kits my brothers tinkered with in the backyard. This one had to power, like, a real computer. I assume this project probably made up a good percentage of my mom's final grade. She worked on it for weeks, tightening her connections, cutting copper, fortifying the insulation** — in the evenings, on the weekends, during whatever "free time" she could carve out.

And my brothers found the circuit board, and they fucked with it. They extracted it from wherever it was hidden in my parents' bedroom, violated it, then ditched it in a window well. The outside elements annihilated all working parts overnight, so the perpetrators' next strategy was to relocate the broken unit to the coal bin. (We had a coal bin, and a coal stove, and I had to stoke the fire and empty the ashes every day after school, and one time I couldn't find the metal ash bucket, so I thought it would be a good idea to dump smoldering ashes into a paper bag from Gristedes, and the ashes dumped all over the front porch, and ashes are not easy to clean up, and I got in a lot of trouble for the mess. I totally wasn't kidding about the Dickensian stuff.)

My mother discovered the fried circuit board later that week when she went outside to replenish the indoor coal supply. She came back inside white-knuckling the sad assortment of eradicated components, her face pale with a rage usually reserved for my father. She didn't yell. She didn't freak out. Instead, my overwhelmed mother whispered, "Get on that couch and don't move until he gets home" (she didn't even have to use his official paternal title), and then she wisely went upstairs to lie down so she wouldn't punch us all in the face (not that she ever did, but I wouldn't have blamed her in this case). I had nothing to do with this circuit board business, but I knew I was in trouble, too, because I was the oldest and The Responsible One and I had fantastically failed at my babysitting duties. My brothers stared at me without blinking, waiting for me to say something, to scream at them, to call them idiots like I usually did when they did something stupid. They knew this was bad. I knew this was bad.

After about 30 seconds, I stood up, said, "See you later" to the two dumbfounded boys on the sofa, and hoofed it three miles across town to my best friend's house. That evening, I went on a date with her and a prep-school drip named Louis. We dined at L'Epicure, a froufrou French restaurant overlooking the Long Island Sound on the Bayville boardwalk. It was very romantic. It was also very awkward, but I still knew it was better than the shitstorm that was raining down two miles away on Peacock Lane. I wish I could tell you where on Peacock Lane, but we didn't have a house number, because we lived in the middle of nowhere and it was easier to just say "we're the house with the giant wrought-iron gates at the head of the lane." Kind of like these folks in rural West Virginia still do.

When my parents finally figured out I had gone missing and started calling around town looking for me, my friend's mother covered for me, then strategically dumped me at my grandparents'. My parents eventually called over there, and my father told my grandparents to make me walk the long mile home. My grandfather refused, my parents showed up in the Pinto a few minutes later, there was lots of screaming among the grownups, and words were said that resulted in my parents not speaking to my grandparents for several months.

My parents (mostly my father) yelled at me the entire way home about how worried they were and what was I thinking and why would I do something like that and did I have a screw loose or something. I stared out the window at the secluded manors and servant cottages and Quaker farmhouses set far back from the edge of Overlook Road. As we cruised past the McLain estate, I thought about how I liked going over there because Susannah McLain's mother always presented us with seedless oranges that were cut in perfect halves and served with tiny dessert spoons (they didn't peel them and devour them in mangled sections like we did). We neared St. John's Episcopal Church at the bottom of the hill, and I peered into the leafy canopy of Old Tappan Road, wondering if Laszlo was on the courts that day playing tennis. Laszlo had just moved to Lattingtown from Romania and was dating one of my tall friends and was always playing tennis because he was going pro.

We passed through the gates and into our driveway; I bolted out of the car and up to my room. My parents didn't bring up my infraction again, except for the next day when one of my friends called and I heard my dad say, "Let me check if she's here or if she took off again." My parents eventually reconciled with my grandparents. I never heard anything about the circuit board.

I don't really know how this explains why I, or other people, want to run in races. Maybe it's a natural extension of the running we do in our lives, or a physical manifestation of the junk we're working out in our heads. Maybe we need visual proof of how far we've come. Except in races, the rewards are more extrinsic — a medal or a turkey leg or an XXL T-shirt that you'll never wear again. Plus it's guaranteed that if the wind's against you going up the mountain, it'll be at your back going down.

One other final takeaway? Never dump hot ashes into a paper bag.

**I know absolutely nothing about building circuit boards because I inherited zero engineering genes, so all details listed here are cribbed from my favorite content farm's "How to Make a Circuit Board."

Drowning in a Slow-Reader's River Styx: The Unbearable Burden of Books

The picture above is a shot of my nightstand. It has not been staged or altered in any way. There is no CGI. That frightening tower on the left hovers next to my accident-prone head, taunting me with its menacing tumble-terrorism threats. It has fallen on me, more than once, yet I simply build it back up bigger and taller and stronger than before. America — fuck yeah!

Those other items cowering in The Tower's shadow are utilitarian incidentals: an alarm clock, my ancient iPod and docking station, and a fancy Brookstone sound machine, a most-necessary implement in my continuing battle against insomnia.

Anyway, this isn't a humble-brag about how much I read. It's an embarrassing testament to how much I haven't read. This is my very own Island of Misfit Tomes, a ragtag assortment of publications that have been meticulously hoarded, passionately pored over in the euphoria of those initially infatuating pages, and then cruelly abandoned before I've even bent the spine (do not lecture me about bending the spine). The only misfits among the misfits are Paul Auster's "The Locked Room," shoehorned in about halfway up the pile, and "The Sound and the Fury," which is leveling out my alarm clock. I completed both long ago, but I'm reading them again for different reasons, which may or may not be documented in a future post. I'm sure there's also an US Weekly in there.

So what's my (admittedly first world) problem? There are a couple of things going on. First, I'm convinced there's some kind of attention deficit thing at play (quizzes in Cosmo serve as good barometers for that sort of thing, right?). I can't keep my interests focused on one thing for too long before I get distracted by the next shiny, pretty thing. There are many shiny, pretty things in this world, and not enough time to get to them all, yet I keep trying, because where the hell am I going anyway?

I'm also an excruciatingly slow reader. This is partly because of the distraction element. My day job as an editor has exacerbated this over the years — my eyes are always "on," perpetually scanning for typos or stylistic screwups instead of simply absorbing the content. I don't see the big picture because I'm hyperfocused on the details. Also, I think my brain is really, really tired.

Mostly, though, I can't stand the thought of missing out on anything lurking in the yellowed leaves. I love nonfiction (input! information!), but when I read litchrachure, I need to absorb every painstakingly chosen word, to be consumed by the minutiae, to forge an intimacy with the characters that would be impossible if I skipped over entire sections (or even a single word) for the sake of efficiency or speed or bragging rights to say "I read xxxx." Universities have built (and continue to build) their curricula around this "survival reading" strategy, which is total nonsense (at least in terms of reading fiction), and I had great trouble in my short foray in grad school because of it. I did what I had to do to get a Very Good Grade, and I'm sure I was exercising other long-atrophied sections of my cerebral parts (my literacy teacher insisted that my brain would fill in the gaps for me, because BRAINS), but it was frustrating and annoying and not for me.

It's comforting to know I'm not the only card-carrying member of the "slow-reading movement" (the virtues of which are more sufficiently described in this thoughtful essay by Tom Newkirk). So I guess the upshot is, I'm going to keep reading the way I like to read, even if the timetable's frustrating and I can't join any book clubs because everyone will be discussing the denouement while I'm still parsing the prologue. The Tower can continue to taunt me. It's not going anywh — AHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!

Time for a Reboot

I have goals, and I don't mind getting dirty to achieve them.

Hello.

I'm back on the blogging landscape after a two-year hiatus. It was a reluctant but necessary sabbatical, born of my engagement on the front lines of Life's Great Scrimmage. To wit, battling the external and internal forces that vie to take me down as I juggle kids, school, work, and relationship and personal maintenance. Keeping your head above these murky waters takes a lot of elbow grease and mental effort, as evidenced by me in the above picture.

But though it's been a tough stretch, especially in the last year, I never give up, because a) my kids need me to keep it together; b) there are just too many amazing things to do and see and experience to pack it in prematurely (that's me being inspirational); and c) what doesn't kill you makes you do crazy things that just might kill you. And by "you," I mean "me." And by "crazy things that might kill you/me," I mean this, which I'll be competing in on June 1.

The Spartan Race is one of the leaders in the "adventure race" category, competing against Warrior Dash and Tough Mudder for the title of Most Extreme Obstacle Course for Regular People Ever. There are knockoffs, including an amusing zombie rendition, but these are widely considered the big three. The New York Times has published a couple of engaging articles covering the genre, including this and this, and there's a whole intriguing substory about the not-so-friendly competitiveness among the guys who created these individual races. Will Dean, the evil genius behind Tough Mudder, has been called "the Mark Zuckerberg of extreme sports," and that's not meant to be a compliment.

However, from my own obsessive research and personal experience (I completed the 2010 Warrior Dash at Windham Mountain in gloriously pathetic time), I've found that all of these events are simply anchored by mud, fire, barbed wire, costumed competitors, and a Woodstock-esque festival ambience replete with music, meat-on-a-stick, and beer, all of which preclude anyone from taking these challenges too seriously. Not that you don't deserve bragging rights for completing the course, but I'd love to know what someone like Dean Karnazes thinks.

Anyway, I'm now registered for my latest adventure, ready to start training in earnest. I'm the world's laziest human being (I'm not even initial-capping that title for emphasis, that's how lazy I am), so it's always exciting to see how these exercise endeavors turn out. It's sad and funny and heartbreaking and inspirational and devastating and boring, all at the same time!

The toughest part for me, though, will be to get back into the groove of longer-form writing, another one of my goals for 2013. My 9-5 job requires condensing lengthy items and concepts into 100-word blurbs, or "infosnacks." This, along with Twitter, has proven terrific for boosting my literary/semantic discipline and conciseness, but pretty terrible for my attention span and ability to string together more than five sentences in one sitting. Fewer than 24 months ago, I was whipping up brain-asploding papers for an attempted English master's (more on that particular battle another time), but I don't think anyone gives a crap about reading my 25-page manifesto entitled "Abelard's Insurrection: Rejection of the Cattle Thief's Conventions in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao." If you are interested, I'll send you the abstract and we'll take it from there.

So here I go again, on my own (H/T Whitesnake). I'm going to resurrect my Warrior Hauswife Facebook page, so keep up with me that way, or head over to Twitter to witness my daily brain dumps.