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.