Watching good & bad movies 🎭

March 16th, 2020

My Spring break got extended, all classes are going to transcend into the cloud for the foreseeable future, and I have a lot of time to spare on my hands. I love watching movies, it is actually my favorite medium of entertainment. Looking at the screen and seeing someone else’s imagination form the scenes, charaters, and the plot. I wish to consider myself having a film version of melomania. However, every time I talk to my mother about movies, I just shock her into silence. I’m probably nowhere near her on the movie tastes scale and she would tell me I’m watching the wrong kind of movies. I thought for a quick while, what does it mean to watch good and bad movies?

Just for the sake of credit, I’m not a film major, nor do I possess an extensive academia-level of expertise in films analysis. I took a film class my college freshman year, FMS 380, which was titled Shocks! Thrills!: Trash Cinema. Easily, one of my favorite classes I have ever taken. We talked trash. By that I mean the absolute trash, someone might even say garbage. The lowest, filthiest, and probably unknown movies ranging in themes from government enforced sexual hygiene to vampires invading other planets or sharks falling from the sky. Watching bad stuff kinda shapes the way you look and perceive everything else. I am not implying that you have to watch a bad movie with every good movie or anything that is even close to that.

Watching and just knowing what bad movies are helped me to start recognizing and valuing some of the small stuff that I may have taken for granted before. By only watching the best of the best, the bar for films was so high for me that I became some kind of a snob, trying to nitpick every smallest flaw in them. We probably have some people in our lives that when we go to movies with them, they would start pointing out some smallest deviations from what their imaginative masterpiece version of what they just saw. It is absolutely fine for them to express their emotions, it just got me thinking that if I follow their logic, then I can trash every movie and just shift my perception of them completely. It is a dangerous game of downplaying. It is equivalent of only eating caviar and then complaining about how cheap bread is.

Diversifying the movies you watch can help to set your frame of reference straight and recognize the whole spectrum of distinct movies. I believe this can be applied to anything. But I also see some people that try to surrender themselves to pure trash and garbash, talking bad about mainstream media. I don’t think this is a good idea. It’s never too good for being a fanatic of anything. You lose that connection with other people by becoming too "niche" and "elite". People like that may feel like a stranger to the society (guess why) and then those people can (or will) get angry with everyone else around them, which never leads to a anything good. Just enjoy watching what you enjoy watching. Recognize the amount of work it takes to make something like that and just have a good time. Don’t be a fanatic.

List of some of my favorite bad/trash/garbage movies:

I would like to mention Pink Flamingos, but this is the absolute lowest and filthiest cinema can get. If you find it, let me know what you think ◼︎