The Red Circle

By Tom Nix

I am going to see The Twilight Saga: New Moon this Friday. That might seem like an odd confession to make, especially on a site like this. So let me explain myself. I am going to see this movie because it is going to be absolutely terrible. And I am going to love every second of it.

Movies do it for me. I am in love with films as I am the act of filmmaking itself. I’ll take all comers, from City of God to City of the Living Dead. In filmmaking, there are some amazing things that happen in spite of the final product. Much like Doctor Manhattan’s speech in Watchmen about the miracle of Laurie Juspesczyk’s birth, there is a series of miracles that have to happen to get a crap movie made.

Not only does someone have to write a movie where a wrongly accused black man seeks revenge on the cops who set him up by strangling them with his massive prehensile penis, someone has to read that script and put up the money to get made. Out of all the other ideas in the universe, that was the one that told them “Yes. This story is the one.” Then someone has to manufacture the manslaughtering member. Can you imagine pre-production meetings focused around how they’re going to get this effect to work? Then someone has to agree to be dropped in a cockpile and pretend to die inside a dick. This movie is called Soul Vengeance and it EXISTS. And for me, that’s enough. These terrible films will show you things you will never see anywhere else. These films have an undying urge for telling you stories that would never make the marquee of any reputable theater. It just so happens that some of the most insane and interesting stories are told by people without the talent to totally pull it off.

Which brings me back to why New Moon is so appealing. This is a movie based on a bland series of books. This is a movie with vapid lead characters and a plot that is so contrived and simplistic as to make a person mad with how derivative the whole affair is. No? Not selling you yet? How about the fact that one of the major plot points of the film is the lead heroine traveling from Washington state to the Vatican (in Italy, natch) to perform a slow motion run in the hopes of stopping her shirtless, pale, brooding boyfriend from walking out into the sunlight and sparkling in front of an audience. Better now? How about the fact that after the same girl gets a paper cut at a party, her vampire boyfriend tells her that he can never see her again because of what might have happened. Are you starting to see where this could be an amazing night at the movies?

Someone wrote this. Millions of people bought it. Millions more will plunk down even more cash to see it. I get to sit in the middle of a massively delusional audience and laugh at a sparkling vampire. The whole scenario is something that should never exist – and yet, here we are. One of the highest grossing films of this year will be one where a paper cut leads to banishment, and an international flight is chartered to prevent unnecessary glittering. THIS IS HAPPENING AND I INTEND TO BE A PART OF IT.

Without bad movies, we’d never have seen Sean Connery dressed like an S&M baby. GIVE THANKS.

That is real movie magic. Anyone can get behind a movie about a law-school dropout who, through incredible circumstances, ends up defending an innocent man in what turns out to be the court case of the decade. It takes a much more unstable and incredible person to get behind a movie that’s about a college kid and his deformed, murderous brother who he carries around in a picnic basket. And we as film fans know this. Sharing a love of The Shawshank Redemption isn’t something to latch onto. Everyone loves it, because it’s a classic. But find someone who has the same specific love for Ricki-Oh, The Story of Ricky, and a friendship happens. The film features a man exploding another man’s head with his fist. That’s something special.

That exact ridiculousness in the face of all sense and good is what makes these movies eminently watchable. Transformers 2 is also a terrible movie, but I hate that film with all of my being. It has no ideas, it has no voice, it has no want to attempt anything new than “make it bigger than the last one.” Most bad film directors are innovators out of necessity. They need their film to get noticed, so they create some insane plot point, or they just ham it up to an absurd degree. I would watch The Room countless times before I would ever watch Transformers 2 again. One is a bad movie made by a man that wants so much for his audience to understand him. The other is made by a man that doesn’t care if the audience dies while watching his film.

Not all bad films are steeped in the silly, however. A lot of them are the playing grounds for truly talented individuals limited by budgets, time, and support. The Lord of the Rings trilogy would simply not exist in the way it does today if Peter Jackson hadn’t cut his directing and FX teeth on Bad Taste and Dead Alive. Spider-Man 2 would not be best comic book movie ever made if Sam Raimi hadn’t discovered his visual style with Evil Dead.

These kinds of second-rate films are important to the art of cinema itself. In fact, four days ago, they gave an honorary Oscar to Roger Corman, the sultan of schlock. For those not in the know, Corman ran New World Pictures in the 60′s and 70′s that churned out dozens of films a year, most by first time directors. I can’t defend the quality of most of the output – they’re pretty much standard sci-fi, horror, and exploitation fare – but the impact these movies had on the industry is incalculable.  At a glance, Corman not only gave Jack Nicholson, Bruce Dern, Dennis Hopper, and Robert DeNiro their first acting jobs, he also paid for the first films by Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, James Cameron, John Sayles, Ron Howard, Joe Dante, Jonathan Demme, and Monte Hellman.

Frankly, Boxcar Bertha begat Goodfellas. Dementia 13 caused The Godfather. Caged Heat led to The Silence of the Lambs. Bad movies are directly responsible for some of the best films of all time. Movies are much more than the sum of their parts. Bad movies doubly so. They speak just as much of the future of the filmmaker as they do the unfortunate present.

Some people are looking for movies to speak to them. They want to be informed about the human condition. I am not here to tell you that bad movies are better than the ones that really have something to say. But consider this: UP is undoubtedly one of the best films of the year. But it’s still a movie about an 80-year-old who attaches balloons to his house and flies to South America to learn how to love again with the help of a talking dog and an anthropomorphic bird. A ridiculous premise made worthwhile. But simply embrace that insanity: Make the flick about an 80-year-old man with a flying house who learns its not okay to throw his poop on people from 11,000 feet.

I think I’d like that version just as much.

Flip Sides and read Stephy’s stance here.

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