THE BEST OF THE BAD

Following on from my last post, there was only so much 
'micro-sanding' rust in millimeter-tight spaces that I could cope 
with, so after a few hours I tended to go inside and watch a movie 
while my finger-tips recovered. As a result I've made a decent dent 
in all the second-hand movies that I picked up recently. DVDs are a 
stupid technology, by the way, I try to be careful and yet I still 
get occasional ones that are unwatchable due to scratches. Give me 
a nice old VHS tape any day, even a bit of noise in the picture 
from a worn-out ex-rental tape is a hell of a lot better than a 
sudden "can not read disc" in the last third of a movie.

But storage medium aside, buying second-hand from op-shops and 
garage sales I usually end up with an equal mix of big-budget 
Hollywood productions and dodgy low-budget American movies from the 
80s and 90s which Australian VHS and DVD publishers such as 
Flashback Entertainment* used to push out either individually or in 
bulk packs (I recently found a copy of Flashback's second pack of 
10 really bad action movies, for $4 - just the third one to go!).

It's funny though that I do quite enjoy the bad movies up to a 
point. Usually not the bad Hollywood ones where they 
unenthusiastically try to pack in a bunch of stars with a 
meaningless script on the assumption that it has to make money, I 
can find those unwatchable. Nor do I really go for the ironic ones 
that have become popular in more recent years, deliberately trying 
to be cheesy. But an old bad low-budget movie is usually made with 
a real intention to be good, just let down by a general lack of 
talent and good judgement.

But the thing about them is that they're different. Sure the 
differences usually don't work, but that's what makes them 
interesting to someone like me who watches too much of the standard 
Hollywood stuff, or maybe just pays too much attention to it. 
Mainstream movies are actually all a lot of the same. Sure there 
can be innovation, but at heart there are certain things that work 
on film and things that don't, and at a point just seeing some 
stuff that's a bit off is interesting in itself, simply because 
it's different.

Not that a movie with a big budget can't be truely innovative and 
good, but it's a very high-risk strategy which the industry 
(especially the American one) only occasionally entertains. One 
example that I watched recently is the movie Revolver - a 
philosophically themed violent crime/action movie. I really liked 
it. Not an all-time favourite, but one of very few films that I 
think really would benefit from watching all over again straight 
away. But by mid-way through I already suspected that it couldn't 
have been a box office success. Looking at the Wikipedia page 
showed it did even worse than I thought, attacked by critics and 
making a significant loss (based on box office results at least), 
though it seems the director recovered from it alright. Eye of the 
Beholder is similar, a film with an intimate theme of obsession 
that I can get into more than anything, but it doesn't seem to have 
gathered even so much as a cult following.

Not all are commercial failures, but the skill required to make a 
movie that really does new things and yet appeals widely enough to 
make money seems to be exceptional. Still, between dodgy low-budget 
productions and over-ambitious Hollywood flops, there's plenty out 
there which escapes from the standard mould, though it isn't always 
easy to find.

There are also 'foreign' movies - anything made outside the US I 
give extra consideration - which in English mainly means UK films. 
But the Australian broadcaster SBS is also an excellent source for 
seeing foreign-language films on TV, which is good for me because 
they rarely appear with second-hand VHS/DVDs. They're another topic 
though.

 - The Free Thinker

* Who I recently discovered have now switched to offering a free 
(with ads) online streaming service at viewlorium.com, for people 
willing to pay for much more internet data than I am.