the fool who makes the bad movies, or the fool who watches them?
While Anne was gone, I spent my Saturday afternoon doing the thing I always seem to do while she’s away: watching bad movies. And boy were some of them bad.
First up, “_Resident Evil: Afterlife_”:http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1220634/. Remember: if the Director is married to the Lead Actress, the movie is going to be horrible. Yeah, sure, you can come up with a couple of possible exceptions–[“_Much Ado About Nothing_”:http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0107616/], perhaps (though it still had Keanu Reeves in it), maybe others–but in general, you’re in for bad news. In fact, this fourth installment in the already-three-movies-too-many _Resident Evil_ franchise amazes me in that it even got made. That there’s a fifth on the way leads me to despair.
Second, “_G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra_”:http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1046173/, which fascinated me in its utter badness. I expected to watch the first five minutes, snigger a bit, and then move on to something at least watchable, but the level of spectacular trashiness this displayed fascinated me. And with actors who should know better: Dennis Quaid? Joseph Gordon-Levitt? Jonathan Pryce? I mean, is there any way this could have read well on the page? No. I just can’t imagine a paycheck big enough. Maybe I need a drug habit to understand, or something.
Finally, “_Salt_”:http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0944835/, which wasn’t actually bad for what it was, though I saw the twist coming from pretty much the moment Liev Schreiber showed up. I’m fairly certain I didn’t remember it from “his slip on The Daily Show”:http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0944835/trivia?tr=tr1477426, but you never know, sometimes my brain files away things in odd places.
I sometimes wonder at the pathology of my addiction to bad movies. Is it that I find so few of even the movies people consider “good” to be of interest, I figure it’s better not to get your hopes up, just watch things you know are going to be bad? Is it the sort of car-wreck fascination of trying to understand why anyone would watch this movie and enjoy it? I dunno, but I should probably see a doctor.