This Year, See a Bad Movie
Don't ask, "Will I like it?" or "Is it good?"
One of my issues with evaluating movies along the good/bad axis is that it treats films like Consumer Reports. You sent in an expert to tell you whether or not to spend your money and time on a film. We’ve come to accept this as the dominant mode of film criticism, and it does serve a purpose. However, there are times when it feels preventive of film appreciation. On the one hand, if you see enough movies, you’ll know your particular likes and dislikes. However, you can also cut yourself off from a better understanding of why you prefer certain films or worse, that movies can surprise you.
Some of my best moviegoing experiences have been at bad movies. Some were films that looked terrible and somehow ended up being worse than I imagined. But more often than not, bad films better inform my appreciation of good films. This is one of the reasons why the Consumer Reports model doesn’t fit neatly on to cinema. If you tell me a microwave oven is bad, and you’ve researched all the microwave ovens, then I’m not going to go out and buy a bad microwave oven for the experience of understanding why the good ones won’t set my house on fire.
The argument against seeing bad movies is that you’ll have wasted money and time, and neither can be wasted when there are so many entertainment options available. This is why we have so many algorithms and lists telling us “The Best Movies on Netflix” so that we never have to spend a second on something that could be deemed unpleasant. But I’m not sure how well you can appreciate “The Best Movies” if you aren’t also aware of why they outshine everything else. Do you know what makes a movie bad? Do you know what makes a film mediocre? Can you explain why?
If you have no interest in those questions, that’s fine. Not everyone has to fill their time with movies. But I would challenge you sometime this year to find a cheap matinee or even wait until streaming to find a film that doesn’t look like your thing. Don’t go in wanting to ironically laugh it off. Meet it on its own terms and see what you think. Maybe it will surprise you with being better than you thought. If it’s as bad as you feared, at least next time you go into a good movie, you’ll have a better appreciation of performance or direction or some element where the bad film came up short.
As I like to tell people when they ask if a movie is any good, “I don’t know, but there are far worse things in life than seeing a bad movie.”
Recommendations
Nobel-winning economist Paul Krugman is now on Substack. I have mixed feelings about people with much larger platforms leaving to start a newsletter (Krugman wrote for The New York Times for 24 years) because I worry they’re trying to shake off editorial constraints. Then I look at what passes for op-eds from most of the Times’ columnists and realize no editor is probably looking at these things anyway.
At least with Krugman, he’s a trusted voice who I remember as being unafraid to challenge Obama’s economic policy from the start (and Krugman turned out to be right; Obama’s half-measures likely dragged out the Great Recession) and his insights will certainly be useful as Trump smashes a big button marked “Tariffs” and nothing good happens.
In the meantime, I greatly appreciated his recent article on the online gambling boom and how, along with the money going into crypto, marks a new frontier in American suffering.
What I’m Watching
I probably need to develop some kind of structure or plan for the movies I watch. I’ve started the year hopping around between anything that catches my fancy at the moment, which isn’t ideal if you’ve got a watchlist a few hundred movies deep. How exactly this project will take shape remains to be seen, but at least in the meantime I finally got around to watching classics like All That Jazz and Bicycle Thieves. As always, you can follow me on Letterboxd to see what movies I’m watching.
Elsewhere, I watched a wild YouTube video where the creator MegaLag discovered how the browser plug-in Honey basically steals affiliate link money and funnels it to PayPal. The way it works is that Honey promises that it will “find the best deal” on your purchase by searching for loads of online coupons before you buy. What it does in reality is swoop in, make itself the last affiliate link for any purchase, and take the money. It also works with companies to ensure that if does “find” coupons for consumers, it will offer lower ones, thus making the buyer think they found the best deal when in reality they only found the second- or third-best deal.
But what’s worth noting here is what’s worth noting for most influencers: they’re not doing the homework. In the same way that a publication may publish ads for less-than-reputable services because ad money is ad money, influencers aren’t doing their homework on Honey. It’s just that here, the lack of interest blew back on them because influencers also tend to depend on affiliate links. Whoops!
What I’m Reading
Maybe in 2026 I’ll kick off the year with some light reading. For now, I’m reading Barbara Kingsolver’s Pulitzer-winning novel Demon Copperhead. The writing is so good (I also loved her book The Bean Trees), but my word: I am so bummed out. Kingsolver wasn’t wrong to take Dickensian England and transplant it to present-day Appalachia, but it’s still a tough chronicle of every way American society fails its most impoverished citizens, especially children.
What I’m Hearing
I’ve been a big fan of the albums Modest Mouse released while I was in college, but I’ve never gone back and listened to their earlier stuff. I’ve rectified that by starting at the beginning of their discography. It’s not for everyone, and it’s certainly not as polished as Good News for People Who Love Bad News and We Were Dead Before the Ship Even Sank, but I’m still digging it.
What I’m Playing
Right now I’m hopping between Pentiment and Sleeping Dogs. I keep thinking about getting into Marvel Rivals, and then I remember fast-paced online shooters aren’t really my thing, so back I go to my nice single-player games.