March is Oscar month, when Hollywood’s seductive millionaires get together to pat each other on the back for being so wonderful as they embark on a mad dash to proclaim to posterity which movies are the best. So it’s the best season to talk about bad and smart movies, and the fact that no one, not even the wonderful professionals in the film industry, can tell if a movie is smart or not.
In an encouraging act of counterprogramming at the Oscars, The Criterion Channel aired a collection of 14 award-winning “Golden Raspberry” films that will air in March. These “worst of the worst” movies turn out that a movie’s “badness” can be just as unknowable as its “goodness. “
If you look at the history of the Oscars (and forget about the subjective nature of our reaction to art), most of the Best Picture winners are “smart” films, in a lazy, average way, and most remain so over time. Titanic is a clever movie, I think. The same goes for Chariots of Fire, sort of. But some films, for cultural reasons that are rarely predictable, oscillate wildly from “maximally productive” to “worst” or vice versa depending on the cultural global in which we live when we watch them. . Sometimes critics, audiences, and “the industry” think that a movie is not only smart, but also the most productive, only to be informed that it’s truly terrible. Crash, for example, has gone from being the most productive to trash in less than 20 years.
When it was released in 2005, Crash was seen as a brave examination of race in America, a film that wasn’t afraid to “go all out,” as we said in 2005. But Crash is bad: it’s not “pretty good,” but it didn’t deserve the most productive movie about “Brokeback Mountain” bad, but active, undeniably and aggressively terrible.
Although the scenarios are the same then as they are today, few people realized how obvious, mundane, and amateurish Crash was in 2005. It’s a film populated by paper-thin characters who exist to wander on superficial, melodramatic, and “racially charged” paths. “Cartoons and preaching. Ours. Crash has a message, and that’s when he goes from mediocre to obnoxious. Despite his promise to “keep things real,” as we said in 2005, Crash is designed to please his liberal white audience, not confront them. His message is something along the lines of “racism is bad, mmm-ok, but you’re smart because you care so much. “Or, as critic Clarisse Loughrey noted, “Crash is the father of Get Out’s favorite movie. “
So how did Crash manage to hide his vulgar looks long enough to win the Oscar for Best Picture?This was partly due to the then-fashionable narrative device of non-linear storytelling, but more commonly it was because the Academy is composed almost exclusively of Get Out’s father. The target of sensitive low-budget films about race is also the father of Get Out, and he probably wouldn’t miss the chance to pat himself on the back for not being racist, especially on Oscar night.
I’ve seen Criterion’s entire Razzie collection, and the price of any of those films may be debatable (with the exception of Gigli, a film that has a 6% score on Rotten Tomatoes and is still overrated), however, two films that I felt deserved maximum reconsideration: Cruising and Freddy’s Got Fingered.
Directed by William Friedkin, whose credits include The Exorcist, Boys in the Band, and The French Connection, 1980s Cruising is a hard-hitting crime/neo-noir drama set among the BDSM crowd in New York City, before the SIDA. Al Pacino plays a detective who infiltrates the leather daddies scene to catch a serial killer.
Cruising is a tense, fast-paced, and desirable thriller, but critics hated it. At first, I thought that the graphic depiction of violence and perverted sex between men was perhaps too much for the critics of that less enlightened era, but it turns out that there is another explanation for Cruising’s critique: it’s mostly about a victim of the occasions around her.
While in production, Cruising was in the midst of a now-forgotten controversy. Gay activists protested out of fear that the film would stereotype all gay men as hedonistic and violent fetishists. Following the film’s release, many critics criticized Cruising’s enigmatic ending and the inscrutable character of its main character was the result of a director under external pressure. Some criticized him for his portrayal of gay men, and some critics, presumably, were simply homophobic.
But seen through the lens of 2024 and ignoring the controversy it once caused, audiences can consider Cruising on its merits and finally see the flawless, tense, and engaging thriller/mental exploration that has always been there. It’s a matter of opinion, but Cruising turns out to strive to depict the struggle and alienation faced by gay men at the time, while also making it clear that a small subculture doesn’t constitute gay men as a whole. The opaque, inarticulate adventure of Al Pacino’s main character, whether he is or rarely is, doesn’t seem so much a hesitation on the part of a frightened filmmaker as an attempt to illustrate just how complex sexuality, violence, and identity can be. Three thumbs up.
When it was released, Tom Green’s (I guess) 2001 comedy, Freddy Got Fingered, filmed almost as well as Gigli. Critics said it was scatological, childish, boring and not funny at all. As Roger Ebert says, “This film doesn’t scratch the back of the barrel. This film is not the back of the barrel. This film is not underneath the back of the barrel. This movie doesn’t deserve to be discussed in the same sentence as the barrels.
All of this is true, but it was also ahead of its time. Green’s stunt was the first major appearance in the anti-comedy wave that propelled The Eric Andre Show, Tim and Eric Awesome Show and most of the internet. It’s rarely meant to be “fun” in the classic sense, but it’s quite unpleasant and meta-fun. It’s funny because it helps keep doing weird and funny things, which leads us to question the nature of comedy and maybe laugh at How Stupid and Exaggerated It Is.
But even if you don’t settle for the pioneering anti-comedy angle, Freddy Got Fingered has a deeper point where the barriers between life and art are stretched and destroyed with tactics that have never been done before. Falling horses or drinking eau de toilette, Freddy is the story of a not-so-funny weirdo who manages to annoy Hollywood fools by giving them millions of dollars to make a TV show, which he temporarily wastes to annoy other people. The true story of Tom Green, and Freddy Got Fingered is a fictionalized account of their adventure and the outcome of it. It’s Tom Green who says, “The other people dressed up gave me $14 million to make this movie, and I’m going to spoil it into a comedy with no jokes, no characters, and no interest in being boring for 90 minutes. Now watch me wallow in the belly of a deer.
Many films claim to be subversive, but few subvert the artistic expectations of their genre. Freddy’s Got Fingered is, but in 2005 audiences and critics saw Tom Green’s antics and didn’t notice his main plot. “It’s not even a joke” meant “this movie is bad” in 2005, but “it has a different impact” now, as I’ve been told by other people who say in 2024. I don’t know if Freddy Got Fingered is a genius exactly, but he’s much more attractive than Crash. .
Stephen Johnson is a contributor to Lifehacker, where he covers pop culture and adds two weekly columns, “The Disconnected Adult’s Guide to Children’s Culture” and “What People Get Wrong This Week. “She graduated from Emerson College with a bachelor’s degree in Writing, Literature, and Publishing.
Previously, Stephen was editor-in-chief at NBC/Universal’s G4TV. At G4, he won a Telly Award for writing and was nominated for a Webby Award. Stephen has also written for Blumhouse, FearNET, Performing Songwriter magazine, NewEgg, AVN, GameFly, Art Connoisseur International Magazine, Fender Musical Instruments, Hustler Magazine, and other outlets. His paintings have aired on Comedy Central and screened at the Sundance International Film Festival, the Palm Springs International Film Festival, and the Chicago Horror Film Festival. He lives in Los Angeles, California.