Symposium: Entertainingly Bad?

Tim asked, “What is the relationship between a film’s quality and the feeling it evokes in its audience?” He called this “a broad, intimidating, and largely unanswerable question.”

Well, here is the answer: There is no difference between a film’s quality and the feeling it evokes in its audience.

Full disclosure: the concept of the “enjoyably bad” movie is one Tim has tried to convince me of many times before, to no avail.

Symposium: The Function of Film

Josh’s complaint that Up merely made him feel good instead of forever altering his weltanschauung prompted me to consider a deeper question: What is the relationship between a film’s quality and the feeling it evokes in its audience?

This is a broad, intimidating, and largely unanswerable question—at least not within the space of this blog. I can only try to speak from my own, admittedly idiosyncratic experience with film.

The imposing opening question boils down to me like so: Can one be unentertained by a great film, and can one be entertained by a bad one?

The first half of the question is prima facie simple to me: No. Any film that fails the basic criterion of entertaining its audience falls short of the designation “great.” And yet I know of several films called “great” that I personally have not, or would not, enjoy. The first that comes to mind is Saving Private Ryan, which ranks 56th on IMDB’s “Top 250” and receives a score of 90, or “Universal Acclaim,” on Metacritic. These two scores represent a reasonable enough cross-section of viewers and critics to call this film great.