Update on the bad movie suggestions
Monday, July 20th, 2009Thank you, one and all, for your suggestions for the Eric’s Bad Movies column (Thursdays at Film.com!). As always, my call to action has yielded many viable choices for future editions. More on that below.
First, let me explain (again) why I said I didn’t want any comedies. Some of you seemed to think it was OK to suggest a comedy as long as it wasn’t funny, which kind of misses the point. The point is that it’s very hard to make fun of comedies because they already don’t take themselves seriously. Often, all the satirist can say is variations of, “Boy, this sure isn’t funny!” Ask anyone who makes fun of things for a living — the people at “Mystery Science Theater,” MAD Magazine, The Onion, “Saturday Night Live” — and they will tell you the same thing. Satirizing comedy is very, very difficult.
That’s not to say it can’t be done. My experience has been that it helps if a comedy has supernatural, fantasy, or sci-fi elements. The problem is that I usually have to commit to a film before I’ve had time to watch it, not after. So I need to be pretty confident going in that it’s going to be suitable for the column, and comedies are so fraught with peril that I’ve mostly avoided them. When I have attempted them, I have often not been satisfied with the results.
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