Not A Blog™

On occasion I review movies, as you may have seen in the past. Like I’ve said before, nobody cares about heaps of praise on a movie, but rippage is always welcome. I don’t watch many movies, and I watch even fewer in the theater, but I’ve done it enough that I’ve developed my own, personal methods of evaluating whether a movie is good or bad, and in turn, whether or not I should waste my time on writing a sufficiently vitriolic diatribe. These are admittedly subjective and complimentary to the usual artistic points of consideration: composition, pacing, acting skill, strength of writing and the rest of that high falutin rubric, but I find them nonetheless useful.

Some of these I’ve mentioned in passing, but this is the first time I’ve ever really codified everything. Presented for your approval: five methods I use to decide whether a movie is good or bad.

1. Length of Time to First Watch Check

This method is somewhat less accurate since I’ve begun to notice it in myself. It used to be that I’d be watching a movie, and suddenly have the mighty, unrestrainable urge to know what time it is right now. So then I’d be leaning back in the crusty chair with built in cup holders, trying to angle my watch in such a way as to catch all the light from the screen and—ah, crap, the movie just changed from a bright scene to a dark one! Now I have to wait until they cut to another outdoor shot so there are enough photons in the theater to illuminate the watch face. Okay, here we go: 9:43pm and 27 seconds. Okay. Whew. That was a close one.[1]

This finagling to read my watch was happening with such regularity that I couldn’t help but notice I was doing it. I realized that the quality of the movie could be expressed as a function of the length of time after the movie started that I try to check my watch. Since I’m aware of it at this point, I’ve had to refine this principal to take into account the “Length of Time to Initial Thinking About Watch Checking”—but most of the time, if I think about it, it takes a herculean effort to keep my eyes off my wrist and on the screen, during which effort I’m not paying attention to the movie anyway. The initial watch check almost invariably happens (I estimate, because I’m not looking at my watch, of course) within 20 seconds of the initial watch check thought, so they are nearly synonymous in terms of movie quality.

As an example, I do sometimes enjoy candy-coated action movies like Pirates of the Caribbean. With these, I’ll check my watch about half way through. That doesn’t mean it’s bad, but it doesn’t mean it’s great either. On the other hand, during a superb movie like Galaxy Quest I won’t check my watch at all.

2. Frequency of Subsequent Watch Checks

The initial watch check is often a good indicator of movie quality, but it can not be considered infallible. If I have something going on after the movie, I’m more inclined to check my watch to verify that I won’t be late. If I have to pee, I’m checking my watch every twelve seconds to try and calculate bladder fill rate over time, along with when the movie is going to end, so I can make a cost-benefit decision on holding it and being uncomfortable versus inconveniencing the entire row yet enjoying the rest of the flick pressure-free.

A more accurate refinement, then, is to take into account the frequency of watch checking after the first check. The first check might have been during the opening scene, but that could simply have been because I forgot to check the time during the trivia pre-roll, and I needed to reset my temporal frame of reference. If I don’t check my watch again for the rest of the movie, this first check could be safely discarded as an anomalous data point. Indeed, if I only check my watch once, this can often be discarded, unless it’s near the end of the movie at which point it’s an indicator that maybe the movie is running too long. This happened during Return of the King—a movie that held my attention right up to the 52nd ending, at which point I broke down and checked my watch.

But generally speaking, an early watch check followed by a plethora of additional watch checks is a pretty solid indicator of a crappy movie.

3. Crowd Watching

There’s always that one person who whips out their phone with its illumination power of a thousand suns and starts texting. This small rectangle of photons not associated with the much larger rectangle of photons always attracts the eye down to itself. Despite it forcing you to watch someone in the crowd, being pulled away from the movie like this is not the crowd watching I’m referring to.

Crowd watching is when you start thinking during the movie, I wonder if anyone is texting. Seeing no small rectangles of light, this is followed shortly by, I wonder if there’s anyone in here trying to record the movie with a video camera or something. So then you start to scan the rows in front of you to see if anyone is sitting suspiciously. (Note: if you’re one of those fans of neck sprain who sit in the front row which is practically underneath the screen, this does not apply to you.) Now you’re looking at everyone, straining your eyes because the movie isn’t putting out enough light for an effective search. After you scan back and forth a few times, you conclude, disappointed, that no one is attempting any stick-it-to-the-man piracy—at least not in front of you—but that would make sense because this movie is pretty lame. Then you remember there’s a movie and start watching again, and realize you’ve missed nothing.

That’s crowd watching. It only happens during bad movies, or incredibly boring parts of okay movies.

4. MST3K, FTW

Among friends and their living rooms, MST3K heckling is common, even during good movies. Among me and my friends in particular, MST3K heckling is, for all practical purposes, synonymous with “watching the movie”. I’m really bad at keeping myself under control with respect to this, so even in a theater during a good movie, I will throw out MST3K comments under my breath to the friend sitting next to me. (After the fifth or six one, I stop, having been punched in the face.) But only once have I experienced full-blown Mystery Science Theater-ism in a theater, where everyone and their grandmother was getting in on the fun.

The movie was Battlefield Earth, which is not coincidentally also the worst movie I’ve ever seen in a theater. Battlefield Earth is great in that it was a perfect storm of movie badness. I remember that the trailers were exciting and effective. Whoever put those together should get a bonus or something. They took the most craptastic contemporary movie and cut a little gem out of it.

Most of my friends were looking forward to seeing this movie, and we all went on opening night. That Battlefield Earth was an enormous pile compared to its svelte little advertising counterpart forced our hand. This was in combination with, if I recall, a pretty poor summer line-up, so there weren’t many good or even fun action-ey movies to see anyway. All things combined, BE couldn’t have blown any harder.

I don’t remember exactly when it started, but I think it was during one of Travolta’s exceptionally whiny tirades that was supposed to be some sort of powerful statement and plot point, but a few of us laughed at the whole crappy delivery. That first laugh-out-loud gave consent, as it were, to the rest of the theater that, hey, sure, you guys can laugh, too. Might as well have fun since we just got stiffed eight bucks. After that, it was free laughter and heckling comments the rest of the way through. I think one or two people booed at the end. Anyway, the point is: if the movie you’re in inspires real life MST3K antics, it’s even worse than you thought.

5. Persistent Immersion

The previous points were all how I can tell if a movie is bad, but this one is a way for me to tell if it’s good. This has been happening all my life, but I can’t say how common it might be, based on the following conversation I had a few months ago.

Me: “Hey, do you know how, after you finish watching a really good movie or playing a really immersive computer game, it kind of feels like you’re in the movie or the game?”

Person: “No.”

So that didn’t bode well for my theory of Universal Persistent Immersion, but it does happen to me, regardless of how weird other people may consider me. Persistent Immersion is exactly what I described. A perfect example is Brazil. I think this movie is the greatest thing ever, and every time I watch it (even though I’ve seen it like 200 times), afterwards I feel like I’m trapped in the world of Sam Lowry and his dystopia. I start noticing exposed ducts everywhere. And as the war on terror enters its seventh year, I wonder if the ongoing terrorist bombing campaigns in the Middle East are really beginner’s luck.

I think this happens more with video games than movies, probably because they’re interactive. After a few hard hours of Tetris, you start automatically rotating objects and fitting them around other objects. It becomes second nature.

If a movie is really good, I will experience persistent immersion past the end of the movie. This happens more with dire, serious movies, so I often end up wandering about my transformed world in a daze of stupifaction—but when it does happen, I know it was a good movie that caused it.

That wraps up the list. These are the first-impression tricks I use to evaluate movies—often as I’m watching them. While not perfect, they are accurate enough to be more than mere coincidence. As such, they’re useful tools with which to make snap judgments, and a they’re a huge help in determining what movies to shoot dow—uh, review, on the Not A Blog™.

-Ted

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1. I always wear analogue watches, which don’t tend to have a back light. The more expensive models might, but I’m a cheapskate. I have also tried using my phone—but that is too bright, and I don’t want to look like one of those inconsiderate “uses the cell phone during the movie” jerks. Plus, I’m an obedient proletariat, so I always turn the thing off when the giant flying cell phone appears on the screen with the female version of Don LaFontaine politely but firmly telling everyone to silence them. [Back]