Time will tell

So the Academy Awards happened. I haven’t watched the ceremony in years because it just no longer seemed relevant to me, often more of an exercise in money, politics, and prejudices than actual quality. Then again, my own prejudices swing towards genre, “escapist” fare, and the Academy by and large does not acknowledge such efforts except perhaps to toss them a visual effects or sound award. Call it an agreement to disagree.

Nonetheless, I’ve read some thinkpieces and summaries on the show and a recurring theme appeared to be a backlash against superhero movies, which is a shame as I feel like 2014 saw the release of two of the best films ever to come out of Marvel Studios. I have both Captain America: The Winter Soldier and Guardians of the Galaxy on blu-ray now. Guardians in particular I have now seen four times over and have thoroughly enjoyed each viewing. I have an instinct that neither will be wearing out their welcome with me anytime soon.

Now, I could spend this blog reiterating some counterpoints to things like Dan Gilroy’s praise of independent and serious filmmakers standing against the “tsunami of superhero movies”, but others have already quite elegantly stepped up in their defense, or defense of “lighter” film fare in general.

Instead, I want to bring up this thought. Thirty years ago, 1985 saw the release of several movies that impacted my generation to such an extent we still remember them and share our experiences of them and quote them to this day: Back to the Future, Better Off Dead, The Breakfast Club, Goonies; heck for purposes of this blog, let’s throw in Return of the Living Dead, the movie that first introduced the cry of “brains!” to the zombie genre. You know what movie I rarely, if ever, see referenced? Serious, important (albeit not indie) Best Picture winner Out of Africa.

Now am I claiming Goonies was a better film? Well, Out of Africa does seem to make a lot of “overrated” lists, especially since it beat out the still much more memorable The Color Purple, but yeah, that’s the thing. Being remembered probably should count for something. I sometimes feel like the Oscars might be more relevant as a celebration of filmmaking excellence if, instead of choosing between the movies of the previous year, they chose their Best Picture nominees from films that released five or even ten years before. After all, we should be looking past the trendy shine of the moment, right? That’s why all these pop culture box office megahits are just dust in the wind, not worthy of consideration next to real, meaningful cinema.

And yet, Ghostbusters is still a worldwide phenomenon to this day, while you would have been hard pressed to find any 30th anniversary fan-fests of Terms of Endearment or even Amadeus. Can you truly continue to write something off as nothing but popular, lowest common denominator tripe when it retains that power to make people laugh, cry, and/or scream over the decades? When it inspires entirely new generations, the way so many current industry professionals can point to a film like Jaws or Star Wars and state, “When I first saw that, that’s when I knew I wanted to make movies.”

In relation to superhero movies, the comparison can be made to the era of Westerns in cinema that dominated studio output for many years because audiences had a hunger for cowboy stories. Out of those hundreds of films we have a handful of all-time classics, some true stinkers, and a great majority that were just forgettably mediocre. And despite their box office success or critical acclaim or lack thereof, only the passage of time truly sorted out the wheat from the chaff.

Now do remembrance, inspiration, and cult followings really equate to quality? All right, if I say “yes” someone’s going to remind me that Troll 2 or The Room have become phenomena over time since their debuts. And… I’m actually comfortable with that. Look, I’m not saying they’re on the level of Casablanca, but I do believe the truly awful can be as inspiring and memorable as the truly great.

If you’d like to hear more from me and some of my colleagues on how that could be, and you’re in the L.A. area, I invite you to come down to the Long Beach Comic Expo this Sunday, March 1st, where at 3:30pm I will be part of a panel entitled “The Satellite Show Presents: Yakmala!”. It’s our bad movie watching club. If you can’t make it, well, here’s a blog I did expressing some of our core principles for movie selection. Yes, we’re actually picky about our terribleness. Plan 9 From Outer Space may not be a good movie, but Ed Wood wanted it to be, and that sort of misguided passion can shine down through the ages just as much as it does for the passionate films that work.