A guide to avoiding cinematic crap

For reasons impossible to fathom, people keep going to see shitty movies. Dreck like Meet the Spartans and You, Me and Dupree does well at the box office, even though they're just terrible, terrible movies and, as much as I grow increasingly convinced that the movie-going public is a bunch of tasteless stupid oafs who'll laugh at anything involving poop, I also need to believe things can change.

For that reason, here's a public service piece about how to avoid shitty movies. You might say it's about judging a book by its cover but, hey, sometimes that works. In Blink, Malcolm Gladwell explains how "thin-slicing" - making conclusions based on very small pieces of data - can be often be more accurate than seeing the big picture. Well, it works for movies too. Things like posters or specific actors can tell you a lot.

Of course, a terrible movie comes down to taste, and how does on measure that? Box office receipts don't work, since, as I said, the movie-going public are morons with too much money to spend. Individual critics don't mean much either, but a collective opinion can tell you a lot. So, I'm relying on Rottentomatoes.com and its tomatometer, the yardstick it uses to rate how well a movie is received. Interestingly, I wrote this whole piece, then checked the ratings and sure enough, every movie that I claim is shit (without having seen) is also, by critical consensus, shit. And many of these shitty movies share certain characteristics that you should keep an eye out for.


The Bad Comedy Face

This is a universal sign for "Shit comedy! Flee!" It's an expression that shows degrees of shame, embarrassment and ineffectual wackiness. It's a plea to be forgiven for appearing in a shit movie and it's a sign that you don't know how to be funny. It typically incorporates a weary smile, raised eyebrows and/or eye-rolling.

Example the first: Matt Dillon from You, Me and Dupree. This bad comedy face says, "Boy, I'm not even ready for the wackiness in store, and neither are you!"

You, Me and Dupree's tomatometer rating: a whopping 22 per cent.

Example the second: Steve Martin in Cheaper By the Dozen. Similar to Dillon, this is the BCF of the hilariously embattled but endearing chump. It sucks to see it, but Martin is an expert at the BCF, because his recent spate of terrible, terrible movies have necessitated it.

Cheaper by the Dozen's tomatometer rating: 24 per cent.

The BCF can also be a sign to indicate that the movie is supposed to be funny, and if that's the best way the promoters can find to communicate that fact, it's a disaster. If a comedy is genuinely funny, it's obvious. If the actors have to wave these flags at you to indicate it's a comedy, you know it's trash.

Example the third: Leslie Neilsen from 2001: A Space Travesty. I mean, Jesus Christ, look at that. It's hard to even verbalize why that's so bad. Just trust me, when you see shit like that on the poster, save your money, your time and your brain cells.

2001's tomatometer rating: N/A (most critics didn't even bother to rate it, although some comments are found here.)

Possible exception: Bill Murray's Bad Comedy Face.

Bill Murray is a great comedic actor, but his major downfall is that he makes this face all the fucking time. He's tricky that way though, because he does it on the poster for one of his best movies (Groundhog Day), and one that I never saw, but I'm sure is irredeemable crap (The Man Who Knew Too Little).

Prominent crotch jokes

If you're promoting a movie, you need to put your best foot forward. You put some of the funniest parts in the trailer and the poster. And if someone getting hit in the balls is in the funniest thing they can find to promote, the movie sucks.

Look at this poster for The Big Green. Now that you're in the know about the Bad Comedy Face, you should know that this movie is only good for violating other peoples' human rights. This poster features five, count 'em, FIVE Bad Comedy Faces. The only thing not making the BCF on this poster is an animal, and Disney execs had a long debate over weather to photoshop a dumb grin on its face.

The Big Green's tomatometer rating: ZERO

Similarly, testicular plays on words are another bad sign. Take a movie like Balls of Fury, which crams two stupid "balls" references into one poster. Or Mr. Woodcock, using a hilarious one-two punch of cock and a visual representation of giant balls. If you're a 13-year-old idiot, your comedic cup runneth over.

Mr. Woodcock on the tomatometer: 13 per cent


Eugene Levy

It pains me to put him here since he's a gifted Canadian comic actor, but Levy is now a strong indicator of cinematic shittiness. Take a glance at his IMDb listing of say, his last ten movies. You've got three American Pie spinoffs, one movie with the Olsen Twins (with a terrible Bad Comedy Face on the poster - seen at right) and another where he stars as Mr. Nerdlinger. It's indisputable, empirical truth that those all suck, and even by abandoning all reason and giving Curious George and The Man the benefit of the doubt, it means at least 60 per cent of his recent movies are grotesque abortions.

Exception: Anything also starring Christopher Guest. Those collaborations give you stuff like Best in Show and A Mighty Wind - good flicks.

TV remakes

Movies based on TV shows are always to be avoided. In all of cinema history, there are just two good movies based on TV shows: South Park and The Muppet Movie (The Muppet Christmas Carol, while awesome, does not count). Otherwise, it's a parade of mind-numbing garbage that was approved at drunken board meetings of the respective film companies. Some are shameless money-grabs (The Simpsons) and some are wrongheaded attempts at nostalgia bucks (Bewitched), but they (almost) all suck.

The sheer ratio of good remakes to awful ones make the movie-going decision for you. The odds are largely on the side of the movie being a craptacular waste, so don't bother.

This is by no means an exhaustive manual, but it really should make a difference. There are so many good movies out there, why waste your time on the crap ones? Hopefully, this will help improve your viewing experiences. And if you find these warning signs are common to your favourite movies, you're just a hopeless mouth-breathing dolt anyway, and who helped you read this far?