Movie Tastes

[Fuzzy Necromancer]

I was surprised to read that Mike Nelson only has a 20% chance of enjoying a movie at the theaters.

What's up with that? Does he have a really bad judge of films by their trailers, or am I less discriminating?

The way I see it, I'm a "fried stuff" movie fan. I'm the cinematic equivalent of somebody who will eat anything fried if he can put ketchup on it. If a movie is scifi, fantasy, or horror, if it has monsters and glowy things, then odds are I'll enjoy it. I had a good time watching the prequel to "Cave Dwellers", and the original Troll..

What are your movie tastes? Are you a connesoir of drive-in trash, or will you turn up your nose at anything that didn't win awards at the Sundance film festival?

[RobtheBarbarian]

For me there are, generally speaking, two grades of movies that I enjoy:

Good Movies - Movies that, in my eyes of course, score above-average on the majority of key areas (plot, acting, dialogue, visuals etc.). They are enjoyable and intriguing on their own merit and don't need to be propped up by gimics or given the benefit of the doubt. I generally don't give movies "passable" ratings based on one decent attribute (like one of my friends who watches and enjoys Pathfinder for the killing, or Over the Hedge for the Shatner Racoon).

Bad/Funny Movies - Movies that unquestionably suck, but do it in a way that is enjoyable to witness (Dead Men Walking for example). They deserve no credit for being in this category, but they cause no lasting pain to watch and can make good impromptu comedies. I notice that the movies that make and effort and still fall short are better in this category than movies that just don't try. They still suck on their own merit regardless of how much I enjoy them.

I don't usually watch mediocre or truly painful movies, regardless of whatever singular redeeming qualities they may have. I'm not unforgiving or pretentious, but I have standards.

[Nunyerbiz]

Lots of good movies are ridiculous and lots of ridiculous movies are good... that's deep, I know.

No offense Mike, but if you only enjoy 20% of the movies you watch... then why the hell are you watching movies?!?

[RobtheBarbarian]

Maybe his statistic is counting all the movies he watched for MST and Rifftrax, in which case it would be disproportionately heavy on misery.

[Nunyerbiz]

I was surprised to read that Mike Nelson only has a 20% chance of enjoying a movie at the theaters.

I would stop going to the theater if I didn't enjoy the experience four out of every five times.

[dribbleglass]

I think enjoying a movie is a matter of adjusting your expectations. I can watch some pretty poor cinema and enjoy it ("Army of Darkness" comes to mind), and some movies which are loved by millions leave me cold. If you know when cinema is good, then you know when it's bad. I look for a little originality, myself. I'm tired of the same old formulaic stylized mass-produced blockbusters.

[Junkyard]

I like a lot of different movies. Mainly, though, I guess I enjoy Kaiju and Werewolf movies the most consistently. They're silly but they're full of heart.
Hasn't stopped me from enjoying a lot of the old black and white films.

[mrbasehart]

I'm not a very discerning viewer, and can pretty much take something away from any movie I watch.  I think the only true movie-crime for me is dullness. 

[ScottotD]

I don't really see a fun movie being worse than a movie that's considered more worthy, if I enjoy watching it then to me it's good.

[Cibernético II]

Army of Darness is not poor cinema. Low budget for Hollywood and perhaps a little silly to people who aren't into the genre, but a 100% in success in execution. Still one of the best directed action movies ever. Flows like the coolest sci-fi novel you ever read.

[Ranika]

Army of Darkness was intended to be what it was. Poor cinema to me is something that has expectations of being something more than it turns out to be (the Star Wars prequels, for example). You can't say they didn't intend Army of Darkness to be campy, they knew it was pure camp. It was what it was intended. Star Wars, however, we got a promise of an epic story, and we got Jar Jar and Anakin the super bitch.

Genrewise. I like almost anything really, but I gravitate toward horror movies, especially slasher pictures, those are good fun to make fun of. My prefered horror though, if I can get it, is a good supernatural thriller (a good one, not Ed Wood's classification of one). I like a lot of atmosphere, though I do want some big damn scares, not a dribble of fright now and again. However, I also like a lot of other movies. I love the typical geek stuff; horror, scifi, and fantasy, but I also enjoy a good drama. I don't mind stupid comedies, really; you know, bad movies with terrible jokes and paper thin plots, but they can be fun sometimes.

I do hate movies in a historical setting before the American Civil War though, because I can't shut off the portion of my brain that screams at the terrible inaccuracies that crop up more often the further back in history one goes. That said, I love good WW2 movies. Bad ones I don't even like to mock, they just bother the hell out of me (Pearl Harbor, ew).

However, I do find myself ever watching awful movies I hate. They're not funny bad, just bad. And I don't know why I watch them. Maybe Mike has a similar issue. He feels compulsed to see a movie, regardless of the certainty of suck.

[ScottotD]

Genrewise. I like almost anything really, but I gravitate toward horror movies, especially slasher pictures

Be prepared to be called a sociopath fairly often here then.

[PsypherPunk]

What's up with that? Does he have a really bad judge of films by their trailers, or am I less discriminating?

I guess it would depend on how often he (or anyone) goes to the cinema. Given that film is his trade I'd have thought he goes more often than most. With that in mind, 20% seems pretty high.

[Petey Wheatstraw]

I think that, in today's society, people have become so quick to judge a movie based on the fact that it's low-budget or whatever...I think MST3K is partially responsible for this as well...where any older film that's low-budget is automatically garbage. I can't get with that. A bad film is a film that fails on every levels and either is entertaining for being an obvious failure (the Ed Wood filmography) or not entertaining because they're so painfully bad. There's something seriously wrong with Americans' tastes.

Here's something extraordinarly questionable on part of the IMDb voters:

Here's one of my favorite films, it's a masterpiece, one of the best films ever made. The rating? 5.3/10.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0067810/

Here's a piece of unwatchable garbage. The rating? 6.9/10.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0374900/

Now I get that most viewers are likely to take to a comedic film more than a serious film, but what the hell? 6.9/10? Are you fucking serious?!? ND is one of the worst films I've ever seen, comedy or not. The rating should not be that high!!!

[Douglin]

You wanna know something that's worse, guess which of the following movies has the highest rating at rotten-tomatoes...

Star Wars Episode 1: Phantom menace
300
Spider-Man 3
Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End


Star Wars Episode 1: Phantom menace - 63%
300 - 61%
Spider-Man 3 -61%
Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End - 47%

and they wonder why badly reviewed movies still do good at the box office