Those Delightful Quirks

So, despite the rocky relationship I share with film, and the myriad of complaints I have; there are still some flaws that are nothing but endearing, and these are my guilty pleasures. It's often painfully easy to spot how bad they are, but there's something that lets you look past it all, and for me that's a real achievement.

I've been trying to work out what the mystery aspect is that can make an otherwise bad film become so loved, but for every common factor I find, there are twice as many examples of it failing miserably. Do I love 'Hard Target'* because it's so unapologetically serious in every ludicrous scene? Then why does every Steven Seagal film suck? Does 'Dude, Where's my Car?' work for me because of the bizarre, non-sequitur randomness of the plot? Then why does 'Spice World'** make me want to set fire to the writer...slowly? I want that bitch to smolder. I'm going to stop the examples there as I'm just listing crap films I like and I suspect it's damaging my credibility.

Overall, that magical elixir seems to be a dynamic combination of factors, that combine with the hosts DNA in new and unique ways to produce a truly unpredictable attraction. And this seems to be the mystery. The bonds that we have for these films are as personal to us as fingerprints, and are as unexplainable as our own desires. While these flicks stand out as the obvious flaws in cinema, our fondness for them make them the endearing quirks in our own film psyche's.



*If you've not seen it, imagine Jean-Claude Van Damme fighting off a variety of gun-crazy caricatures who would look over the top in a 'Captain Planet' episode, that are hunting him for the sake of evil. All done in over the top John Woo style so that it takes 50 bullets to dramatically miss someone 6 feet away (in slo-mo)!

**Hideous Spice Girls movie, from back in the day. If you're remotely interested in finding out about it, then please watch this review first http://thatguywiththeglasses.com/videolinks/thedudette/nostalgia-chick/2969-spice-world