“There’s always been some kind of snobbishness among these educated people when it comes to cinema, as if it was not as worthy as the other arts. But for better or worse, with increasingly distracted people spending less time on art and literature and suchlike, popular culture appears to have become the only culture.”
One of India’s best writers on cinema, Baradwaj Rangan, tells us why even bad films merit a review. Movies document contemporary culture for the future generations to be able to understand the curve that cinema as a barometer of pop culture follows. In other words, the movies we see today are a result of how our previous movies have largely shaped the movie culture of the country as we see it today. And in turn, these movies are also going to be a factor in the way our movies will find shape in the future.
When it comes to writing about cinema, the bad films are as important as the good ones.
“What makes you go watch this film despite knowing full well that it is nothing but trash?” Some version of this question crops up every time a critic reviews a “bad” movie. As subjective as the qualifier is, there are two kinds of “bad” movie. The first is a movie from a big production house or featuring a big star, or a movie made by a well-known director, or a movie about an issue – even if such a film is deemed bad content-wise, these other factors are seen as contributing to its “review-worthiness.” The idea, I suppose, is that people have heard about these films, so they’d want to know about the critic’s response to them.
We’re talking about the other kind of “bad movie,” the kind whose trailers leave us…
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