Bad Movies: Directed Rage

On more than one occasion, Megan has asked me why I continue to watch terrible movies even when I know they’re terrible and can easily see that they’re going down hill.
Part of the answer is that I can’t stop consuming media if I’m already in it - books, movies, TV show seasons, etc. - and I apparently have a mild masochistic streak when that media isn’t up to snuff (I watched four seasons of “Shameless” before it became too much for me).
The other part is that I write best when I’m hating on something.
When I make the unfortunate mistake of paying for a movie ticket because the trailers were a little too slick, or wasting my time on a flight when I have a queue of stuff to watch, getting to insult what I’ve watched helps mitigate the frustration of the time I just lost.

Yes, I’m aware of ‘rage culture’ and how being angry on purpose just feeds an unhealthy obsession.
I don’t review bad movies explicitly because I want to be upset about them - “A Vigilante” wasn’t good, but it didn’t make me angry.
I’ll happily watch a wide range of movies for a myriad of reasons, whether or not I get to write something insulting about it later is a different matter completely, and is entirely based on how the movie played out.

So: why do I like writing mean things about bad movies?
Because they exist.
Someone, somewhere, who makes more money in a month than I’ll see in my entire life, green-lights horrible, horrible scripts with stupid plots and idiotic characters.
Those characters do things that no reasonable human being would ever do, while physics arbitrarily stops working and internal consistency rules get broken for the sake of progressing the story.

There are countless good ideas out there. Good story lines, good character development, good scenery.
When any number of those come together, they get 3, 4, or 5-Claw reviews, because they’ve clearly and cleanly hit on the things that make a movie good and worth sitting through.
Even converting a pre-existing book into a movie: the material is already there, it just needs a physical embodiment.

When the director can’t be arsed to create believable characters, or develop engaging plot lines, I have to wonder how many sycophants were there on set chattering “yes! yes! yes!” to every suggestion made. Or, if it wasn’t that, then some studio exec wrote a blank check and said “make me something, anything!” when they should have been saying “make me something the studio can be proud of!”
I can only assume the ‘blank check’ logic is what explains the waking nightmare that is cinematic existence of “Cats” (2019).

Now, I get that some stories simply cannot translate into good movies. “Ancillary Justice” is a perfect example: it’s a hard-core sci-fi story that relies on a non-human character to monologue through most of the adventure in a far-off land in an unknown future. As a book, it was easy to read and understand; as a movie, I cannot think of a way a movie script could handle it without losing the magic of the character or spending 75% of the run time explaining things that printed word can explain in sentences in parenthesis.

So with so much good source material out there, why do directors feel the need to butcher it? I’m sure that, sometimes, an actor wants a very specific thing to be included (eg: Tom Cruise running in every movie), those are small potato changes to plots that should be outstanding.
I simply don’t know why directors tell tales that are terrible. There can’t be that much pressure from higher ups, or we wouldn’t have weird fiascos like Star Wars VIII and IX with problems caused by directors with too much free reign, or successes like the entire Marvel franchise, which is successful because the directors got so much freedom.

Clearly I’m not a director or a script writer. I’m not known for writing stories with good plot lines - if I was, I wouldn’t be a dude with a keyboard screaming into the void for my 13 readers and my parents to click to.
But come on studios; there’s got to be a way for you to make movies from a pre-existing source with your own “flair” that doesn’t also turn your multi-million-dollar endeavor into a stale tube of crushed Ritz crackers.

So to the writers and directors of the movies I give 1-Claw ratings to:
I write mean reviews of your stuff because you deserve it. You choose to make a movie with your ego instead of your brain, and it makes mush instead of magic.
You’ve earned the insults, and they’re so very fun to write.