Vinegar over Wine: What Film Schools Should Teach by Gary Hainsworth

Film schools should not be allowed to show good movies. If this is not there way, and their selection is far more varied on the spectrum of quality between awful and good, disregard the previous sentence. However, if it is not, let us proceed shall we. Film schools should not be allowed to show good movies. Rather, film students should be required to watch a steady diet of the worst of the worst: Battlefield Earth, Foodfight, The Room, Samurai Cop, Lawnmower Man: Beyond Cyberspace (incomprehensibly called Jobe's War in the original video releases), Showgirls, Troll 2, Santa Claus Conquers the Martians, Who's Your Caddy?, Son of the Mask, Theodore Rex, Subspecies 2-4 (and Vampire Journals), Plan 9 from Outer Space. Manos: The Hands of Fate, and so forth. The benefit would be four-fold. One: you deconstruct where a movie went wrong (and to a lesser extent: what went right) using what are tantamount to real-life case studies. In effect, learning from other people's mistake with the intention to not replicate their respective failures. Two: encourage confidence. After all, if these movies could be produced then there's hope for the rest us with nothing more than a dream and a notebook. Three: a quasi-memento mori reminding us what Geoff Colvin has been reminding us for years: that talented is overrated. It certainly is. Many of these aforementioned movies, not to mention terrible movies in general, were made by talented people and don't say that people like Tommy Wiseau aren't talented (at least a little). I don't know if I could have raised six million dollars to finance a movie just by importing leather jackets from one of the Korea's. I'm sure few can. Could I replicate the business savvy of Roger Corman or Meachem Globus (1929–2014)? I don't know. Yet even in their pursuit of quantity they occasionally made quality. In other words, bad movies are made by talented people all the time (and even what constitutes as bad and what constitutes as good is quite murky). Four: separate the wheat from the chaff. It requires no effort whatsoever to sit through "Citizen Kane", "Goodfellas", or "North by Northwest" (1959). I'd watch those movies when I'm bored any day. However, it takes a certain level of dedication to the craft to sit through "They're eating her....and then they're going to eat me!......OH MY GOD!!!" or "What does "katana" mean? ~ "It means Japanese sword."

Best Video Game Movie Ever? by Gary Hainsworth

December 2016, Updated August 2022

Is it possible that "Mortal Kombat", which was better when it was called "Enter the Dragon" and starred Bruce Lee, is the best live-action video game adaptation of all time? Is that a depressing commentary of the movie genre itself if the answer turns out to be yes/? It's a sad thought, but the conclusion seems rather inescapable. The only other good movie based on a video game that comes to mind is "Street Fighter II: The Animated Movie." All the others I can think of are either "so bad they're good" or are just plain terrible. Bad as it is, I "enjoyed" the "Super Mario Bros" movie despite a part of me wishing it had the plot of "Blue Velvet" (with Princess Peach in the Isabella Rossellini role and Koopa played by Dennis Hopper channeling Frank Booth) instead. 

Still, I don't like having to grade movies on a curve. However, until video game adaptations produce their own version of The Dark Knight (2008) or even Batman Begins (2005) curved their grade will have to be just to say that the genre itself is not entirely devoid of merit. Back in the day, a good comic book movie, let alone a great one, was so rare a bird that the idea of their being a good comic book was almost absurd. Sure, but people are now being nominated and or winning Oscars for films that started their creative journey as a comic book or graphic novel. Whereas before comic book movies, on those few occasions they would be considered for Oscar consideration, tended to be nominated for technical awards like Art Direction, Cinematography, and Visual Effects, but those above-the-line categories traditionally called Creative, such as acting, writing, directing, remained elusive until relatively recently.

Now the comic book movie is better accepted as a valid genre come awards season and not treated as the unfortunate source of Hollywood's wealth the way Gatsby tries to distance himself from his bootlegging past. For example, Paul Newman being nominated, but not winning for his role as John Mooney in the Sam Mendes directed movie Road to Perdition (2002), William Hurt being nominated but not winning for his role in the David Cronenberg directed movie A History of Violence (2005), and Heath Ledger being nominated, but unlike many others, winning for his posthumous performance as The Joker in The Dark Knight (2008). If one wishes to expand the definition of a comic book movie to include a comic strip then Al Pacino's scene-stealing performance as "Big Boy" Caprice in Dick Tracy (1990) as Best Supporting Actor is a further example of the comic book movies slow and steady march toward artistic legitimacy as a proper movie genre. Video game movies have had no such parallels and are generally considered to be synonymous with terrible, and there appears to be many legitimate reasons for the persistent belief that a video game movie is garbage. Because virtually all movies based on a movie have been awful. Occasionally profitable, but never critical darlings. 

Update (08/2022): While the genre has yet to have an equivalent to The Dark Knight (2008) or Joker (2019), three have been a few video game based/inspired movies that achieved critical success. Pokemon Detective Pikachu (2019), Sonic the Hedgehog (2020), and its direct sequel Sonic the Hedgehog 2 (2022) are all rated over 60% on Rotten Tomatoes. In other words, certified fresh. Great films they are not, but good or at least good enough, most certainly.