Black Gate

Bad films reek, and at a distance, too.

Bad Arthurian films have a special odor all their own. John Boorman’s Excalibur (1981)  may be a mess, but it’s a glorious mess, chaos of the highest and noblest order; in retrospect, it smells remarkably sweet.

Sadly, where Excalibur rises above both its Wagnerian grand guignol and its elaborate and intentional eccentricities, the mini-series Merlin (1998) sinks beneath a morass of imitative, careless, and flashy choices. It’s like a pretty stone chucked into dark and thankless waters: for an instant, on its way down, it glimmers. And then, blessedly, three hours later, it’s gone.

The star-studded cast is jaw-dropping. A film that boasts John Gielgud, Miranda Richardson, James Earl Jones (voice only), Isabella Rossellini, Rutger Hauer, Billie Whitelaw, and Helena Bonham Carter shouldn’t be a failure –– such an outcome shouldn’t be possible –– but as with so many popular music albums featuring a glittering luminati of “guest stars” and “collaborators,” star power proves to be yet another form of lead weight. Without the grace of good storytelling and with far too many overwrought effects, even the best actors on the planet prove to be nothing more than celluloid cannon fodder.

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“Excellent, Dude! This movie was totally triumphant!… Not since the McKenzie Brothers or the Frog Brothers has a group come along as wild as these Wyld Stallyns…”

So I wrote 24 years ago in my review of Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure. Dude, I totally didn’t talk like that — for those who never saw the movie, I was riffing on the way the characters speak.

Looking back over the review now, I notice that I list the then-unknown actor who played Ted as “Keavy Reeves.” We didn’t have the Internet Movie Database — or the Internet — back then; my guess is I misread the notes I jotted down in the theater.

I also notice it was a decent review that gave readers of the high school newspaper a good grasp of what the film was all about, albeit a bit adverb-heavy: “As one can probably tell this movie had great potential to be utterly stupid. It is on that fine line between being fantastically dumb and riotously hilarious, but it succeeds in being the latter. . . . It is an incredibly funny movie and I declare it excellent.”

So the review holds up okay. Question is, does the movie? I confess I haven’t watched it in years, but I have seen it several times, and my memories of it are fond ones (it was filmed in the places where I hung out in high school, so it is a trip down memory lane in more ways than one).

When I declared Bill and Ted’s to be “excellent,” was I (aside from playing on the characters’ vernacular) putting it in the same category as 2001: A Space Odyssey? Bill and Ted’s is nominally a science-fiction (time travel) film. Of course, it is primarily a comedy, so was I elevating it to the ranks of Some Like It Hot, Duck Soup, and Dr. Strangelove? (If you haven’t guessed, the answer is Hell no.) This leaves one big question, which brings us to the final topic I wish to consider in this series on the art of rating: When we rate a film (or a book or a television show etc.), what are we rating it against?

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Last week, I began my reflections on the art of rating. These thoughts are based on my own 25+ years of reviewing literature and film, as well as on being an avid reader of reviews and follower of particular critics.

To recap, in last week’s post I covered the selection of a ratings scale, which can vary from the most simple “thumbs up/thumbs down” to a more nuanced 10-point scale such as I use (five stars, with half-star increments). I also touched on the implications of being either a stingy or a generous rater.

This week, I’ll delve a bit deeper by considering the importance of establishing one’s viewpoint and communicating that viewpoint (with all its preferences and prejudices) to the reader.

After I see a film, there are two additional pay-offs besides the film-viewing experience itself: 1) (social) discussing the film with friends, family, colleagues who also saw it; and 2) (solitary) paying a visit to rottentomatoes.com, the aggregating site that links to hundreds of reviewers, to find out what amateur and professional critics thought of it. It’s fun to see how one’s own impression compares to the general consensus, and I enjoy those “A-ha!” moments when a critic deftly articulates some emotional or intellectual response the film also evoked in me (or when they wittily trash an aspect of the film that I also abhorred). Doesn’t always happen, even when a critic has assigned to a film the same rating I’ve given it. It goes without saying that we can like the same thing for different reasons; likewise, we can dislike something equally vehemently, but on completely different grounds.

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