What Makes A Good Movie?...

By J. Bunce

People who have read a fair number of my reviews have a good idea of what kinds of movies I generally like or don't like, and how I express that like or dislike. But I realized I've never actually spelled out what criteria I use to qualify a movie as a "thumbs up" or "thumbs down" (not that I can actually use those terms, of course, as long as Roger Ebert has them under copyright). THEN I realized that hardly ANY movie reviewer has ever come out and done that, unless it's in the course of actually writing a book about the subject (as Ebert has often done).

So I thought it couldn't hurt to spell out just what elements can cause a movie to wind up on my good or bad side. Anyone who hasn't read much of my stuff yet can use this to help them decide whether they think it's worth the trouble:

PASSION. One of the real necessities for me is that I have to get the feeling that the movie's director was so excited about the concept of the picture that they just had to make the movie... that it was something they seriously wanted to see and that probably wouldn't have gotten made if they didn't do it. Now, this has nothing to do with whether a movie is a foreign language film, an indie art house release, or a Hollywood blockbuster... for example, I definitely believe that Katherine Bigelow felt that kind of enthusiasm and passion about "The Hurt Locker", that Lee Daniels was that excited about "Precious", and even that James Cameron felt that way when "Avatar" first occurred to him. On the other hand, the notion that Brian Levant felt the world of movies would be infinitely poorer without "The Spy Next Door" or that Roland Emmerich thought the world needed to see "2012" strains my credibility past the breaking point. A movie that is just getting made to appeal to an established market or rake in the bucks earned by a previous film definitely is NOT being made out of a passion to tell that story.

ACTING. Yeah, I know, everyone knows that good acting is essential to a movie. But what exactly qualifies as good acting? For me, it's when you don't SEE the performer acting. They can be calm and understated or excited and shouting, it doesn't matter, as long as that's what their character would be doing in that situtation. The main thing is that you're able to forget for a brief moment that you're watching an actor and think you're watching a person actually going through that experience. A good example: I love Jack Nicholson, I believe he's a genuine treasure. However, let's face it, as time has gone by he's slipped more and more into "obviously acting" mode. As fun as he was to watch as The Joker in "Batman", for instance, there wasn't one second he was on screen where you could forget he was Jack Nicholson pretending to be that character. On the other hand, with Heath Ledger in "The Dark Knight", you did not see a single trace of Heath Ledger on screen, neither Ledger the man nor any character he had previously played. You were just looking right into the face of genuine madness. If a movie has too many cast members who can't invest themselves that deeply in the role, I'm going to have problems with it.

STRAIGHT FACED COMEDY. This sort of relates to the previous. In a comedy, I almost always find it infinitely more amusing when the cast plays it totally straight, as if they (and their characters) have absolutely no idea at all that they're supposed to be funny. Obvious mugging and such over the top actions really distract from the humor, at least they do for me. That's one of the reasons that I found "Airplane!" so hysterical: a cast of previously ultra-serious actors like Leslie Nielsen, Robert Stack and Peter Graves doing this incredibly silly material with exactly the same straight faced seriousness as all their previous roles. "Don't call me Shirley!" just wouldn't have been as funny if Leslie Nielsen had been mugging while he said it.

SUBTLE HORROR. A horror movie like the "Saw" series or your typical slasher movie... or pretty much the majority of horror movies these days... does nothing for me. A series of interchangable, plotless murders done in as graphically bloody fashion as possible just does not scare me, it grosses me out. I want to see a horror movie that's interesting in SCARING me. And nothing you see on screen can be as scary as what's in your own imagination. For that reason, "Paranormal Activity" is by my standards far and away the most frightening film in ages. A classic maxim of movie making is "Don't tell, show". Not in this case.

SPECIAL EFFECTS. A movie in which the people who are raving about it can't seem to find anything more significant to be enthusiastic about than the special effects is almost certainly going to be a bad movie, however good those effects might be. Special effects that don't make you forget the movie is about characters, and that are actually in service to the story rather than a substitute for it... now, that's what I find impressive.

SURPRISE. When I realize that a film I'm watching is just going according to a standard, rigid formula I immediately lose interest. That's one of the major problems I have with the vast majority of romantic comedies... the fact that there is no genre of movie that is more thoroughly bound by formula. A lot of people feel uncomfortable if a movie takes them somewhere they weren't expecting.. they want to know near the movie's beginning how it's all going to turn out. I'm not one of them. If a movie can genuinely surprise me, there's a whole lot of other faults it can probably get away with. I WANT the unexpected. I just wish I got it more often.

EMOTIONAL IMPACT. I've saved the most important for last. A movie absolutely has to make me FEEL something. Whether it's fear, laughter, whatever it might be... it has to get to me on an emotional level. And there's a funny thing about emotion... there's nothing logical about it. A movie might possibly be lacking a number of the above listed "necessary" qualities, but if it goes completely past my logical reasoning responses and makes me really FEEL something deeply, I'm going to rate it highly nonetheless. I can carefully examine a movie and find any number of faults with it, but if it's a horror movie that really scared me or a comedy that had me in hysterics, it still comes out a winner. So do none of those other things matter? Actually, they matter a lot. Just not as much as emotion.

That's not everything, but I'm not writing a book here. It's enough at least to give you some idea of what makes a movie good or bad for me.


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