When Bad is Good

I rented the crappiest dvd the other day. Few things piss me off more than spending money on a movie you think is going to be great and it turns out to be a piece of crap. In this particular case, I got double-screwed, because I actually rented two dvd's that turned out to be crap. The two culprits were both Asian horror films, which I figured was a no-brainer, since every other Japanese horror film I've seen has been fantastic, but I found out the Japanese can be just as adept at making crappy sequels as Americans. I rented "Ringu2" (sequel to "Ringu" or as commonly known in the U.S., "The Ring") and a real piece of shit called "Phone". All the characters were totally unlikable and the plot was absolutely unfollowable.

But there are bad movies that are dear to my heart, that are so bad they are actually good. One of my favourites in this genre is a gem from the '70s, I believe, called "Moment by Moment" starring Lily Tomlin and John Travolta. Some Hollywood hotshot actually had the lunacy to think he could match these two romantically. I love Lily Tomlin, I think she's a good actress and very funny but let's face it, she's not going to win any beauty contests. And John Travolta was at a very hot point in his career at the time, having just finished doing "Saturday Night Fever", I believe. He had the hot bod, the "Welcome Back Kotter" cuteness at that point. So, not exactly a credible pairing. But that's what made it so great. Lily played this rich divorcee who had just been dumped by her mid-life crisis asshole husband. He left her the Malibu beachhouse but took off with the sports car and the bimbo. Lily was absolutely crushed by this, and spent most of her time trying to gain solace by reading at the beach, or crying into her toy poodle's fur. But then along came John, a hunky little piece of a beach boy, strolling along the beach seeing her and he starts hitting on her. At first she just thinks he's nuts but then she gradually comes to acknowledge her attraction to him and begins a very idyllic, carefree relationship with him. Of course the only problem is, he's 20-something and makes like $2.00 an hour delivering groceries and she's this rich 40-something divorcee, so they can never really mesh. But as in all totally implausible, bad Hollywood movies, they end up living happily ever after together at the end. The movie is just chock full of ridiculous dialogue and hilarious, mismatched, bad acting. You've got to see it if they ever re-run it on t.v., or even rent it if you can. You won't regret it.

Like I did with those crappy horror films.