Notes on the Substandard: Rogue One Redux

Sonny is absolutely right that GI Joe 2 is not “bad” and definitely not “so bad it’s good.” Rather, it is good at being bad, and this is different. I basically see two dimensions. There is a trashy/Oscar-bait dimension and a failure/successful dimension. We conflate these two in that “trashy” and “failure” are both called “bad”—but these have different meanings. The first is effectively a sort of genre convention or target market; the second an issue of execution of strategy. GI Joe 2 targets a trashy market segment, but nails it like a Roman centurion at Calvary. This is the complete opposite of a typical “so bad it’s good” movie that aspires to seriousness, but fails comically. Like, say, Valley of the Dolls. It gets interesting with something like Showgirls, which is on the far left tail in both dimensions, because it is both extremely trashy and an artistic failure, even as trash—but to such an extent that becomes so bad it’s good (at being bad). Contrast this with its artistic predecessor Basic Instinct, which is successful trash. This is actually something I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about, mostly in the context of why I don’t want to use critics’ reviews as a control variable in my Oscar-bait models. (My two reasons basically being that I think critic reviews conflate the two dimensions and that I’m interested in strategy, not execution). And this implies another problem: which is that you can measure the trash/Oscar-bait dimension, but measuring quality in the sense of doing what the movie is trying to do is much harder. And arguably impossible. Also, I appreciate Jon’s efforts to soldier on and give his (correct) theory of Gilmore Girls despite the cultural illiteracy of his co-hosts rendering it a monologue.