On Bad Vs. "Bad" Film

Hoping to have a real post for you in the near future. In the meantime, in the spirit of posting more links to good writing, here’s an excellent piece from my favorite working film critic, Nick Pinkerton. As with all Pinkerton’s pieces on his Substack, this one ranges widely. If your curiosity is less than piqued by an in-depth discussion of low budget 80s Japanese cinema, you can pause the essay halfway through after reading Pinkerton’s excoriation of the current state of American cinema, both Marvelicious and “artsy”. Vintage Pinkerton. Here’s a sample:

“In fact, there’s nothing surprising about the manner in which arthouse indies have become a game reserve for Disney, because the only crucial difference between them is the scale of their operations. The qualities that are awarded on the U.S. independent film festival circuit—sturdy three-act storytelling, no stylistic or formal intercessions that might get in the way of emotional involvement, a nice lacquer of social conscience to finish—are the same qualities that are valued in the modern tentpole. (As for the big-budget action bonanzas, they can be left to the second unit and the CGI galley slaves.) If this prim, professional, marvelously unproblematic generation of auteurs called up from the indie farm system can seem so interchangeable as to have been grown in a lab, well, that’s because most of them were: a Sundance Lab.”

Pinkerton’s thoughts here mesh quite well with my own in my previous post on masscult and midcult - and of course, even better with the thoughts of Dwight Macdonald, whose work I reference in that post. But do go read the whole piece from Pinkerton.