![]() From this point until then, our job as viewers is to go on a bunch of dates with Rod and Nathalie. The two meet in a diner scene that borders on Lynchian, inasmuch as anything weird or off-putting gets called “Lynchian.”Īfter what feels like fifteen minutes of quietly riding along with Rod under a birdless sky in California, the waitress breaks the silence in an absolute jump scare of audio wherein she says, “Hi!” This holds the most excitement you’re going to get for the next hour or so. She is a budding young fashion model (they never say “model,” always “fashion model”) who just landed a cover with Victoria’s Secret. Questions that someone who has never seen a solar panel in his life might have. Specifically, he is a software salesman, though he later sells green tech, which is strange considering we also get a shot of a solar panel salesman coming to Rod’s house, and Rod has questions for him. Touching briefly on what can generously be called the plot, Rod is a guy, not a bird. It is like someone once told Nguyen, “this guy made a movie about killer birds” once, and Nguyen said, “cool.” The film itself is an homage to a Hitchcockian classic, and yet it holds neither reverence for it nor reference to it. There is so little care, so little passion that it wraps back around and becomes interesting. Even the opening credits feature the words “Supporting Casts” in a generic font. The entire project is afflicted by a disturbing apathy that infects everything from the actors to the oddly sterile North California setting to the CGI eagles who hover in mid-air with lazy, halfhearted little flaps of their wings. Everything worth thinking about in this movie comes back to its cold, sinister aura. Ignore that this is a clear homage to Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds, a film that opens with a title sequence featuring… birds (it does seem a bit intuitive). Ignore that there is not a bird to be found within the first 30 minutes of the movie, that it has a disinterest in the sky that borders on artistic intent- Jaws immediately thrusts us underwater, into danger, into the belly of the beast, but not here. I found this both intriguing and distressing. There is no light to be found within its hour-and-a-half run time. What’s interesting to me about Birdemic, though, is what it lacks. It had birds! Stilted dialogue, terrible effects, awkward sex scenes, these are all par for the course. After all, it had all the ingredients I look for in these kinds of movies. Teddy and I had high hopes for Birdemic (Yes, Teddy now gets top billing in these reviews). That’s part of the fun of the whole thing. This pursuit has brought us no shortage of fool’s gold.īirdemic: Shock and Terror, written and directed by James Nguyen and released in 2010, is one such hunk of rock that’s been offered up as raw ore, the stuff “good bad movies” are made of: Yes, you will have to work for it, but there’s something valuable, something interesting in there, if you can sieve it out. What I’m more certain of, however, is that its overrepresentation in the “good bad movie” genre has sent many cinephiles on a treasure hunt for precious metals of similar value. For many, it’s simply a funny, silly movie to play in college. ![]() I can’t know for sure if it’s the quest for the sublime in a less alloyed form that draws others to The Room. Wiseau is just untalented, which is fine. The Room is a movie made by a believer, by a man on fire, no less on fire than Michelangelo or Emily Dickinson or Prince or Pasolini or Ella Fitzgerald or the Dril Twitter account or any number of storied artists who’ve stolen from the light of Olympus and brought it back down to earth in the palms of their bare hands to share with us mortals. It topples over, falls down a flight of stairs, and breaks both its legs as it does so, yes, but it reaches nonetheless: at themes of infidelity and reckless passion. Beyond the ironic fandom and the cult classic status lies an incredibly earnest work reaching for the sublime. Tommy Wiseau’s The Room, to cite a prominent example, has elicited the interest of millions as precisely this sort of curio. Cultivating an appreciation for bad art brings us into finer attunement with appreciation for art in general. Such slapdash projects, lacking the precision and elegance that mastery over craft provides, offer a raw, visceral glimpse at the smoldering Promethean flame at the center of man’s works. This fact is what draws me to awful films in the first place. Within each human creative endeavor both large and small exists at least a flickering ember of the divine.
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