Sometimes bad movies can be good.
You know what I’m talking about: Most of us have likely seen one or two. Movies can be both problematic and resonant. They can be filled with bad behavior and good messages. You find films that you or I couldn’t recommend to a friend … and yet, if that somebody does see it, you know, on their own, they might learn a little something.
This whole issue of good movies/bad movies has been a point of tension for me ever since I began working for Plugged In—and, really, I think it’s a paradox that Plugged In has always dealt with. After all, most movies aren’t altogether good or bad. Most fall somewhere in between.
We Plugged In reviewers pay a lot of attention to what’s good and bad in the movie: What’s the worldview? Is there nudity or lots of blood? That sort of thing. We try to pay attention to both a movie’s superficial content (sexual stuff, violence, etc.) and its core content—that is, the explicit or underlying messages that it might communicate, intentionally or not. Sometimes a movie does come across as uniformly bad to us (like, say, Project X). Sometimes it can feel super-clean and uplifting. And if we find one of those in the latter camp, we kinda like to do a Movie Night on it.
But for Movie Nights, we sometimes like to tackle films that fall more in the middle. They may not be pure as the driven snow. And yet these flawed movies can teach us something about our equally flawed world—and what we can do to make it a little better and brighter.
Tomorrow you’ll see The Fault in Our Stars roll out on our Movie Nights page. This teen romance, based on a bestselling book, was one of the summer’s biggest hits—and perhaps one of the very few that isn’t predicated on explosions. The only fireworks you see are between the movie’s young, ill-fated teen lovers, Hazel and Gus. And when I say “lovers,” it’s accurate however you choose to define the word.
Gus and Hazel have sex outside of wedlock. Neither are particularly pious and, indeed, Christianity takes some shots here. This weepy drama has its share of problems, as evidenced by the two out of five “plugs” we gave it. We even slapped the film with a yellow (medium) warning label for adults—meaning that even if you’re paying a mortgage, this movie is one that you should think twice about before watching.
And the fact that we wrote a Movie Night about it does not mitigate any of our content concerns at all.
We wrote that Movie Night for those who choose to watch it despite our cautions. Because there are loads of lessons to be gleaned from it—both from what Gus and Hazel do right and what they do wrong.
Our Movie Nights are never to be treated as a seal of approval. We’ve said that for years. And I personally like that, because I think that sometimes more content-laden movies—particularly popular ones—deserve a Movie Night treatment more than the squeaky-clean ones. You don’t need to expend a lot of effort to pull some goodness from Dolphin Tale 2: It’s all around you, just like the water. (Even though I was the one who wrote the Movie Night on that flick, and I hope it helps you!) Movies like The Fault in Our Stars are a little trickier to navigate. But with so many people (particularly teens) watching Fault no matter what we say about it, it makes sense to figure out what we can teach through the thing.
In essence, we want to help jumpstart conversation in the world you actually live in, not the world in which we’d ideally like you to be.
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