In defence of mediocre movies
There is an argument to be made that the worst insult you can give a person is to call them mediocre.
Being mediocre (or ‘basic’, as the kids say) suggests that you have risked little. You have neither succeeded nor failed spectacularly. You are content with ‘meh,’ comfortable sitting on the fence or following others, sheeplike, into a queue whose destination is unknown.
It stands to reason that, just as most people would prefer to live lives of variation and discovery, most cinephiles would rather not waste their time watching films that are formulaic or uninspiring. And yet, if we could all just let our guards down for one second, I think we’d agree that there is a distinct pleasure in viewing these sorts of middle-of-the-road ventures.
Before we get too far into the proverbial weeds, let’s define cinematic mediocrity. Mediocre movies aren’t the ones that feature flashes of brilliance marred by a few spectacularly poor decisions. We’re not talking about noble failures or captivating messes. David Lynch’s Dune is not a mediocre movie (Lynch was incapable of mediocrity). Emilia Perez is not a mediocre movie (it’s just a terrible one). Movies that are middle-of-the-road include most things directed by Nancy Meyers, the 1964 Audrey Hepburn movie Paris When it Sizzles, and the 1999 Renny Harlan movie Deep Blue Sea.
Mediocre movies are rarely ambitious. They are rarely passion projects. Often, the people making them are either between gigs that inspired them, or they needed the money. Maybe they think they were doing something revolutionary, but get overruled by their producers. The resulting movies are not masterpieces or festival favourites. You aren’t going to see them at Cannes, let alone winning an award at Cannes, and you probably aren’t going to hear many people showering them with affection. They probably aren’t box office hits, either. And yet, when I look back on the movies that have meant the most to me over the years, many of them have been ones that check all these unflattering boxes.
There was a year when I watched the Steve Martin/Goldie Hawn comedy Housesitter about ten times, even though you’ll never see that reflected in my Letterboxd ratings. If you were to ask me to list some of my favourite movies of all time, I would rattle off such masterpieces as There Will Be Blood, Cool Hand Luke, Kiss Me Deadly, and Don’t Look Now. And yet, I have probably seen the John Cleese comedy Fierce Creatures or the Lake Bell comedy In a World… more times than all of them combined.
There is something intensely personal about loving a second-rate movie. It requires you to ignore the critical consensus and find your own reasons to embrace it. I could rhapsodise about One Battle After Another or My Dinner with Andre until I require medical attention, but I probably won’t reveal anything about myself in the process. Plenty of people have already said what I would be trying to articulate anyway.
But what about a movie like Paris When it Sizzles, a film that a critic for Variety called “contrived, utterly preposterous, and totally unmotivated”? I could watch William Holden being grumpy all day. I could watch a simplistic and repetitive film about writer’s block all day. I could watch Audrey Hepburn galavanting around Paris all day. Put them all together and you have a film which is both artistically lazy and exactly what I want to see.
The internet has made movies like this all the more difficult to discover. Sites like Rotten Tomatoes, IMDb, and even Letterboxd reduce everything to numbers so that potential viewers can filter out anything that gets below a 60%, a 7.0, or a 3.7, respectively. I wouldn’t give any of the mediocre movies I’ve mentioned an objective rating above those benchmarks, and yet, I happily watch them on repeat. Ironically, sites like these make our viewing more consensus-driven and unadventurous than ever. It’s an awfully boring – and yes, basic – way to go about watching movies.
I don’t want to see only masterpieces or noble failures. I want to see films that I like. Sometimes, those are aligned with the critical consensus and sometimes they aren’t, but I’d much rather find out the hard way (by watching them) than by missing out simply because they didn’t resonate with everyone else. How else would I have discovered that I Give It a Year is my favourite romantic comedy of the 2010s? I might not be able to explain why it hits the mark, but I don’t need to. I can just watch it, over and over again, and feel seen.
