I am trying to come up with my ultimate guilty pleasure movie. Of course there is subjectivity in this choice because what might be a guilty pleasure to you might not to me. In other words, how merit-less does it have to be to count?
What movie would you admit to? What do you watch when no one else is there to shake a finger and say, "Not again!"
27 comments:
The first Star Trek movie. STAR TREK: THE MOTION PICTURE is long, boring, with a silly story. And I will always love it.
American Beauty! Broad stroked 'satire.' Hammy turn from Spacey.Annoying young people talking rubbish. Loads of stereotypical 'Americans'. Still enjoy it, though. Well, when it's on telly!
Creature From the Black Lagoon. Love it.
It was so good to see those guys again.
I only saw AB once but was impressed at the time. I know it's now on the list of pictures that were over-praised but it seemed to deserve it one.
Horror movies are in their own special category. I have seen Carrie many times.
"The Oscar"--a fabulous, glossy, melodramatic piece of cheese from the mid-1960s with Stephen Boyd (playing an actor who would sell his soul to win an Oscar) and Tony Bennett (yes!) as his best friend. It contains every Hollywood cliche--and then some.
I've actually invited people around for a party to watch it when it's showing on TCM. Yes, we give it the Mystery Science Theater 3000 treatment, but I love it just the same.
Flash Gordon with Sam Jones and a Queen soundtrack. A lot of people don't think much of it.
Jones couldn't act. but I love it.
My wife's sister-law-law can't stand BERNIE'S; it creeps her out. Yet her favorite movie is HAROLD AND MAUDE.
I love BERNIE'S and hate HAROLD AND MAUDE.
"Beyond the Valley of the Dolls" and maybe a couple of other Russ Meyer movies. "Showgirls". Gotta disagree about "Carrie". It's way too good to be a guilty pleasure.
Creature from the Black Lagoon, Showgirl, and Russ Meyer -- all things I like, but I wouldn't call them "guilty pleasures."
David Sterritt's introduction to his collected film essays, "Guiltless Pleasures," talks about this concept. He used to talk about "guilty pleasures" until a friend of his took him to task for feeling bad about enjoying certain movies. If they entertained him, wasn't that enough? It's an interesting essay, though I'm not sure if it is posted online.
My husband claims with the collapse of ideas about high and low culture, the term is now meaningless. I guess that's along the same line. But like the idea there is no difference between a Little Lulu comic book and Jane Eyre I don't quite buy it.
That's an easy one: The Ten Commandments. The funniest thing I've ever seen was when my obsession was echoed by Billy Crystal doing Edward G. Robinson as Dathan: "Yeah, where's your Moses now?"
The cheese does not get any cheesier. A true classic we never get tired of quoting:
"Are her lips red like a pom[e]granate?"
"Oh Moses, Moses, you stubborn splendid adorable fool!"
As you know, I hated everything about AMERICAN BEAUTY from the minute I saw it and nothing would persuade me to sit through it again.
Jeff M.
I guess I'd have to go with Soapdish-probably a lousy movie but Carol and I laugh all the way through it every time we play it. Sally Fields disgraces herself in at least twenty ways--hilariously.
THE THIN MAN. I watch it over and over. And over.
Naomi,
How can you consider THM a guilty pleasure? It is a good film.
One of mine is DEAD HEAT.
Well, that might well depend on which LITTLE LULU comic one has under review...JANE EYRE isn't my choice for the best novel of its time, much less the ages. But just because pretending whole classes of art aren't inherently better or worse than other whole classes of art doesn't mean that individual works aren't distinguishable by quality...just because Fritz Leiber's (high art) "The Winter Flies" or "The Secret Songs" are comparable to Jorge Luis Borges's (high art) "The Aleph" or "The Other Death" doesn't mean that Ed Lee or Laura Esquivel's fiction is nearly as good, nor is it ever likely to be.
That said, my favorite smart stupid film is THE HIDDEN. Less good, my favorite widely-reviled film is probably NOTHING BUT TROUBLE. Better, my favorite film which seems to evoke a lot of shrugs is STARDOM, though the "alterna"-spy films FAY GRIMM and THE LIMITS OF CONTROL might be catching up...GRIMM had to grow on me, too. The most goofy failure to reach its goals that I nonetheless have a sneaking fondness for is probably THE BALCONY.
THE OSCAR, where Harlan Ellison whas re-written by the producer-directors (but Ellison cops to having written a miserable script initially), was a flop which might have been the initial reason no other Ellison theatrical script has been filmed, although Ellison is perhaps still the most decorated television playwright in WGA history, and has had a love/hate relation with the medium in every decade since moving to LA in the early '60s. THE TEN COMMANDMENTS is a powerful contender as well. So is every Irwin Allen production. The likes of ROBOT MONSTER and BRIDE OF THE MONSTER seem too easy. WOMEN IN LOVE was hilarious beyond how Russell meant it to be.
And, speaking of WUTHERING HEIGHTS rather than EYRE, there was this Encyclopedia Britannica Film called THE ROMANTICS which was perhaps the most insanely inept introduction to that school of writers that anyone could possibly want, with abysmal hamming by all the cast and a script that posited the clever device of having our narrator be simply "Richard," a minor poet, he assures us, we've never heard of, present at the cremation of Percy Shelley, which is the wraparound for the whole mess. The performance of a scene from that Other Bronte's novel is particularly perfervid, even among the events presented.
I must admit, I wasn't at all impressed with AMERICAN BEAUTY on first viewing, either, though didn't hate it as passionately nor as instantly as I did CRASH, that other ridiculous recent Oscar bait. (Whereas the other, Ballard/Cronenberg, CRASH is an only slightly controversial reckoning as a good film by me.)
FAY GRIM, actually. A FEW DAYS IN SEPTEMBER is almost as a "alternate" and even better than GRIM or CONTROL. But perhaps all the GET SMART films so far will fall into my GP category, despite the two with Don Adams being more fizzles than the mostly pleasant "reboot".
Vee-jer! (Still better than the STAR WARS films, but by only the thinnest of increments. Subsequent installments fall to the SW level, considerably below what EMPIRE could have been had Leigh Brackett's vision been filmed).
MysterLynch, it's only a guilty pleasure because of the frequency with which I watch it, because you're right: It is a good film. I don't mean I watch it two or three times a year. I mean two weeks rarely go by that I don't watch it. It's like comfort food to me. I have to have it.
I'm with Richard Prosch. Star Trek 1
I must admit that I've never heard of one or two of the movies Todd mentioned, and haven't seen some of the others. (I can only take Parker Posey in small doses, and Demi Moore even less.)
It's the whole concept of "guilty pleasure" that eliminates some movies for me, as I don't feel guilty about watching them over and over, unlike TEN COMMANDMENTS, for example.
Jeff M.
My guilty pleasures? I can't get enough of ICE CASTLES - Robbie Benson coaxing the blind ice skater back to the championships. It's a classic. Even my other guilty pleasure, THE SOUND OF MUSIC, doesn't compare to that.
By the way, I actually won $40 in Vegas. Can't wait until next year.
Happy Thanksgiving.
Jackie
I'm a hopeless ADHD type. Can't sit through the same movie twice. But many years ago, I fell in love with a French movie called SUNDAYS AND CYBELE, which I paid to see daily as long as it ran in the local theater in Grand Island, Nebraska. Hard if not impossible to find now; I'd love to see it again.
Don´t know if it counts as a guilty pleasure or just a pleasure, but "Pretty Woman".
- if you keep asking these film questions, perhaps I´ll be able to scrape together five American films I remember? ;D
I have shown classes "American Beauty" now and then, but I can live very well without that one.
I remember Ice Castles, Jackie. And forty bucks buys you dinner on Time Square.
Pretty Woman is perfect. I have watched in way too many times.
Haven't seen THE HIDDEN but I have seen THE OSCAR.
Sundays and Cybele-I thought I had seen every French film but not that one.
I may be the only one on the planet who actually enjoys MARCI X. There. I've said it.
I've never even heard of it!
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0266747
Comedy in a vein sort of somewhere between Mel Brooks and John Waters. Universally panned with a vengeance, and a total bomb at the box office. Lisa Kudrow is by far the most interesting actor from the FRIENDS cast.
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