Not every movie from the millennium is good. For example: this movie is terrible. I still want the $3 I paid to see it back in 2000 refunded to me. I will accept this in the form of a check or the return of my lost youth.

It’s late in the semester, and I’m running on empty much of the time, when it comes to new ideas. The end of April and the end of November are much the same in that way: the students who kept up are coasting across the finish line, others are desperately running up from behind and seem to think that I should be as panicked about their situation as they are. Same song, different day.

Between this, recent attacks on the rights of transgender people in my home state, and watching the edge of the fractal trainwreck that is the news (Hasbro hired the Pinkertons to recover unreleased material for a card game, the idiot who owns Twitter pulled all of the Jenga blocks out from the bottom and is desperately trying to shove some of them back in, etc.), I haven’t been able to think of much.

As a side note: our podcast has a pinkerton as a character. You can tell it’s a fantasy story because the character has a moral compass.

One thing I have done – because I was thinking about showing a movie on the last day of my literature class – was look at DVDs in Half Priced Books and other places, including – regretfully – Amazon (though I did not buy anything from there.) I can’t select just anything I’m thinking about for this: whatever I pick for to show has to actually be connected to what we’ve done in the class.

Right before spring break, for example, I showed them Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon, and we read Ryuunosuke Akutagawa’s “In a Bamboo Grove” (I found a version translated by Jay Rubin, who did many of Haruki Murakami’s works.) Despite the title this is the story of which Rashomon is an adaptation, with the short story only serving as inspiration for the frame narrative. Of course, the problem is that I planned to use Rashomon, and this is just me trying to paste over a small hole in the schedule that I knew was there but didn’t get to in time.

So, I look over everything that we read and everything available, and I’m left with two options: Carlos Velo’s 1967 adaptation of Pedro Páramo, or the film In Bruges by Martin McDonagh. While I definitely need to see Velo’s adaptation of Pedro Páramo, I thought that In Bruges might be more amusing in the last week of classes. Despite how dark it gets, it’s still got moments of comedy. The reason it was appropriate, though, is quite simple: it’s an adaptation of a play that we read in my class, Harold Pinter’s “The Dumb Waiter” – trade out a stuffy basement for a major tourist destination in West Flanders and you’re about 80% of the way there.

This is all a long walk that could have been covered by the sentence “so I was looking at DVDs the other day”, but I am afflicted with the curse of believing that my thought process and decision making is at all interesting, so let me just jump to the point.

It’s a terrible tag line. I remember the movie as being okay?

You can get a DVD of the 1993 Super Mario Brothers movie for under four USD from Amazon. That movie is not available to stream anywhere, and – for whatever reason – I was tempted to buy it. I’ll admit, I heard it discussed on Horror Vanguard while walking to and from class, a state in which I tend to be highly suggestible for some reason. However, that’s not really the point. There’s a reason that I was even bothering to listen to this discussion regarding a movie that electrocuted Bob Hoskins four or five times, broke his leg, and forced him and John Leguizamo to get drunk before filming as the directors – a married couple who fought constantly – guided almost the entire production department of Blade Runner through making one of the least child-appropriate films based on a child’s video game.

I mean, I haven’t seen it in twenty years and I imagine it’s better as a memory than as a film, but I’m curious.

I’m not the only one who is – and I don’t mean about this film in particular. There’s a lot of turning-back to the trash stratum of late Pre-9/11 culture going on. I’ve been watching people defend the Star Wars prequel trilogy on Tumblr for about five years now, and it’s not the only film getting this treatment.

So, why is this happening?

It’s important to note that not all legitimately bad films are being given this treatment. No one is clamoring for a reassessment of 2000’s Supernova: despite it being directed by Walter Hill, who directed The Warriors and starred James Spader and Angela Basset, it is one of the worst movies I’ve ever seen in theaters, and I still want the $3 spent on the ticket returned to me.

Somehow, though, famously bad – or just forgettable – movies like Super Mario Brothers, Waterworld, the Star Wars prequel trilogy, the Joel Schumacher Batman movies, Event Horizon, Starship Troppers, and Demolition Man are getting treated as hidden gems. Some of these I see the point with, others I don’t. Hell, I’ve done similar things in my own life with such films as Mystery Men. Is this simple nostalgia, or is it something else?

The cult status of these films was often tied to a particular character of the presenter — most notably Cassandra Peterson’s “Elvira” character, though it originated about thirty years earlier, with Maila Nurmi’s “Vampira” character. Notably, both Elvira and Vampira were the horror presenters in Los Angeles, ensuring a cultural cachet that other presenters did not enjoy.

Part of this, obviously, is the presence of social media. This sort of thing happened in the past, but it was a cult thing: someone would pour through the archive, find something cheap to air, and hit upon the equivalent of Batman and Robin and then put it on the late night movie slot. This would be a local phenomenon, spreading like ripples in a pond from the broadcaster that revived it. Now, everyone has a megaphone, and maybe they have a point, maybe they don’t, but the message spreads.

Perhaps that’s all this is. I happen to think there’s probably something else, though: The disappearance of the mid-budget movie, which looks like it might be reversing, but was a real factor in the cultural landscape for a time. All major films, it seemed, were separated out into roughly three categories: superheroes, awards bait, and indie films. Sure, sure, there were a number of comedies and whatnot in there, but there wasn’t the diversity present previously.

What this all meant is that people were starving for things not in those three categories, and you can only re-watch the good films so often. So you rewatch the bad ones, and maybe you were wrong about it previously, or maybe you just want to justify it after the fact, that’s not the point. The point is that you want something different.

This is especially telling with regard to Star Wars. The original trilogy has become a perennial classic: you don’t watch it every night or anything like that, but it’s notable when someone hasn’t seen them. The prequel trilogy was largely panned, though it had some reasonably good ideas in places: the problem was that Lucas wasn’t given constraints he had to work around. Now, people are looking at the sequel trilogy and the Star Wars story movies, and scratching their head, wondering what happened?

I mean, a big part of it probably is Daniel Craig being excited to play a character other than James Bond. [image is Daniel Craig at the 2022 TIFF Premier, uploaded by user GabboT, and appearing here under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 license.]

Now, I’ve already made my thoughts on the sequel trilogy known, I’ll let that original piece speak for itself. Though I find it shocking that Rian Johnson could make a legitimately bad Star Wars movie (not as bad as the followup, but one that mistreated and squandered John Boyega and pushed a romance that I strongly disliked. It had some good ideas, but I can’t get past those two things) while also making the two Benoit Blanc movies, Knives Out and Glass Onion, that are extremely good – well on their way to being contemporary classics.

It’s because not every movie needs to be a $500 million monster – the higher the budget, the more money it must bring in to qualify as “successful” by the only metrics that the market recognizes as valid. The greatest innovation, thus, is going to come from the low- and mid-budget films, because they have the freedom to experiment.

There is a theory in biology, a refinement of Darwin’s theory of evolution put forward by a number of scientists including Stephen Jay Gould, that’s commonly called the “hopeful monsters” theory. The idea that, occasionally, a “macromutation” occurs and spits out a radically different sort of creature. Most of these hopeful monsters don’t make it. Some do. I don’t know if this holds true for evolution, but it sounds absolutely correct about cultural production.

Here’s the real question — where is our Roger Corman? Modern Hollywood wouldn’t exist without him, and yet we’ve made conditions hostile to the emergence of a new one. At least, a new one creating in a format other than YouTube shorts.

For more than a decade, though – a decade that I contend will be a weird, lost decade fairly shortly – all of the directors that might midwife these hopeful monsters have quickly been snatched up by major studios before they could really develop their talents. The smartest or luckiest of these directors took their paycheck and then used that leverage to make their mid-budget films, but a number of talents got eaten alive by the studios.

Because there is a sense of this, we look to the past, and we see hopeful monsters – experiments that didn’t pan out, but could easily have. Mystery Men, made in 2010 or 2012 or 2015, at the same level and with the same kind of cast, would have been a major hit. Because it came out in 1999, it’s barely a footnote to a footnote.

But I’m not arguing for a reassessment of Mystery Men or the original Super Mario Brothers – chances are, I’m bringing that up because I’m a spiteful contrarian and I hate that they made a new one – I’m questioning how technology has changed our experience of nostalgia, through the lens of movies that were considered to be legitimately very bad at the time. Social media is part of it, a certain contemporary cowardice and lack of experimentation is possibly another.

Finally, we get to the part where I become a real crank.

I think that the time frame from 2008 – 2023 is going to be less culturally significant in the long run – providing there are people to look back on it – than we might anticipate. Sure, sure, people will remember it and look back fondly on some parts of it, but it’s going to be a weird, hopeful monster of a decade-and-change that doesn’t quite make it.

Admittedly, we did get one really good mid-budget movie out of the financial crisis, but I don’t think any of us want to see *The Big Short II* in 2030.

Right now, we’re going into a new iteration of the 2008 financial crisis (this time it’s commercial real estate, not residential) and – in an attempt to head it off – a number of weird financial side effects are becoming apparent. Most notably, venture capital funding is drying up. A lot of things that were like furniture to us are melting into air.

And so, we’re trying to reorient and reconnect with the time before the crisis to ground ourselves.

However, what existed beforehand was not a halcyon age of authenticity. I think it’s important to remember that there’s never been a perfect era where everyone could be an auteur and find their audience — that’s just the fantasy that everyone could eventually work their way up to being the boss repackaged for creatives. Maybe Andy Warhol is right about everyone finding their fifteen minutes of fame, but I think that it would be better to remember the trap of the ignored middle I mentioned above.

Maybe you’ll never be a famous author or director or musician. But fame should never really be the point — finding a set of constraints in which you can work, a situation that challenges us creatively and gives us the chance to flourish creatively.

In short, what is needed is a new popular modernism — an open space where access to cultural production is opened. The problem with this might be difficulty in finding an audience, but systems have been built for that in the past.

If the other option is waxing nostalgic about Demolition Man while waiting in line for the third big-budget movie about a superhero played by a blonde man named “Chris”, then I’ll gamble on a newer system.

I mean, this whole business is because we keep doing the same thing — perhaps a new approach is needed.

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The Great Reassessment: On Nostalgia and Experimentation