Hollywood Babble On & On #1070: Little Budgets Need Big Ambitions

I like low budget movies.

Or to be precise, I like good low budget movies.

I also respect low budget movies with ambition. Even if they're not my particular cup of tea in style, subject matter, or even fail utterly creatively, I can at least respect their attempt to step beyond the constraints of their finances, genre, or talents of the filmmakers.

Take the people behind the Insidious franchise. The first one had a production budget of about $1.5 million, and made about $97 million at the box office, and the sequel Insidious: Chapter 2 has made over $41 million on its opening weekend and judging from audience reaction could at least repeat, if not better the first film's performance. 

It doesn't matter if I like the films or not, I haven't seen them, so I can't judge them, but it does mean that I can respect the ambition and hard work behind them and their success.

However, what I find hard to respect is the trend for making "deliberately bad" cinema as some sort of post-modern ironic form of anti-entertainment.

I can't appreciate such films which the makers see as a license for laziness in almost every aspect. The premises are composed via Mad Libs, you're lucky if the dialogue even went through a first draft, some "I can't believe they hired them" stunt-casting, and loads of shitty CGI special effects that can out-done by an adolescent and their home computer.

There's very little imagination, and very few calories burned to make these films.

So I end this mini-rant with a plea.

Please stop supporting, or promoting deliberately bad movies. There are more than enough inadvertently bad movies released every year, we don't need anymore. Support and promote movies where it looks like some effort was put into the production. Even if they fail, at least respect that they tried.