What Makes a Movie Good?

Fact: Only dumb people deny that there is an objective "good."

This is true. People who believe that every opinion is independent and cannot be judged are stupid. For example I've always said that people who love Pro Wrestling lack taste, and that's just true. An example that puts me in the spotlight is that I like the movies Highwaymen, Last Man Standing, 13th Warrior, Hard Target, and The Punisher game for Xbox and PS2. I would never defend these movies and game and say that they are great because I like them. Rational arguments can be made as to why they aren't "good". Even though i enjoy them, I realize what is "bad" about them.

Compelling characters that you can relate to, in my opinion help to make a good film.

http://chud.com/forums/showthread.php?t=85432

Well, i believe that ultimately a film is a relationship between the objective film and the person watching it so, yes it is subjective.

However this is me getting worked up about the strict definitions of 'objective' and 'subjective'. Anyone talking about objective taste is in danger of falling into dogma.

But considering the massive amounts of shared experiences and common cultural inputs and values we have, in any normal conversation, yes some people's tastes are better than others. This is a culturally relative objectivism but, as this is a movie forum and not a metaphysics of value forum, i'll go wth it.

So there.

Obviously the amount of money made has nothing to do with how good a movie is. I'll admit that I like when a movie I dig makes some scratch because that will hopefully lead to similar movies or films featuring those actors, writers, and directors.

In terms of content, whether a movie is good mainly depends on what it is trying to achieve. I enjoyed the recent version of THE PUNISHER because I think its goal was to put a comic book character in exciting situations which I felt the film accomplished. I enjoyed DIRTY WORK because its goal was to make a person laugh and the humor in that film was right up my alley. It would seem odd to some that I like those movies more than something like GOOD WILL HUNTING but that picture had a much higher goal of presenting characters that I'm supposed to genuinely care about on an emotional level, and it failed with me on those terms.

Individual taste is always going to determine what people find good in a movie. I would suspect that most people on these boards aren't big on romantic comedies. You can take the "greatest" rom-coms of the modern era like PRETTY WOMAN, SLEEPLESS IN SEATTLE, and WHEN HARRY MET SALLY and they'll always be viewed less favorably around here when compared to stuff like BLADE, DEEP RISING, and HARD TARGET.

What makes for a good movie? I always thought it was the popcorn, mise en scene and cumshots.

Fact: there are no absolutes in life, or art. But an informed opinion carries more weight than the alternative.

Well, I watched Alien vs Perdator last night and I'd have to disagree there, that movie sucks ass, absolutely.

There are absolutes in art, and it scares people. People automatically assume that if something is "good" they should like it.

Now, I'm not saying you can't make a case for or against the goodnes of a work of art, but I would be very interested in seeing someone make a reasonable case AGAINST Huckleberry Finn, for instance. Or Hamlet. Or Van Gogh's Starry Night. And so on and so on. The fact is that these are "good" works of art, regardless of whether or not you personally like them.

And on the flip side, I would love to see someone make a real argument - a serious one - for the "goodness" of STREET TRASH or THE GARBAGE PAIL KIDS MOVIE. Not just why you like it, but why it's good.

Seriously, I bet you could get some takers for the challenge with oh, say, THE TRANSFORMERS MOVIE.

Logic always dictated to me that I couldn't have been the only one to have suffered through Street Trash. I just never heard about it from anyone except the person who insisted I watch it. Once again, Devin proves beyond doubt that his knowlege of movies has not just depth, but also breadth.

But the topic: What makes a movie good?

Breasts. Breasts make a movie good. I thought everyone knew that.

Well not many people recognised Van Gogh when he was alive. His longevity is due, i'll argue, to culture coming round to his way of thinking. The strong form of this argument is that Van Gogh being seen as absolutely 'good' really only means the culture 'likes' it at the moment.

It's also disingenuous to use such extremes as Shakespeare and The Garbage Pail Kids Movie. A much pricklier topic would be whether Star Wars (1977) is a 'good' movie.

There certainly are objective ways to judge a movie - purely technical achievements, or the depth and subtlety of expression - but i think these are much less interesting topics than those concerning the subjective side of how you, as an audience, liked it.

And to think that there are some people who don't understand why Mark Hamill didn't get a best actor nomination back in 1977...

Yeah but the point is one can appreciate a well made movie without having to think it was great film. Take something like Shawshank Redemption and Million Dollar Baby. Both are brilliantly acted, directed, scored. Both are Good films. And both have Morgan Freeman. But of the two I hated Million Dollar Baby and love Shawshank. But I can appreciate an 'artistic' well made film, even if I didn't much like it.

It's not disingenuous at the least. We're not talking about the gray area. The question is what makes movies good, and are there such things as objectively good movies? So expanding that to art, why is it disingenuous to bring out objectively good art? I would call that making my case.

Again, there are plenty of movies that you can argue back and forth about, sure, and that's part of the fun. But you can't just say there's no such thing as a good movie, that's it's all taste. Especially as it makes the arguing pointless.

I don't argue with Devin's further points at all, though my natural aversion to absolutes is pretty much intact. I blame Camus for this. That, and I still don't think before I post sometimes.

I think at the end of the day, I'd be more concerned with someone's frame of reference and breadth of experience when it comes to their assigning of objective quality.

Of course, I'm a terrible hypocrite, and grade comics on a horribly subjectively "objective" scale, so I ought to shut up.

If there was objectivity, then there would be no arguing back and forth, there would only be a consultation of the great criteria of 'goodness'. The grey areas ARE what makes art discussion fun because art only becomes interesting when it interacts with a human being. Art is the filter through which we can express our sense of the world and it is this that makes art vital and important rather than some tedious nitpicking exercise in who should have shot first.

Expressing our 'sense of the world' is very difficult in plain conversation, but, through art - through an artist trying to express themselves and us an audience reacting to it in different ways - we find a way to reveal ourselves to others and argue over what we feel is important. This is all very lofty but, if we are to take art to be more than just mindless entertainment, this is what it can achieve, and this is why it has lasted.

It is exactly this messy, subjective grey area that makes film discussion interesting and worthwhile.

Now arguing over a film involves a basis of common ground on which to argue - if our ideas were completetly different we simply wouldn't be able to communicate (see 'Devin's Requiem' thread) - and i'm happy to call this common ground 'objective' because, for us, as near as dammit, it is.

Just please be aware that all ideas are subject to change. Nothing is Gospel unless you are a Christian.

I appreciate that you're going to university and appreciate a good mental wank, but let's be frank here. You can't come back to me and say SEVEN SAMURAI is not a good film. You can not say that HAMLET is not a good play, etc.

The thing that you're missing is that there is no list of what makes these films good films. There's magic that comes together, not math. So the discussion doesn't end when we all agree that certain movies are just very good. It just takes on a new aspect - why are these movies good?

Agreed. I think the question is being misenterprated as "what makes an enjoyable movie?" There are certain things that make a movie "good" in the way that you can make a mechanical part "efficient." Whether those are appreciated or not in a certain manner go towards how enjoyable a film is.

I think it's because making a film entertaining is much easier than making it good, and it brings in more money. Making something good requires the artist to have an intellectual motivation behind his work. The problem is that making this art requires a fairly large amount of money, so the artist is often at the mercy of the business.

Yes, it's not math, it's magic. The magic comes when people get involved. People, the ones worth a damn, are subjective, unique, disagreeable souls.

I'm really just trying to avoid the tryranny of objectivism. It gets horribly dogmatic.

So, no i'm not coming back at you and saying Hamlet is balls. That's missing my point. I'm trying to argue that it's is only when the subjective enters the debate that the debate gets interesting; which is, i think, the same as you saying that the debate moves on to WHY the movie is good.

and please don't accuse me of wanking or of still being at university: both are tremendously offensive.

My first trip to New York, when I was in 2nd grade -- there were one-sheets for Street Trash plastered EVERYWHERE. I think it's colored my perception of the city ever since.

It's not that they "hardly ever go hand-in-hand," it's just that "entertaining" is not a prerequisite for "good." A fact that, while true in all the arts, people really have the hardest time accepting when it comes to film (music would come closest, I think).

I think the general public are too quick to equate the two. They'll tell each other a film they enjoyed was good, whereas they really mean it was only entertaining. Or maybe audiences justify todays ticket prices by convincing each other the film was better than it actually was.

Not only is there a difference between quality of technical filmmaking and performance versus ability to entertain the masses, there are also films which are quality films that just aren't necessarily feel-good or entertaining in an "I want to watch it over and over way." That definitely reduces their income and mass popularity. I, for one, enjoyed "Closer" but there are plenty of people who would not want to see it in the first place due to subject matter, and plenty of people who might not want to see it a half-dozen times (a la Star Wars or LOTR).

Certainly there are people who are extremely easy to please with film. Yet don't we all have our weaknesses (e.g. "breasts make a good film")?

Also, I'd agree that there are ways to objectively assess film as with any art - film quality, quality of cinematography, any innovative methods used, etc. Most of what we judge is very subjective, though.

A primary problem here is poor word choice by the opining person. "That movie was good" usually means "I enjoyed that film-going experience" and "That movie sucked" usually means the reverse.
Rather than arguing whether the movie was good, perhaps asking the person to expound would get to the true meaning of their statement, and you can discover that they meant "entertaining" not "good."

There is a difference between being stupid and being ill-informed.

Analyzing and assessing the quality of a film is a skill, that is learned, and takes a whole lot of knowledge. Then it takes a talent for writing to communicate the things that one takes away from the film. Not everybody have that skill/knowledge. But that doesn't mean they're stupid.

Devin didn't say "only dumb people can't judge what is objectively good." He said only dumb people DENY that there is an objective good. I don't have the skill set to judge classical music, for example, but I don't deny that there's such a thing as good classical music.

They go hand in hand. If you have never had the idea explained to you, you are not likely to reach that conclusion by yourself.

And I agree, one might well argue that getting into a debate on a subject without the necessary knowledge to back one's opinion is due to stupidity, but that's not necessarily the case.

For me, what makes a great movie are good script, great actors and director. I f either one doesn't make the cut, then the movie has a gigger chance of becoming a flop.

I'm in general agreement with Vilyanur Ramachandran that there are artistic universals that appeal to us (on a biological level, at that) as humans, that they tend to have many of the properties he cites in the lecture, and that they tend to be found in what is called 'good art'.

Though, as what people call 'good art' - particularly in contemporary arts - tends to be determined by a self-selected, back-scratching group of critics, and has a strong cultural and social bias, the question is often obscured by other matters ... trumping up a set of rules to justify an instinctive - or biologically programmed - preference, etc.

In my day-to-day life I don't attach as much importance to distinguishing 'good' from 'bad' art as I do to distinguishing between what I respond to, and what I don't respond to. I can't tell you if Damien Hurst's Mother and Child Divided was good or bad, only that I wanted to spew up.

To be honest, I don't see a problem with adopting a schizophrenic (and fundamentally human) stance, conceding everything is subjective and then arguing, in specific cases, to the contrary. Granted you’ll appear a hypocrite, but debate will never be dull.

Hrrrm.

I think it's all, in the end, subjective. It is not a law of nature that Huckleberry Finn is good art. It would be possible for someone to say "Huckleberry Finn is dreck; printing this book is a waste of good blank paper; the novel adds nothing to the wealth of human expression; etc." It's possible to say it, and it's possible for it all to be correct.

Not in this society, with this literary culture, however.

What is "good" and "bad" in art are completely defined by the collective opinion of the culture around us, and the literary culture is led by those who are most engaged in talking (and writing) about literature. If you wanted to "prove" Huckleberry Finn is shit you could do it, in a sense: all you would have to do is either a) change the opinion of most of the influential people already in the field of literary criticism, or b) change who is considered to be influential. That's a tall order, and in the case of Huckleberry Finn it's so out of the realm of probability it can safely be considered impossible... in the short term.

That's why the "classics" are the "classics". Opinion on them is so uniform, so unlikely to change, and dissent on that opinion is so likely to cause the dissenter to be ignored, that sharing the common opinion on the classics can be a useful litmus test for whether a person is "in tune" with the art culture or not. We feel safe in dismissing the opinions of someone who hates Huckleberry Finn, because their dissent on a point of such uniform agreement makes their other opinions suspect (a leap in judgment that is both biological and illogical).

The problem is finding any practical application to all this. So, Huck Finn is universally admired. What can that tell us about whether or not this next work will be admired? Not much, I'm afraid. Sometimes the critical consensus also congeals around certain "laws" or "rules of art" that the cultural junto places their stamp of approval on, but these are temporal. The rules themselves will change over time, they are just an illusion of absolute legitimacy. In the end every piece of art has to stand for itself.

Film criticism, like all other disciplines, finds legitimacy in membership and consensus. The universally acclaimed films (like, say, Casablanca) are universally acclaimed because they act as a litmus test for membership AND NO OTHER REASON. There's no right answer on whether Star Wars is a good film because there's no consensus. The criticism community can only say "Here's our numerous fractious arguments... decide for yourself if it's any good."