There is no such thing as a bad movie
Most of my non-Native friends find it funny that I can sit through a really bad movie. The fact is that for the first 15 years of my life all I got to see were mostly bad movies. The luxury of having access to new Hollywood blockbusters and quality movies didn’t happen for me until I was in my late teens.
I grew up watching television up north in Attawapiskat when we only had four channels. We had CBC, Television Ontario (TVO), a community church channel that broadcast the daily church service and a pirate satellite signal. The pirate satellite signal was an unreliable, intermittent broadcast in the community provided by an anonymous individual who was known to everyone.
Most of these stations didn’t run popular movies. Although the church station featured classic hits like Ben-Hur, The Greatest Story Ever Told and Moses, it ran these three movies over and over again. A lot of my childhood friends still use Ben-Hur references when they make jokes to each other. My friends and family often refer to each other as “41”, the slave number of Ben-Hur in the film, and everyone gets a laugh at that. The problem is that even when you see good movies too often, they become bad movies.
CBC was known for its news and television shows rather than great movies. TVO featured lots of educational shows that we were not really interested in but it also ran Saturday Night At The Movies with Elwy Yost – back in those days we didn’t really understand what all those classic movies were about.
We wanted action and every once in awhile we would get it with the pirate channel which featured mostly B-movies from the 1970s and 1980s. We didn’t even get to see a lot of these B-movies from beginning to end because the signal was unreliable. However, I recall being glued to the tube and savouring every minute of action movies that had to do with the kung-fu karate period, old spaghetti westerns, horror films and Japanese monster flicks like Godzilla. Most of those B-movies had mystery endings for me because the signal would cut out at some point.
I spent so many years watching bad movies that somehow it has diminished my appreciation for quality movies. I will put up with just about anything and I would never walk away from a theatre or a TV set no matter how bad the movie.
These days, every time I turn around, I run into movies. I can watch movies at home on TV through regular cable channels or satellite TV. I can see great movies and bad movies on my computer via the Internet. I can watch films on the run with my tablet and I can even watch a movie on my smartphone. It’s raining movies compared to what I grew up with.
Now, you would think, with all these available movies, that I would be more selective about what I watch. But you know what? All I need is a film that gives me a beginning, middle and an end. It is so satisfying that I can finally watch my bad movies from beginning to end.
When I am sitting at home and browsing through all the movies available on Netflix for only a few dollars a month, I realize how far we have come. Our cultures, stories and beliefs are reflected to me just about everywhere I turn through movies. A person could live their entire life in front of a screen these days and I think many do. Documentaries can educate us, motivate us and empower us. Mindless action films are like an antidote for getting too smart and they merely entertain us and dumb us down. In a surreal way, we can almost live another existence at this point just through watching movies from the past and in the present.
I wonder what the future holds for our movie world with some films being bankrolled by big corporations, including national governments. Then there are all those new first person shooting games that are becoming more visually realistic. Modern video games are becoming more like bad movie shoot-’em-ups that we get to be part of. Perhaps our future in front of a screen might be more about propaganda and less about creativity. I will have to be more careful about what I watch, but – meh – maybe not.