Had another one of my bad move nights with friends.
I am Sam, 3/10
This is a 2001 Sean Penn drama best remembered from the famous "never go full retard" scene from Tropic Thunder. It's about an intellectually deficient man struggling with raising his daughter who's about to surpass him in intellectual capability. It's goddamn ludicrous. It's best described as "good intentions aging poorly", seeing as it's a ca. 2001 depiction of autism, down syndrome, and just about every kind of neuroatypicality you can think of, landing it firmly in the same camp as Rain Man. It might have been made with the best intentions, but watching it today is so fucking uncomfortable and cringy. It straddles the line between ridiculous and uncomfortable just enough that it never becomes fully acceptable as either genuine drama or hilarious awfulness, and the result is a viewing experience that's just uncomfortable and heavy on the soul. The movie's premise relies on so many absolutely ridiculous assumptions that if you think about it for even a second it all falls apart immediately. The performances are about as ridiculously caricatured as you can imagine. So is the music, which ranges from unbearable Hollywood schmaltz to just weird and out of place pseudo-comedy. I'll give it this: I genuinely couldn't tell where the story was heading, because the editing and structure felt so scattershot that just about anything felt possible. I checked out of it for considerable chunks because it was such a confused and mismatched experience. I have no idea if I'd recommend it as a so bad it's good movie, it kind of lies outside of that whole paradigm because it touches on just a nervous subject, yet its execution is at times genuinely on the level of those fake trailers from Tropic Thunder with how schmaltzy and ridiculous it is.
Gigli, ?/10
This was the second movie we watched, and I genuinely don't know how to grade it. It's one of the most infamous bombs of all time, yet I can't say I didn't enjoy myself. It's an alleged crime comedy about two career criminals having to watch over a hostage because of... something. The big premise of this movie that it's a Hollywood power couple of the time (Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez) sharing the screen together. But the execution is genuinely unlike anything I've ever seen. This might be the only comedy in existence that's genuinely so bad it's good. I'd previously considered that impossible, because bad comedies are usually just not funny, and therefore if they're funny by accident, they still succeed as comedies. But Gigli somehow bridges that gap, because I genuinely could not tell what was supposed to be funny about it a lot of the time. It's absolutely steeped in poorly aged humor of the early 2000s about sexual minorities, the handicapped and so on. The writing is clearly trying to be funny, slick and cool, but falls flat on its face in a way I've rarely seen outside of Neil Breen movies, giving the whole affair a sort of uncanny, hilariously awkward vibe.
For a movie made for $54,000,000 it's shockingly amateurishly made. The whole thing is shot in like 3 different apartments and people's cars, lending it the air of a student film. There's an especially jarring appearance by Al Pacino who turns up for one scene, and that alone was hilarious by itself. For the vast majority of it there's zero music, not even background ambience, and when the music does show up it genuinely feels like stock porn intro music. Speaking of which, this movie has to have the record for amount of scenes that feel like a drawn out porn intro, and it's absolutely bizarre how almost every scene manages to feel like that. Yet the movie continues to surprise by actually being a genuinely more respectful and empathetic portrayal of the intellectually disabled than I am Sam, which blew my fucking mind when I realized it. Affleck and Lopez have remarkably little chemistry despite being a hot celebrity couple of the time.
This is genuinely something you have to see to believe it. I'm still flabbergasted at how a movie this cheaply and badly made, this misguided in so many ways, this awkward in whatever it's trying to accomplish, somehow ends up creating something akin to The Room in just how alien and weird it feels like.
