The Great Good-Bad Conundrum: Do Transcendent Stinkers Like The Oscar and The Lonely Lady Belong on a List of the 100 Best American Movies About Filmmaking or the Worst?
Unlike many film writers, I did not take to social media to share my favorite films of the century in response to The New York Times’ list on the subject. The failing New York Times is our paper of record.
I was nevertheless inspired. People love lists. They fucking love lists. People love lists so much that the New York Times piece became a legitimate news story.
People like lists because they love to argue about what belongs on them and where it should be placed. They’re bite-sized, reader-friendly, and wonderfully conducive to debate.
I’ve never been a huge fan of lists. I prefer to work in a more unhealthy, obsessive way.
Unhealthy and obsessive certainly describe my work on The Fractured Mirror, my mammoth upcoming tome about American movies about filmmaking, which I have been working on since I was a small child and will hopefully finish and publish at some point in my lifetime.
Professionally speaking, The Fractured Mirror is my world right now. It’s taken an ungodly amount of time to write and research, so I want to get as much out of it as humanly possible.
So I decided to create epic lists of the 100 best and 100 worst American movies about filmmaking. The lists will each be approximately 20,000 words, so I will divide them into tens. Beginning October 13th, every Monday, I’ll post an exhaustively researched 2000-word piece on ten of the greatest movies about filmmaking here. Every Wednesday, I’ll publish a similarly obsessive list of ten of the worst American movies about filmmaking on my Substack newsletter, Nathan Rabin’s Bad Ideas.
For ten weeks, these lists will run on this website and Nathan Rabin’s Bad Ideas. In the middle of December, I’ll publish the final, definitive lists of the 10 best and worst American movies about filmmaking of all time.
Pia patiently waiting to see what list she’ll end up on.
One of the reasons I’ve had an ambivalent relationship with lists is because of the limitations of the writer, or writers, creating them. After all, it would be impossible for that overworked, underpaid freelancer to have listened to every American one-hit wonder to determine which are the ten best.
On a similar note, who could possibly be obsessive, masochistic, and utterly self-defeating enough to watch every narrative American movie about filmmaking? Me. I’m insane enough to have spent years watching every example of this ubiquitous breed in order to write the definitive book on movies about movies.
Of course, it’s impossible to see EVERY American movie about filmmaking. I’m sure there are weird obscurities that I don’t know exist, as well as plenty of movies about movies that are unavailable for legal, or illegal, consumption.
But I have fundamentally seen EVERYTHING. I’ve seen over 500 films for the book that were released over the course of a century.
I’m excited about the lists because they’re wildly entertaining, give a sense of the book’s ambition, scope, and depth, and hopefully will bring people to a site that’s had a very difficult year and has generally had a devil of a time finding and holding onto an audience.
Assembling the lists was surprisingly enjoyable. I’ve spent my entire career thinking that rankings don’t matter, and that arguing about them is a waste of time. I no longer feel that way. The Fractured Mirror lists turned me into a believer.
I write about a staggering array of movies in The Fractured Mirror. It covers everything from a nearly seven-hour-long documentary about the Friday the 13th franchise to a direct-to-DVD Barbie cartoon in which Barbie meets Harvey Weinstein, to a pornographic take on Singin’ in the Rain. We’re talking apples and oranges, but I nevertheless thought long and hard about the list and the rankings. I never thought I’d write this, but I look forward to nitpicking with readers when I launch the lists.
These twenty lists run about 40,000 words collectively, but The Fractured Mirror is so massive that you can read every last word in the lists and still have an entire book's worth of entries left over.
I love bad movies. Some bad movies are fucking great!
I pay loving tribute to some of these transcendent stinkers in The Fractured Mirror, all-time trash classics like The Oscar, The Lonely Lady, and Valley of the Dolls.
To put things in Flop House terms, they’re not just good-bad, they’re bad-great. They’re bad-essential. They’re bad-unmissable.
The Oscar, The Lonely Lady, and Valley of the Dolls are, objectively, unbelievably terrible movies. Yet I would aggressively recommend watching all three, more than once if possible.
They weren’t necessarily conceived as comedies yet they provoke explosive unintentional laughter all the same. I’m smiling just thinking about them and their straight-faced ridiculousness.
Do these movies belong on the list of the 100 best or the 100 worst American movies about filmmaking? I honestly don’t know. I’ve finished both lists but I’m still open to changes. I’d love to hear what you think. I may be the world’s greatest expert on American movies about filmmaking but your opinions will help me shape a massive amount of writing I could not be more excited to share with you.
You can pre-order The Fractured Mirror here: https://the-fractured-mirror.backerkit.com/hosted_preorders
Nathan needed expensive, life-saving dental implants, and his dental plan didn’t cover them, so he started a GoFundMe at https://www.gofundme.com/f/support-nathans-journey-to-dental-implants. Give if you can!
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