Two bad movies

What makes for a bad film? It’s all a matter of opinion of course. And mine obviously differs with the world’s elite cineastes. Take for example Bruno Dumont’s 1999 film L'humanité, which won the top prize at Cannes and awards for best actor (Emmanuel Schotté) and actress (Séverine Caneele). The Criterion Channel describes the movie as probing “the wonder and horror of the human condition.” The opening is unsettling and exploitive, showing the close-up of the vagina of a murdered young girl, flies alight on the corpse. I had to cover my eyes.   The film tracks the movements of Pharaon, a police detective who’s seemingly dimwitted as he is alienated. The back story is he lost his lover and child in an accident. The film is exceedingly quiet (as in hardly anyone says much) and languid as we follow Pharoah on his daily rounds, leading to, well, not much of anything. This is interspersed with graphic depictions of sex by neighbor Domino (Canelo) and her boyfriend Joe (Philippe Tulear).

Again, unnecessary and voyeuristic. These elements, folks, are basically the entire content of this almost two-and-a-half-hour flick. The thought occurred to me: I could make a better picture…...The second movie was Alan Rudolph’s 1985 Trouble in Mind (also on Criterion). I’ve always enjoyed the films of Rudolph, a protégé of Robert Altman, for their hilarious insights into the absurdities of modern relationships. But here he concocts a very staged crime story that descends stupidly into cartoon.  He’s got an interesting cast - Kris Kristofferson as Hawk, Keith Carradine as Coop, Geneviève Bujold as Wanda, even Eighties drag queen Divine as a straight Hilly Blue crime boss. The plot is about Hawk returning to Rain City aka Seattle but immediately getting into trouble with a cast of nefarious characters frequenting Wanda’s Café. The stultifying interior shots are matched by roll-your-eyes cops-and-robbers action sequences. And Carradine’s character devolves into a villain worthy of Batman. So, a wasted cast and soundtrack featuring the iconic Marianne Faithfull. All I could think of was why would someone (i.e., Rudolph) expend so much energy making such a senseless empty movie.