We — and I mean that “we” inclusively, critic and fan — don’t help matters either with our grades and rankings, which sometimes encourage us to overrate movies that we admire but don’t love, and to underrate the kinds of movies that people rent at the video store on a Friday night, or watch over and over again on TBS. I’m not saying that it’s wrong to try to elevate the good and shine a harsh light on the bad, but there should be a little more wriggle room for movies that are bad in some ways but good in others — even if that “good” is just the way they can dominate popular culture for a few weeks, a la Pirates Of The Caribbean. If you decide that the fun of sharing in the zeitgeist isn’t worth it because a movie’s just too shitty, that’s cool; but it’s important to recognize that some movies really do have their primary value as phenomena.
If the summer movie season teaches us anything, year after year, it’s that if movies can be novels, and essays, and art installations, and reportage, and scrapbooks, and pulp trash, then they can also be a kind of cultural comfort food, as familiar (and as annoying to some people) as a trip home to see the folks. It’s a quality of movies that’s hard to qualify — and may be critically useless, because it doesn’t allow for a lot of debate — but it’s there, it’s significant, and there should be a way to acknowledge it without automatically elevating every piece of pop crap to the level of good pop, let alone to the level of a masterpiece. Maybe the key is to funnel the objective through the subjective: to own up to what sucks about a movie and then explain why, ultimately, it might not matter.