Cinematical Seven: Seven Genres We Could All Do Without

Theodore Sturgeon, speculative fiction writer and visionary, once formulated a "Revelation": "90% of everything is crud," though "crap" seems to be the word he was groping for. Cruel, maybe. And frankly, does the half-good, the good-in-spots, or the really-bad-with-a-couple-of-redeeming-moments counts as crap? And the 9 out of 10 ratio means a lot of mulch for the talented 10%...I mean, in this 90 percent are plenty of examples of what not to do, or what could be done better. However, there are 7 genres that are just so consistently low standards that Sturgeon's Revelation seems like blatant optimism. I'm tempted to use the above as one genre example -- the title card from John McNaughton's 1994 movie comes from the ever-reliable shillpages.com -- but there were all more frequent offenders that didn't even have the benefit of catfights and shower scenes:


1. Stock car movies.
Days of Thunder is the prime example, with Tom Cruise playing Cole Trickle. Fancy that, a character named after mine-tailing runoff. But the hit Cars shows that even Pixar couldn't do much with stock cars besides giving the world an idea of what a feature-length version of Thomas the Tank Engine would look like if it guest-starred Thomas's previously-unseen cousin Ralph the Race-car. Talladega Nights identified all of the usual elements; the hard-bitten pappy, the floozy wife, the strangely intense (i.e., gay) rival, but it was shooting very big fish in a small barrel. No matter what you do with this kind of movie, it's cars running round and around on a track like speedy hamsters. And never enough collisions. And now we're preparing for Speed Racer--The Movie, though of course the Mach 5 was a formula racer, not a stock car. The very concept race-car movies is an affront to us drivers who'd like to kill the environment more slowly so we can all enjoy the process.
Exception that proves the rule: Heart Like A Wheel.

2. Boot camp movies.
Take a punk kid and make a man out of him, with push-ups in the grass while a Jupiter-sized orange sun sets behind him, magnified by the swamp gas over Camp Lejeune. Then contrast it with the same characters doing jumping jacks in the rain. Bring out a big-voiced drill sergeant, Louis Gossett, or maybe Clint Eastwood in the never to be forgotten (or forgiven), Heartbreak Ridge.
It's not just men who end up having their character firmed up by a good slog through the mud, as we've seen in Private Benjamin and the elaborate S & M ordeal of Demi "The Concrete Kitten" Moore in G.I. Jane. No matter how you tint or cut it, what you're talking about is a process that most inductees make it through...and films made, almost always, by non-combatant directors who have only the most speculative idea of what goes on in basic training.
Exceptions that prove the rule: The opening sequence of Full Metal Jacket, the as-always neglected Jack Webb's The DI, and Michael Palin in Monty Python's The Meaning of Life: "Riggggght! Sergeant Major's marching up and down the square!"

3. Rape revenge movies.
"Healing violence" is just like "jumbo shrimp" or "military justice": an oxymoron, a contradiction in terms. Outside of a surgeon's table, there's no such thing as healing violence. Almost every rape revenge movie is set up so that we get the titillation first and then the rampage; and unless you're bent that way, the former is always sickening. To be fair, it's not always female victims, as in the recent and inutterably weird I'll Sleep When I'm Dead. Of course you can work up an audience with a rape scene. It's the most basic kind of cinema lever-pulling, going back all the way to Birth of a Nation. Why should anyone congratulate themselves for knowing where the lever is, and how to pull it?
Exceptions that prove the rule: Ingmar Bergman's The Virgin Spring, Ms, 45 (a grindhouse version of Johnny Belinda). Deliverance.

4. Inspirational football movies.
Practically a branch of the basic-training film, so we needn't dawdle over it. The merits of learning to kill to defend the homeland is replaced by a weaker argument that football is more than life, it's just plain everything. Every one of these movies is made with the tunnel-vision of the football coach. If you're not channelling the ghost of Vince Lombardi, it's hard to get in the mood for non-stop collision, and the constant crunching of plastic on plastic as helmets slam into shoulder pads. If you'd never seen American football, you'd never know that most of it is 4 hour length of a game is actually composed of fat guys in striped shirts examining the ground and tweeting on whistles. But don't listen to me, I'd rather be at the movies anyway.
Exception that proves the rule: Semi-Tough.

5. "Make me pregnant right this instant!"
OK, bearing male genitals and what not, I probably can't understand the pain of the would-be mother. But isn't cinema supposed to make you understand? I'm sure not getting it from watching the hideo-comic hysteria of some fading actress, baying like a timberwolf for a full womb...and my sympathy isn't worked by the inevitable "dog-parade montage" of unsuitable sperm-donors (there's been a million of these since Spike Lee devised the technique in She's Gotta Have It). In a planet already ram-packed with human beings looking for food and water, it's sometimes very difficult to sit through another baby-fever movie, A Smile Like Yours or whatever they're calling it this week, We've been getting it long and often ever since the early offender, Henry Jaglom's Babyfever...a good example of this bad genre.
Exceptions that prove the rule:
Raising Arizona, the "Selma's Choice" episode of The Simpsons.

6. It's the worst school in town, it's so bad.
Now, we're talking about a kind of film that goes back this far, and the kids still aren't getting any smarter. There are ways to dramatize the story of hero teachers who cross into the ghetto and stare own the thugs, using only a piece of chalk and an eraser as weapons. But the few intelligent versions of this kind of story are outweighed by the more common, the armadas of over-aged teenagers using outdated slang, as some actress puts worry wrinkles on her forehead to show how much she cares. Even parody didn't stop this, and this year we had both Freedom Writers, as well as a year ago's Akeelah and the Bee, fattened with Starbucks' bucks. Both added trumped-up conflict (the parents and the administrators who just don't understand). The latter was worse, since it insisted that the pedantic memorization of spelling is more important than actually using logic to figure things out. Here's my vote for the phoniest: 187...I think that I wrote when it came out that "187" was the number of times this movie had been made already.
Exception that proves the rule:
Stand and Deliver. Here we have an article that talks about what happened to Jaime Escalante later on.

7. "I've got to finish my movie."
There was only one Federico Fellini and one 8 1/2. Unfortunately, since Sundance commenced, there's been so many examples of this kind of whipped-together work that it's hard even to remember specific titles. And how many film festivals are there now, 700? And for one Living in Oblivion, these fests are swamped by numberless semi-autobiographical films about the hard-bitten indie filmmaker trying to get it all together. When I was going to college, the creative writing program had one rule: you had a year to finish a novel, but it could not be about college life. Maybe that rule ought to be spread to film schools.
Exception that proves the rule:
Even Living in Oblivion isn't what you'd call a classic.