me_irl

This is why I hardly ever recommend movies.

My criteria pretty much boils down to "did it hold my attention" during the runtime?"

A "good" movie holds my attention An "ok" movie doesn't hold my atttention 100% A "bad" movie 'pushes' my attention away

Watch both Judge Dress films to understand the difference between a good film and a bad one.

Did u have fun is one part of good. So is did it make u think deeply about something, was it pretty, was the dialogue good, did it give u a new perspective, did it make u feel something. Etc etc

Imo most movies are kind of bad and I usually regret watching them.

But I kinda feel like this is because I can easily think of other things I would have had more fun spending that time on. So it's a tangible loss to me.

FWIW I keep watching movies because I have seen a few that makes the pursuit worth it.

This is exactly why we mainly get dogshit by people with nothing to say or any life experience.

I did a Final Destination marathon recently to prep for Bloodlines.
While all the movies have their flaws and weaknesses, FD4 was garbage. Even as a easy to please person I couldn't handle it.

Genuinely terrible, I am shocked they wanted it to be the last one in the franchise, to the point they called it "The Final Destination"

We've got a community on mastodon called monsterdon that watches bad movies for fun. Just search the hashtag, main event is Sunday nights but there's some spinoffs.

So do they also just enjoy jingling keys for 2 hours?

Like it's not that hard. You enjoy it or you don't and everyone has a criteria on what's good or not.
Some people like to think about high concept stuff and a good movie gets their moral queries up.
Some like professionalism and it's about shot compositions and good editing.
Some want jokes and as long as they laugh it's good.
Some like Neil Breen stuff that's none of the above.
Truly exceptional movies usually are able to satisfy multiple groups of people and also may get you interested in lines of thought or art that is in a different realm than your normal standard of quality.

Saying you turn off your brain and have no concept other than colors make time pass is beyond a lack of critical thought.

Books are good when you don't realise you are reading.

Any film that makes you realise you are watching a film (bad sets, acting, dialog etc.) is bad.

Sometimes, it's more important that you enjoy the thing than the thing being objectively good. There is merit to objectively analyzing things, and there can be enjoyment found in doing so. There is also merit to just enjoying the thing you like. Both are valid.

I had this exact train of thought when I was eighteen and ended up building a career and a half on top of that particular crisis.

I was going to say no regrets, but... you know, some regrets?

I can tell when a movie is good now, though.

Weirdly, that somehow became a huge political problem on the Internet and ended up killing democracy. I guess that's one of the regrets.

Don't have fun = bad movie.

Enjoying a movie, having fun watching it, is not an indication of its quality. It is acceptable to enjoy bad movies, nothing wrong with that, I've watched plenty of movies I consider as bad but still had fun and a nice time watching them.

Defining the quality of a movie by the enjoyment you had is like defining the quality of a painting by how realistic it is. A painting might be good even if it is surreal, unrealistic or abstract, and a realistic painting might be crap, so the quality of the painting is not tied to simply how realistic it is. The same way there are movies that are fun and enjoyable but not "good", and there are movies that bore most people and are a master piece.

While with a painting defining the quality is simpler (simpler yes, but not simple) as it is the creation of one person normally, for movies it gets incredibly complex as there's so much to measure and its the work of so many people; the script, the acting, the photography, the score, the directing, the stunts, makeup and dressing, FX, ... There's a lot that can be good and a lot that can be bad in the same movie.

At least that has always been my perspective, I have no issues admitting to not liking something despite how good it was, and loving something that I knew was not good. Some examples that come to mind: I love the matrix movies, love watching them, yes, in plural, that doesn't mean the second and third are good. It feels like there were too many issues in them to make them good, but I still had a good time watching them. On the other hand, I feel like a movie like 2001 is of unquestionable quality, yet I always feel somewhat bored watching it and would rather do something else.