Much easier to avoid than Obamacare
Really bad TV and bad public policy have a lot in common.
Both are produced by highly-paid people who are supposed to know what they’re doing. Both cost heaps of money.
But there’s one important difference.
Bad TV gets canceled, but bad public policy goes on forever.
Did you ever decide to watch a movie because it stars an actor whose work you’ve really liked, so far? We fell into that trap the other night–Malice Aforethought, supposedly an English murder mystery. The bait was Ben Miller, a very funny comedian who’s also a pretty good actor.
You would be justified in walking a mile out of your way, in snow or rain, to avoid seeing this movie.
In fairness, we could only endure about 15 minutes of it, stubbing it out when a certain seduction scene turned out to be so ham-fisted, so inane, so jejune, as to start me whistling Lillibulero. It was that or throw something.
Once again, it set me to thinking… Here is a movie made by professionals, costing heap big sums of money. They hired real actors, real writers, a real director, and a real crew. Every day they had the opportunity to view the rushes and see how it was shaping up so far. And yet the result managed to be both fatuous and offensive.
How does a movie this bad even get made? Obviously it was going to be one ludicrous sex scene after another, with somewhere a murder mystery thrown in, if they ever got around to it. Why didn’t Miller’s agent read the script and threaten to shoot him if he agreed to appear in this clunker? Somebody should’ve been shot for this.
If people who actually make movies for a living can produce a mess like this, what does it suggest about any idea to grow the government and give spectacular new powers to equally inept and foolish individuals?
You can always turn off a rotten movie. It isn’t so easy to get rid of rotten public policy.
Hey, if you’re shut in by the weather today, or just feel like reading a little more of this blog, visit the archives and call up this post from Oct. 6, 2014–“What We Can Learn from Bad Movies.” What does America’s immigration policy have in common with Plan 9 from Outer Space? Well, yeah, okay, Plan 9 was better than anything ever produced by the Obama administration–but read the post. I think you’ll like it.