"a moody teenager hilariously incapable of remembering or articulating why he’s moody"

Phil Christman on the importance of -- the joys of -- bad movies:

"My most memorable experiences of art include A Brighter Summer Day, Jules and Jim, Only Angels Have Wings. They also include Robot Monster, Glen or Glenda?, Godzilla vs. Megalon. The love of bad movies has made me both more observant, and more tolerant, of the little inadvertencies that crop up even in the greatest works. If, as a child, I loved Hitchcock’s Notorious because it was an exciting adventure story, a lifetime of watching incoherent, ideologically-at-war-with-themselves movies has made me appreciate the way Notorious is also far too sunken in its own weirdness to notice how conflicted it is about women.

My father and I still regularly talk about bad movies we’ve seen. During our Sunday phone calls, when things turn contentious, our mutual interest in bad cinema serves as a hedge against topics we’re better off not discussing, chiefly politics. Regarding which: I am disappointed in him, he is disappointed in me. To put it this way is to frame the thing liberally, as though I were to say, We are the same on the inside, but kept apart by meaningless ideological preferences. But I don’t want to frame the thing liberally. I believe that I am right to be a leftist and that he is wrong to be a conservative. I have worked very hard, as has he, trying to be right about things. I learned from him that ideas matter, that it’s worth trying hard to be right about them. But one of the ideas that I believe matters, one of the things I believe I am right about, is that the pain he has when we fight is morally significant, not only to me, because he is my dad, but in some abstract moral sense, because he is a person. And I know from bitter experience that I cannot bend him to the left, which means that when we discuss politics we both suffer pointlessly."

Definitely worth reading the whole thing.