My 5 Favourite Guilty Pleasure-movies

Why I think of it as a guilty pleasure: You know, self-indulgence is a funny thing. People will hate you if you do it alot. Richard Kelly's Southland Tales is by far the most self-indulgent movie ever made. I love it for that, but many, MANY hate it because of this. Kelly's way of directing makes things properly apparent almost exclusively to himself only, making this movie a very hard watch. People mostly want to be entertained in movies. When they don't want to be entertained, they want to be enlightened. Most are willing to do some thinking on their own, but not too many like it when they see something that's never properly explained throughout the entire movie. Filmmakers such as David Lynch for example atleast make the film seem as if it had a purpose. They disguise their self-indulgent experiments with sometimes great philosophical dialogue and so on. Richard Kelly... well, with Southland Tales, he does none of that. He presents to us a script that could've been written at one sitting while watching CNN for a singe night and reading Orwell's 1984 at the same time. Southland Tales provides you with a very straight-forward story told in a very complex world in a very complex narrative. Some may argue it has useless scenes throughout. I just think all this adds to it's charm. You see I write a lot. Not reviews or stuff, but fiction. Books and so forth. Hence I love to exercise my imagination. Few movies have given me a chance as excellent to do that as Southland Tales. It made my imagination go haywire on unraveling the story properly. The world in Southland Tales is very detailed, but unlike in Constantine, we get explanations to it throughout. The problem to most people is that Kelly bombards us with information about it every minute. It's tiring and most people give up after an hour of viewing this. If you can go through the entire movie, you'll either hate it for Kelly's self-indulgence, or love it because of the fact that this isn't a popcorn movie. It isn't an enlightening movie. It's just something very, very complex and different from most things today. And boy do I enjoy it because of that.

Why I think of it as a guilty pleasure: It's really a pretty god-awful movie if you take a critical perspective on it. The plot has cowboys that do karate to our main character in a scene that has nothing to do with the main storyline, there's some extremely stiff acting from everyone but Doug Bradley and Craig Scheffer (the man that should've been Max Payne) and some really bizarre directorial choices here and there, such as the fact that Inferno has a scene where the main character has sex with a prostitute in a pink/violet room and no nudity whatsoever is shown. I don't get it. But why it's on this list is that I love it. I'm incapable of viewing it critically. It's impossible for me. The Hellraiser-series has always differed from the bulk of slasher series's. It has strong sexual overtones, psychological layers and very twisted visuals. Inferno takes all these and throws some of the basic themes of the previous movies to the edge, pushes the boundaries. This was the first movie I ever saw that really depicted a man's fall into his own personal hell, and have loved it ever since. My feelings towards this film overcome any criticism I might be able to put to it, and this is why it's #2 on this list.

Why I think of it as a guilty pleasure: Everyone hates it, but I love... some things about it. Constantine bombed horribly, and rightfully so. It's an ambitious movie, and sometimes very confusing while trying to seem cool and mysterious. It's because of this mysterious feeling that I like Constantine. It isn't a film that explains what happens most of the time; it doesn't tell the viewer a damn thing. It leaves things to your imagination. I know what you might be thinking "But I could just imagine things sitting at my couch while scratching my bawls". Well, that you could, but Constatine does provide you with some very interesting ideas and visuals to feed your imagination. Add to that a strong main character (possibly Reeves at his finest), some pretty good, scarce action, a very little amount of a young Shia LaBeouf and Peter Stormare as the coolest Satan ever on-screen, and you have yourself a very good movie. As long as you're willing to accept that it will not explain much of itself to you.

Why I think of it as a guilty pleasure: It's a F13th-movie that I like. That's like saying it's a Saw-sequel I love. Even though Part 3 is a very far cry from being scary, it's entertaining for sure. For one thing, the director tried to make the movie "3D". What makes this apparent to us is the grooviest title sequence of all time, with the most danceable horror theme ever made ( www.youtube.com/watch?v=kKYniMDeL3M ). Of course that isn't true, but it made me laugh for it's entire 2-minute running time. The 3D-effects mostly stem from stuff being thrown towards the screen (the best effect in my opinion, Jason trying to grab the viewer, works even without any goggles or so), and it's hilariously overused on occasion. For example this one kid plays with a Yo-yo (remember those?) just so the camera could shoot the red round thing coming towards it. Speaking of red, the gore in F13th 3 is so rarely used, when you see it, it gets to you. You go "Holy crap, that surprised me". It ain't scary but it's fun to be surprised every once in a while, and there's one surprisingly gory sequence where Jason cuts some idiot doing handstands into two (in 3D, of course), that looks particularily nasty. I enjoy watching this type of "harmless" slasher movies where the main point is to shock the viewer abit and make him/her jump out of the seat, while still not falling to the nowadays oh-so-popular goreporn-category, and in this aspect, I have a great amount of respect for this film. It does just that when you're in the right mood; you'll have fun watching it, and it's thrilling.

Not scary though, I can't express that enough.

Why I think of it as a guilty pleasure: It's retarded. Seriously. Marky Mark pulls some very bizarre role as the nicest guy on earth who kills people for money, lives with a complete cunt of a wife, and is completely happy with all this. Also, the climax of the movie takes place in a huge video rental store. VHS looks better when shot all over the place than DVD, I'll tell you that. But the main thing with this movie is that it's so much fun. As I said, it has Marky Mark in it SHOOTING PEOPLE IN THE FACE. Some scenes just ooze comedy gold, like when his family comes over for dinner and all his hitman friends decide to kill him. Action ensues as the parents complain about the ruckus. It's fun. Did I already say that? Well, probably because it really is. This is in my opinion damn near the peak of Mark Wahlberg's career. Just plain juvenile action, even if it doesn't follow any of the rules of common logic, it's still fun.