My name is Joey, and I'm a bad movieaholic

I have a Cinecast confession: I find bad movies comforting. Not "bad" like "That movie is degrading to yellow midgets named Petey with speech impediments" but bad like "Tango and Cash." If I have extra time and I'll be alone and cleaning up around the house or working, I usually turn on a bad movie. Keep your alcohol, stowe your porn, hand me the soda: I'm habituated to bad movies.

This past weekend I went into the video store and rejected so.many.good movies: no Hotel Rwanda, no repeat Batman Begins. My weekend was Land of the Dead and Sahara. Both were really really bad. Really bad.

Land of the Dead was actually, in some ways, better than Sahara, but c'mon, that's like saying "This pile of dung... not nearly as stinky as that pile under the dead possum." It's George Romero not really returning to his roots. The social commentary is there but not subtle. The action is there but not suspenseful or kinetic. The gore is very "you have a budget." Part of what makes the original Dead movies so good is that there was no money, there were no expectations. The overtones were daming. Hell ran out of room for the overtones, that's how daming they were.

Then we get Land of the Dead and Dennis Hopper and John Leguizamo and Simon Baker and Dario Arogento's kid. The dialouge is bad, the acting is laughable, and the effects are sub par. It's just plain not good when the DVD extra made by an outside company is BETTER than the movie as a whole (Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright have cameos and made a fifteen minute documentary that's leaps and bounds better than the movie).

Sahara is just mediocre. There's enough to not offend, there's enough to be "okay." It beats around the Movie-You're-Better-Than-This bush, but it never goes anywhere. The main characters are treasure hunters looking for a U.S. Civil War era battleship buried in the Nigerian desert while helping a perpetually pouty Penelope Cruz hunt down the source of water contamination poisoning all of Africa (yup, that ol' chestnut). There's some fine bits by Steve Zahn and William H. Macy, and the leads all seem to like each other and the direction is all competent and what not and the lighting is good.

There's a line that shoulda made the movie but instead sums up the mediocrity of the exercise. Our leads are racing against time and the villans to uncover a buncha secrets and treasures on camelback across the desert! And, paraphrasing, Steve Zahn is asking Matt McISmokeThePot if he remembers running into those guys from high school who are in a job they hate with a family they may not want and a beer gut that's never going to leave. Zahn asks him when they're going to get those jobs.

This could have been a very good moment, a very self-reflective moment. When I was a kid one of my favorite Bloom County strips has Milo turning down the oppurtunity to chance a life of advenutre and daring, of boldness and uncertainty, for all the reasons you'd turn down "risk" for "safe," and that's a very real theme to life, I believe.

Does Movie play this in a way that matters, in a way that inspires? You know with the set-up here it just sort of peters out. Nuthin'. The thought, and the moment, die on screen.

And why is all this strangely comforting? Is it white noise in the background of a bunch of head noise? A glint of superority to failed efforts, some good ol' fashioned Schadenfraude?

I don't really have an answer, just an addiction. If you'll pardon me, there's something starring Patrick Dempsey circa 1987 on and I've really been meaning to sweep up in here.