> With Rocky Horror, I honestly can't remember if I was trying to argue with you that Rocky Horror is objectively bad, or merely state that I hate it and explain why.

Honestly - and this, unlike most things I say, is true - I think I agree with Dave that what you were saying was actually most likely "lol darien u r noob." Which is cool. But you know me - every once in a while I like to get philosophical about weird issues and discuss how to define things like "film enjoyability."

> Just don't expect me to accord the movie the respect you think it deserves.

I don't think it deserves respect. I think it's a figure of fun, basically, and much of the reason I brought it up in response to both lists was not because I honestly think it's one of the best movies EVAR (ye gods), but simply to illustrate in a comedic fashion how odd some of the picks on both lists are (okay, mostly the EW teen list) and how much I hate Grease.

> Everything else in the opening paragraphs of your post I agree with.

Yeah, me too.

> I *did* like Evil Dead II, but, you know, although it was trying to be campy badness, I think the reason it works is the *character* of Ash doesn't really ham it up very much in that one. In the great "hand" scene, which makes the movie for me all by itself, Bruce Campbell plays the scene basically straight, acting as a normal, unaware person would if all those things were happening to him, or at least how we might imagine someone would.

I can almost agree with that, minus a small amount of confusion about *which* hand scene you mean (the one where his hand gets all evil and he cuts it off, or the one later where it's running around the room?).

> The characters in Rocky Horror, however, not only ham it up, they behave in ways that aren't even recognizably human even accounting for exaggeration and camera mugging. That's much of why I hated it. It's just people doing stupid random crap.

I don't agree at all. The Brad and Janet characters behave more or less how they could be expected to behave, and act basically like ordinary people in this wacked-out setting. The rest of the characters, granted, do *not* act like any normal humans ever would, but, to be fair, they're *not* human. Not that I'm suggesting even for a moment that you can take a bad movie and make it a good one just by saying "it all happened in an alternate universe," but it does seem to me that your standards are a bit too strict if you expect explicitly non-human characters to act "recognisably human."

> > What if we replace Rob Schneider with Jerry Lewis? Lewis in his stage persona is obviously aware of his own nerdy strangeness in exactly the way that Keaton is not.
>
> Obviously Lewis, the actor, knew what he was doing, but I submit that Lewis, the character, was *not*. His movies, in stark contrast to how they're sometimes remembered, are typically about misfit nerds that, sure, behave in funny ways, but not on purpose. It's just how they are.

How does this relate back to the clown analogy? Clearly in that case, the actors know what they're doing, but the characters do not. Any clown worth his rubber nose doesn't show any anticipation for the pie that's about to hit him in the face - he plays it totally surprised.