SYN Media

Any movie nerd listening to a film review knows that it is kinda pointless to look at one movie on its own. Why is it that I know what to expect of a film before it begins? Why do reviewers keep mentioning the ‘style’ of the film without specifying what it is? And how can a star rating mean anything when Leonard Maltin is compating Fight Club to Babe 2: Pig in the City? The problem with conventional review shows is that they look at vacuum packed movies dropped like gumballs from their local Hoyts Kiosk.

We want to look differently. ‘The Good, The Bad, and The Box Office’ is the attempts of two film fans – named Scott and Til – to celebrate the medium of cinema, rather than the achievements of a credits list consisting of a few hundred people with a few million dollars. Each week, we will examine a genre of cinema, be it the kind of genre you find with a plastic label at the video shop or the kind of niche genre that only gets a name on the internet, with the intent of finding out what makes it work. The discussion will centre around an example of a good film from each genre, a bad film, and a film recently to cinema or DVD; bringing in any other film that comes to mind, until we understand what we are supposed to do with these five stars.

Thanks to Rachael Osborne and Blair Martin Hall for providing the logo and theme music respectively.