Are Entertaining Films Always Good?

I've just finished watching the Guardian's round-up of the year's films, and it was clear that Xan Brooks and Jason Solomons are both of the unprogressive school of film critics. Solomons decried the entire comic-book adaption genre, including perhaps this year's best film Kick Ass and the rather flakier but nevertheless entertaining Scott Pilgrim, while in the 'Guilty Pleasure' category Hot Tub Time Machine and Piranha 3D were the nominees. Both were convinced that their choices were 'rubbish', and yet they both enjoyed them immensely, sidestepping the thorny issue of whether an entertaining film can be considered good even if it wallows merrily in the mud of the derivative or the self-consciously schlocky. I am going to explore whether a film that prioritises viewer pleasure over artistic substance can be judged to be good, or accurately judged at all.

Nearly every film ever made was made with the intention of being entertaining (why are there no decent synonyms for entertaining?), and nearly everyone goes to the cinema with the intention of being entertained. Even the most journalistic of genres, the political documentary, will be presented in such a way to actively engage with its viewers. Almost nobody has more than a basic knowledge of film theory with which to analyse cinematic technique, and even most film students such as myself judge a film mostly on how absorbing it is. The whole film industry is built upon making films that engage their target market, and the more successfully this is achieved the greater the box-office receipts. When critics like the aformentioned Brooks and Solomons bow under apparent critical peer-pressure it's indicative of the tendency of film writers to try and evaluate films in the manner of literary and music critics (who are both also guilty of the same tendency), when film is an entirely different medium and so should be judged after it's own fashion.

But. 'Entertainment' is impossible to quantify. It is entirely subjective. I really enjoyed, say, Cloverfield yet most of my friends were put off by the herky-jerky camera; another of my friends really hates Forrest Gump. How is a critic supposed to intrinsically judge the collective mood of not just the audience in his or her screening, but the mood of every audience in every cinema in every country? Would it not make more sense to analyse a film based on its more concrete elements such as cinematography, script, acting, themes etc? Furthermore, if a film is entertaining but contains questionable material, for instance homophobia or political insensitivity, it would be a poor critic that fails to dock marks. I think it would be fair to say that critical analysis of films with cultural and political pretentions is possible along the lines of how well it achieves this, but this group would be a minority. Likewise would an attempt to judge films by how well they achieve their primary objective fail - many films just want to be fun, which brings us back to square one.

So, the original questions is still unsettled, but how about the inverse: Are good films always entertaining? I've used it in arguments for the past several blogs but I'm using it again here: Citizen Kane (despite being flawed) is still technically decent, yet no one I've ever met has actually particularly enjoyed it. In fact it could be the epitome of the hypocritical attitude I bemoned earlier, and in the previous blog - declaring it to be less exaulted than previously thought would be seen as an attempt to undermine critical theory as a whole, such is its position as a vaunted text. Other than this, I'm struggling to think of further examples. Jackie Brown was dissapointing, as was Vertigo, Ratatouille and The Untouchables, but I think broadly speaking film critics get it right.