I'm so pretty. Oh so pretty. I'm so pretty and witty and... a kite?

Few people that read this are from the Chicago area. Which means that few of you will understand how excited I was last night when I randomly remembered the commercial for Eagle Auto Insurance in which a man crashes a car, pleads to the Insurance Gods as to who might help him, hears a woman yell, "Look it's Eagleman!", and sees Eagleman fly in and lay an egg out of which pops low car insurance prices ("Oooh, look at those low rates!"). The inflection of the completely unable actors just won't be in your head the way it's in mine.

I save a soft spot in my heart for this and other commercials (Eight hundred, Five, eight, eight... two, three hundred, EMPIRE!) because they are so ridiculously bad they become good. It's the driving force behind several seasons of the real world (Miami thank you very much) and many of the reality shows it spawned afterwards. It's the reason Carrot Top and Pauly Shore ever got movies made and why Freddie and Jason are still allowed to spar. Because somewhere deep inside of you, though you know it's crap, you want it to be such crap that it implodes on itself comes out the other side of a dimension and re-appears as interesting.

For example, I once saw a high school musical that takes my prize for the "It's so bad it's SO good" category. It was West Side Story already a good start, and a kid playing Chino ran backstage from the wings to recite his one and only line. In the play this action occurs in the bridal shop and Chino is the unlucky sap left to tell Maria that her great love has just killed her brother. As such he is intended to come in and yell,

"Maria!! Tony killed your brother!"

in a firm and world shattering manner. I guess this kid was so excited about the fact that he had a line he forgot to ensure he actually said what was assigned. Or maybe he was confused about the plot. I'm not sure. In any event what really occurred when Chino grabbed Maria by the arms was something along the lines of,

"Maria!! Tony killed your parents!"

At which point everyone in the audience turned to their neighbor and said, "Wait... That's not right is it? No. No, it's not. He didn't kill her parents at all." This quiet buzz of conversation swept the auditorium with its gentle hush. The girl playing Maria (to a Tony who happened to be the only actual Puetro Rican in the production) also appeared to find the comment erroneous and stared at us, her waiting public, as if for help. She looked back at poor Chino who simply ran off the right side of the proscenium, ignoring entirely the convention of the door placed thoughtfully by a set designer up left. Maria looked back at the crowd and abandoning entirely any pretense of accent, which up to this point had in truth been more British anyway, sighed and said "Aye me. Poor Mama and Papa." and walked off the stage as well.

Like the paradoxical sexy-ugly phenomenon (Keith Richards anyone?) good-bad entertainment is a tricky mistress. There is a very fine line between something just sucking and being so laughably bad it's actually, well laughable. It's a gamble between forcing yourself to watch Alien Resurrection, the obvious choice for worst movie of all time, where if you're one of the lucky ones you'll have already fallen asleep by the time the evil Winona Ryder alien/human baby thing gets sucked out a tiny hold bit by bit into space and enjoying the insane head/chest/torso/legs/you name it she's done it body part ripping apart, hot chick on outside evil reptile being on the inside, crazy machine sex spectacle of Species 2 (or is it 3?). Because so bad it's good movies can be tough to spot from the outside. It is difficult to judge this proverbial book from its cover.

There are some simple guidelines. Obviously, if the trailers look terrible the movie will probably be bad, but if the movie takes itself too seriously, bills itself as epic or grand or sweeping it will probably just be bad-bad. If its come out on video has a fantastic cast and/or director and looks cool but you've never heard of it, it will be bad-bad. Unless you don't pay attention much. If it involves people dying you're on more of the right track, but if it does so in a manner that involves watching a lot of close ups on the about to be dead's face, in my book you can only go up. And also, musicals if you know they involve people who aren't singers can be great. But more often than not its just a guessing game, an open sesame of possible entertainment. Perhaps best to just keep trying to watch actually good movies and take recommendations for antitainment from friends.