The Disaster Artist (2017): How we appreciate bad films

Abstract

Abstract The following record is an excerpt of the Deep Focus Roundtable Discussion originally published on April 3, 2018, which was part of the second round of the Chinese-language film criticism competition organized by Deep Focus. Since 2016, Deep Focus has held a Chinese-language film criticism competition that targets a young generation of cinephiles, comprising film professionals, college students, or white-collar workers in a variety of fields. The competition usually consists of three rounds. At the preliminary stage, the first-round reviewers rank submissions and select a certain number of good reviews according to their shared criteria. In the second round, the authors of those selected film reviews are randomly allocated into groups. Each group is asked to discuss an assigned film as a roundtable. Each member of the reviewing committee leading such roundtables picks one film that merits in-depth discussions from multiple perspectives, and they serve as both the facilitator and the examiner of the roundtable contest. One winner within each group is selected for the final round, during which the finalists write criticism on a single film. The roundtable “How We Appreciate Bad Films” exemplifies the importance of the roundtable format for the Deep Focus collective. Responding to the debates and controversy over The Disaster Artist (2017) among Chinese fans and cinephiles, the four participants of this competitive roundtable engage the category of “bad film” (lanpian, a Chinese term referring to box-office flops and/or aesthetically bad films) in a global context. Respectively hailing from Taiwan, Hong Kong, and mainland China, young cinephiles confront each other in an intellectual battle around one film.