Finally watched the Stallone Judge Dredd
I'd been putting this off for years because I heard it wasn't very good. It's not! It's kind of nonsensical - apparently, Stallone asked for cuts during development, and you can really tell. The cast is absolutely stacked, but some of them don't do very much. Joan Chen is shockingly misused and seems to exist only to get in a catfight with Diane Lane in the final scenes. Rob Schneider is also unbelievably annoying in the back half. So! Not very good.
The production design, however, is fantastic, and I'm glad to have seen it just for that. I wasn't expecting to like the way it looked as much as I did. It has some of the weird photobashed visual style that a lot of 90s and early 2000s sci fi does - a look similar to the stuff I loved in Spy Kids and some of the "Maya 1.0" movies I've written about before. There was something really special and weird about that period of time when filmmakers could use a computer to whack together a weirdly high-fidelity sci-fi city out of physical props and miniatures and 3D modeling all at once. I am glad to have seen it just to see the props and sets, genuinely.
I have grown more comfortable over time with the fact that I can take what I please from movies that I consider "actually bad" - not good-bad, but actually worthless. I am easily-amused, and I'm getting easier to amuse all the time. It's largely because I'm watching more movies I actually dislike and trying to find ways to get something out of them. I think I spent my 20s and early 30s only watching stuff I'd heard was amazing. I definitely think I'm better off occasionally watching stuff that's widely considered terrible.
Most of the terrible stuff I watch isn't as easy to find something in it to enjoy as the 1995 Dredd, though!