My gigs are a mixed bag, but I too have plenty that I'm proud of.   I can also earnestly say that I'm always more interested to ask what my fellow FIYH'ers are working on because I recognize VFX is a skill I am never going to have, and am always fascinated by it.  To me, the advantage of having these dudes as my friends is that there's such a diversity of experiences that I don't see it as mere conversation filler as much as its me genuinely curious.

That said, I grind my teeth when someone says, "Oh. you're an editor!  So you have to like, watch ALL the footage?" or "Oh you're an editor!  So, you like, add music to it and stuff."

2001: A Trey's Odyssey.

Kubrick was just a puppet.

Disclaimer: if you dislike the tone of a post I make, re-read it in a North/East London accent until it sounds sufficiently playful

So Trey mentioned in the episode that he doesn't understand watching bad movies ironically. I absolutely LOVE watching bad movies. It's not necessarily ironic, though I do get plenty of laughs from a specific type of bad movie. But I actually find watching bad movies to be at a minimum AS educational as watching good movies, possibly even more so.

Good movies are kind of like a weird alchemy. You can point to the things that they did right, but checking all the right boxes doesn't necessarily make for a good movie. It takes a special combination of all the different elements to make a movie work. Ghostbusters is a fantastic example, since I just saw it in theaters and it's fresh in my mind. GREAT movie, one of my top ten favorites. But on paper it fucking shouldn't be. It's a bonkers idea, the script is structurally flawed to an extent, there's no reason Ghostbusters should be as amazing as it is. And that makes it kind of hard (but not impossible) to learn from.

But a bad movie is never less than a crash course in what not to do. Whether it's a horrible script, terrible casting, or even technical issues. It's easy to tell somebody, "You always need to capture good sound," but they won't understand how right you are until they watch a movie where a scene is dead silent until they fade up the dialogue tracks and you can hear cars and birds and possible the camera. Watching godawful schlock is a really good way to take all the lessons you've learned and see why they're as important as they are.