Last night Shelly and I watched Ella Enchanted on DVD (no, we don't see movies till they've come out on DVD, and even then we generally just check them out from the library instead of paying Blockbuster for the privilege). It's a bad movie. But I liked it.

Not long ago I wrote a post about The Prince and Me and how terrible it was. Ella Enchanted is likewise awful, and for many of the same reasons. Both movies feature hackneyed cliches, have problems differentiating between different accents and languages, show characters reacting to things in a totally unrealistic manner, and were directed badly. While The Prince and Me has Julia Stiles to make it worse, Ella involves bad special effects, leaves characters and plotlines hanging, and can't seem to make up its mind if it's a melodrama, an action adventure, a romance, or a cheesy musical.

But I hated Prince and I liked Ella. Why?

I was orginally going to make a laundry list of reasons why I can like one bad movie and hate another. But I think it all boils down to two reasons. I don't know which is more important.

The first reason is the difference between Julia Stiles and Anne Hathaway. While I still wouldn't go so far as to label Hathaway a "great actress," she's at least energetic enough to be fun to watch. She's likable. She's believable. Plus, she's gorgeous.* I wonder what she'd be like in a movie with a good script. Stiles, in contrast, is dour, sour, glower all the time, and she looks like a poorly carved jack-o-lantern. I constantly feel like I want to slap Stiles, while I want to get to know Hathaway. So yeah, I'm saying that a pretty face can save an otherwise bad movie. But there's more.

Second, most of Ella's badness is dispelled by the fact that it's a fantasy fairy tale. The events are not meant to be taken as real, so it's easier to brush it off when, for example, the person our heroine has spent the entire movie searching for just randomly (and even unintentionally) literally falls out of the sky right in front of her. My initial reaction was, "Sha right. That would never happen." But then I shrug and say, "But hey. It's a magical wonderland. Who knows what would happen." Also, the melodrama, sporadic and badly done though it is, is intentional--that means that a lot of unrealistic things are allowed to happen.

Watch both of these movies at your own peril. I've made a private goal to never see another Julia Stiles movie again, and to never see another Tommy O'Haver (Ella's director) film again. But I've learned that if you play your cards right, it's very easy to recognize a bad movie when you see one, and yet to like it nevertheless.

* I believe I have written elsewhere that Anne Hathaway will play Shelly in the movie version of our lives. I have yet to cast someone as me, though.