The Film Hierarchy

 I watch a lot of B movies on Netflix, a lot of low budget things, or movies with stars in them that are vanity projects and not very good, in various ways. 

This leads me to my theory of the movie hierarchy.  

It isn't hard to have pretty people in the movie; that's a given. It isn't hard to have beautiful scenery or nice cinematic effects. There are plenty of editors and directors who know the basic cinematic language of conventional film. The music can be fine, too. There are enough people who can create music that will serve its proper cinematic function. (An exception was LALA land, a movie about jazz that had almost no good jazz in it.) So at the minimum we will have something to look at and something to listen to.  

Next comes acting. This will be of more variable quality. There are enough good enough actors to go around for the secondary roles, but there could be casting problems, or the typical wooden performances by big name actors like Nicholas Cage or Keanu Reeves.

But the rarest talent in cinema is writing and plotting. The screenplay can be weak along several dimensions, in its narrative structure and/or its dialogue, which can be so bad that it doesn't give the actors enough to work with. So a bad movie is usually bad not in its musical score or art design, but in its screenplay, directing, or acting, or some combination of these. A solid or brilliant screenplay will give the actors something to work with.