I love “bad” movies until my friend starts mocking every sincere moment

One of my favorite kinds of movie night is choosing something messy: an overconfident thriller, a creature feature with visible rubber seams, or a sequel that spends more money while making less sense. I like laughing at the strange choices, but I also like the parts that work. A ridiculous movie can still have a beautiful shot, a committed performance or one line that lands harder than it has any right to.

My friend enjoys the same movies differently. The moment the logo appears, he starts looking for material. He gives characters nicknames, imitates accents and pauses to inspect continuity errors. If a scene becomes emotional, he performs fake sobbing before it has a chance to breathe.

At first this was fun. Then we watched an old science-fiction movie I genuinely love. It is cheap and earnest and occasionally clumsy, but its central relationship has mattered to me since college. I told him that before we started. During the final scene, he added a joke over the quietest line. I asked him to stop. He said, “I thought the whole point was that this was bad.”

That sentence has been bothering me because I do not know what “so bad it is good” means if affection is not allowed. I am not gathering friends to prosecute a movie. The pleasure comes from moving between laughter and surprise, not maintaining two hours of superiority.

He says I changed the rules by choosing a film with sentimental value for a roast night. That is partly fair. I knew how he watched and hoped a warning would make him recognize this one as different. He heard the warning as background information, not a request for a different tone.

We can solve the immediate problem by labeling future nights: roast pick or sincere pick. But that division also seems false. Many of the movies I enjoy most live in both categories. Their flaws are funny, and their ambition is moving. I do not want to apologize every time my irony switches off.

Can affectionate mockery survive if everyone has to agree which moments are protected? How do you watch flawed art with friends who treat sincerity as an invitation to make the next joke?