Popcorn Plebeianism

Beyond the obvious fundamentals like my family and friends, what I love most in life are stories. Telling them, hearing them, seeing them, reading them, playing games around them. That’s the semi-obvious foundation underlying the prominent place that books and comics and movies occupy in my mental landscape. I’ve already done my reaction piece to the A.V. Club’s top books of the decade, so now it’s time to turn my attention to the movie theater (and DVD player).

Of course, that’s not something I do with great regularity. I read constantly, about a book a week, but I can go months without seeing a movie. If I were independently wealthy and my life were an endless expanse of leisure time, I have no doubt I would watch more movies, but they don’t fit very well into current configurations. Even if I had a tiny portable DVD player I wouldn’t replace books on the bus or Metro with films, because I like to watch movies straight through, not in chunks.

So, my hit-miss ratio is a bit lower for the movies. Here’s where my intake overlaps with the A.V. Club’s, combining both their consensus Top 50 list and their side-inventories of personal favorites.

Movies I’ve seen:
The Dark Knight
The Prestige
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon
The Incredibles
The Lord Of The Rings: The Two Towers
The Royal Tenenbaums
Almost Famous
Grizzly Man
Kill Bill Vol. 1
Memento
25th Hour
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
American Splendor
Minority Report
Shaun of the Dead
The 40 Year Old Virgin
Idiocracy
Sideways
State and Main

FWIW, the consensus choices are at the top of the list and run through Eternal Sunshine, and American Splendor down through the rest are the personal faves. I caught 12 of the Top 50, and 7 of the 25 supplemental flicks. With a single exception, I think all of those movies belong in the hit parade and I would recommend them unreservedly. (The outlier is State and Main, which I didn’t think was terrible but didn’t think was anything great either.) I mentioned the other day how I dropped in on the middle of Kill Bill on cable and got sucked in, and there are several of those kind of movies on the list, not just that in theory I would watch random scenes from the middle on tv but which I have repeatedly proven that to be the case: The Royal Tenenbaums, The Incredibles, Shaun of the Dead, Idiocracy, and 40 Year Old Virgin will all make me set down the remote for at least a little while.

There’s an additional 16 movies I would like to see, most of which are actually in my (ridiculously long and slow-moving) Netflix queue.

Movies I want to see:
Oldboy
Adaptation
Audition
A History of Violence
Pan’s Labyrinth
Punch-Drunk Love
WALL-E
Zodiac
The Squid and the Whale
Mulholland Dr.
Children of Men
Spirited Away
In The Loop
Big Fan
Brick
The Fog of War

So, all told, 35 movies I made the time for or think will be worth the time. That leaves over half the list which I haven’t seen and don’t care if I ever see, despite the fact that they are being hailed at a site I know and love as great movies. I’ll list out those movies in parentheses below for completeness sake, and then after that I’ll talk about the obvious contrasts between my interest in the movies above and my indifference in those below.


(Meh Movies: Gerry; Crimson Gold; Moulin Rouge; 4 Months, 3 Weeks And 2 Days; Brokeback Mountain; L’Enfant; City of God; Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter… And Spring; Waking Life; American Psycho; A.I.; In the Mood For Love; Morvern Callar; What Time Is It There?; Together; Yi Yi; The Man Who Wasn’t There; United 93; Y Tu Mamá También; Talk To Her; Before Sunset; Time Out; The New World; Capturing The Friedmans; No Country For Old Men; There Will Be Blood; The Aviator; A Prairie Home Companion; You Can Count On Me; Under the Sand; Rachel Getting Married; Owning Mahoney; Slasher; Gosford Park; The Fall; Amelie; About Schmidt; Dogville; Friday Night)

If anything about me screams geek (and it’s not just anything, it’s pretty much everything, so this is just the most recent example) it’s the way I’ve split these movies in half. The movies I couldn’t give a crap less about are foreign films and indie films, small-scale personal stories, basically the serious movies for grown-ups. Whereas the movies I’ve seen or want to see are by and large genre flicks: fantasy, sci-fi, comic books, crime, horror, martial arts, and comedies, or combinations thereof. Geeks are the denizens of the genre ghetto, and I am doing very little to dispel this stereotype.

(Of course there are exceptions. Grizzly Man is a documentary but it’s truly bizarre. And I’m cheating a bit by putting comedy in the same class of genre as sci-fi or martial arts, and I’ll elaborate on that a bit more but note that 40 Year Old Virgin is a comedy about a total geek, Sideways is a comedy about a wine geek, The Royal Tenenbaums is a comedy about a family of geeks … stop me once you spot the pattern. Conversely there is some genre stuff I’m not interested in at all. A.I. has gotten too many mixed reviews, and No Country For Old Men still has a lot of overpraise backlash going on in my mind. American Psycho is on my don’t-watch list mainly because I’d rather read the book. Still, big picture, my premise holds.)

Incidentally, most of the movies that I’ve seen this decade (especially in the theater) which didn’t make the A.V. Club lists would be right at home genre-wise with those that did. Off the top of my head that includes: all the Spider-Man and X-Men movies; Watchmen; Harry Potter; Star Wars; the Bourne Identity; The Hangover. And genre often equates with spectacle, which means I’m more likely to shell out for the big screen experience if it’s a genre movie with car chases and explosions and such, but when I Netflix movies it’s not like I’m watching quiet, human dramas which just didn’t make the Top 50 cut. I’m watching the genre stuff I missed in their theatrical runs, like Hellboy and Casino Royale. Or King of Kong, which is a documentary … about video games.

It’s especially curious to me to see this disparity of subject matter because, while I started this post mentioning books and movies in the same breath, the genre segregation doesn’t really apply in my reading choices. I will read pretty much anything across all styles and subject matter. I read my fair share of genre trash, but I devour realistic modern lit and canonical classics and non-fiction just as often.

I guess the telling difference is that I read to keep myself entertained, but I also read to learn, and to exercise my brain and stave off senile dementia and whatnot. But I watch movies to be entertained and that’s about it (hence the open-door policy towards mainstream comedies). In a sense that raises the bar, but it appears to have the opposite effect, lowering my intake to the least reputable and least impressive and least deserving of the appellation of “art”. I read smart books (sometimes) and watch stupid movies (almost all the time).

So I guess I’ll never be a true cinephile, but I think I’m OK with that. I think the division of labor, with books responsible for my self-improvement and movies responsible for pure escapism, has been working well enough so far. Maybe when I hit the lottery and have more time to devote to my aesthetic pursuits the balance will shift. Except that when I use the winnings to build an obscenely pimped out home theater, I already know which kind of movies will look and sound the best in there.