Resistance IS Futile

Last night I made the conscious decision that I am going to stop the madness and stop balking at seeing really popular movies...

Here's the deal. Someone makes a movie and then a group of certain someones sees said movie and all of a sudden it is a sensation! Everyone is talking about this movie, everyone is watching this movie, this movie is the epitome of everything we want movies to be!

Here's what happens to me -- I don't see the movie. It's not always because I don't want to see the movie, there are often many factors involved. Sometimes the movie was produced before I was born or when I would have been too young to really appreciate it. Then the movie is "old" and everyone that's talking about it has already seen it, so I'd actually have to get the motivation to go get the movie and watch it on my own. That's an awful lot of motivation. Many times, it turns out that the movie came out during the period when I was married and living in South Dakota -- in other words, in a pop culture coma. Pulp Fiction was the number one example of a movie that fell in this category. Same scenario, everyone's seen it and I'd have to motivate myself to watch it. The last thing that happens to me is that somehow everyone I know will engineer a plan to go see said movie on a day when I'm inescapably unavailable. I never see the movie and once again -- everyone I know has seen the movie.

The fact is that I need to get over this need I have to watch movies with others and just see these damned movies by myself. This would solve a lot of my problems. Not that I have any major problems, but a minor one I have that drives me up the WALL is when one of these movies comes up in conversations and I have to admit I haven't seen it and I get the same reaction every time, "What? WHAT? You haven't seen ? How is that even possible??"

I hate that. A lot. I'm sure that there are things that these people haven't experienced that I've done a million times but since I don't know what those things are, I can't rub their faces in it. It sucks.

So, part of the problem is that there's all this stigma attached to the fact that I haven't seen whatever the amazing movie is and that pisses me off, so I just don't watch the movie because now I have all of these negative feelings associated with it. My friend Julia once told me that the only way I had to be elitist was because I hadn't seen these movies. I could be snooty about being the only person who somehow hadn't seen Pulp Fiction. (As much as I would love to receive comments, don't comment on this. I've seen it. Yes, it was wonderful and I'm glad I saw it -- but was it really worth all those years of sneering at me?)

Such was the case with O Brother, Where Art Thou? (Grammar question: if the title includes a question mark, does the question mark cease to become actual punctuation and simply become part of title and therefore I should have put a period at the end of that sentence??) I hadn't seen it and everyone I knew had and said it was funny and wonderful and that the songs were cool. Out of context, the songs seem really silly. Like how many times do I have to hear that you're a man of constant sorrow? I believe you, okay? So, we watched that last night and I loved it and completely regretted putting off watching it for so long. I promised myself that I would not do that any longer. That the next time something came up and it was said "I can't believe you haven't seen that" that I would react by getting the movie and watching it. Someone feels that strongly about something, gotta be a reason why.

Off to get ready to look at artsy stuff -- enjoy your weekends!

HP