What the Hell is Wrong With People? [movies]

Push / Timecrimes / Star Trek

Why we like what we like

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Have you ever finished watching a movie you really enjoyed and then taken to the internet only to discover that your newest diamond-in-the-rough has been panned by your favorite film blogs and gotten a pitiful rating on Rotten Tomatoes? Have you ever been recommended a film by ten of your best friends, who praised it like the second coming, only to watch it and scratch your head wondering how anyone could like, let alone recommend that crap? Obviously these are rhetorical questions because I know it’s happened to you. It’s happened to all of us at one point or another. And we all inevitably ask ourselves the same ubiquitous question:

What the hell is wrong with people?

How could you think “Jumper” was a good movie? How could you possibly hate “Star Trek XI”? How could anyone even sit through “Stealth”? What the hell does everybody see in “Forrest Gump”?

I’ve watched several movies over the last few weeks that have made me ponder just how we decide what is considered “good” and what is considered “bad”. First was "Push", a modern superhero movie that interested me based solely on the trailer, but one that I didn’t follow too closely when it was released and it quickly fell off my radar. I saw it on a whim recently and thought it was pretty cool. It was basically “Heroes”, but in a lot of ways it pulled off what that show was trying to do far better than they did. It was really stylish and had a unique feel to it. The super powers were portrayed in a flashy, but believable way. Dakota Fanning was in it and she was the bee’s knees just a year or two ago. Chris Evans was collectively panned for “Fantastic Four”, but redeemed himself in “Sunshine” and turned in a good performance that changed a lot of people’s opinions of him…and chicks seem to really dig Chris Evans for some reason. So I left the movie expecting that people would generally be into it. Boy was I wrong! People hated this movie, as you can see - some of them with quite a bit of venom! “What crawled up these people’s asses”, I wondered?



Then, of course, I watched “Star Trek and walked out with a very different opinion than most people had. To me it was nothing more than standard Hollywood fare and that’s not where I wanted to see Star Trek go as a franchise. “How can people not see that this is the same old summer movie crap with a shiny new graphics”, I thought?



Then I watched “Timecrimes, a small Spanish sci-fi movie I previewed several months back with much interest. The buzz on this movie was very positive with some people claiming it was the best movie they’d seen in a long time. I liked it, but in the end I thought it was a bit predictable and I had a few problems with the movie that others didn’t seem to have (like not bothering at all to address why a time travel institute of some sort is right next door to this guys rural house, which is just kinda taken for granted as inconsequential). Regardless of the minor problems I had, I enjoyed “Timecrimes” infinitely more than I enjoyed “Star Trek”, yet it only received an 86% approval rating from Rotten Tomatoes compared to Trek’s 95%. “What’s that all about”, I asked myself?

The multitude and apparent arbitrary nature of people’s opinions can be extremely confusing when you attempt to break it down from afar. Sort of like the opposite of a “Monet” (nice from a distance, but up close it’s all a mess…thanks, “Clueless”), the origin of opinions is like one of those “Where’s Waldo?” drawings - chaotic and nonsensical when taken as a whole, but much easier to understand with a magnifying glass.

We all have our own built-in emotional responses to stimulus that we interpret to decide whether we like or dislike something. We use this same mechanism on a different level just about every second of every day. We encounter so much superfluous data in any given moment that our brains couldn’t function unless they had the ability to decide what deserves focusing on and what doesn’t. For instance, right now I’m typing on my keyboard and looking at the monitor in front of me and my brain is deciding that the coffee cup, the telephone, the stack of papers, the crappy computer speakers, etc. are not as important to me right now, so I’m not really paying much attention to them. All those other things are still real, but that’s just not where my head is at right now, so until I care to focus more intently on them they remain stereotypes of what my brain immediately thinks they are based on memory, based on “common knowledge”, based on snap, slit-second judgments. When the time comes and I’m feeling a little parched, I might interact with that coffee cup and eventually find that there’s a chip in the rim that will cut my lip open and ruin my day, but until I get thirsty it doesn’t really matter to me one way or the other if the cup is chipped or not – it’s just a coffee cup until I choose to engage with it on an individual level and see it, not as a stereotype, but as a unique object.

Knowing that humans posses this trait, it’s easy to understand why two people could look at the same sequence of images and come away with two very different opinions of it. Obviously, it’s impossible for anyone to ever completely take in a film from start to finish – there’s simply too much there to analyze, from sound, to dialog, to set, to movement, to ambient noise, to props, etc. Like in any other instance, our brains help us narrow in and focus on what is important to us at the time and not everybody is going to be looking at the same things. Then from that streamlined data we make another set of decisions – whether we derive pleasure from what we’re taking in or not.

Some viewers may be so interested in the story of a film that they don’t focus as much on the acting whereas someone without that fascination with the structural elements may find the performances unconvincing and thus never bother to give the story much of a chance. So who is right in this situation – the person who looks past certain elements and enjoys the piece or the person who focuses solely on those elements and doesn’t allow for the potential strengths to take hold for them? Is this a good movie or a bad movie?

With so many subjective opinions is it even possible to label something “good” or “bad”? Is there a difference between something being bad and something just not speaking to you personally? I don’t know many people that would disagree with me if I said that “The Hottie and the Nottie” was a bad film (we won’t get into whether or not they base that opinion on first hand knowledge or stereotyping for the sake of this argument), but on the other hand, there could conceivably be a person or two our there who that movie speaks to on a personal level and they might just love it to death. So is it bad or is it just not for me? How many people have to hate a movie for it to be labeled “crap”? How many people have to love a movie before it’s considered a “classic”?

This is where we come to the most important question – does it really matter? Should films be made for mass appeal, should they be made for a target audience or should they just be pieces of art made for anyone that can find value in them? Think about it for a second and you’ll realize the pitfalls of each option. Films made for mass appeal are generally watered down, neither here nor there to avoid getting people riled up or offended – they tend to lack punch and more often than not they end up being on the generic side so as not to alienate anyone. Films made for target audiences are often so densely focused on appealing to their fanbases that they become impenetrable and unpleasant for outsiders. Films that are made as art pieces tend to exclude large portions of the movie-going public because the filmmakers are less concerned with appeasing the viewer than they are with getting their own point across or trying to match their own vision.

The reality of our culture is that film is an artform that has become primarily viewed as a business whose purpose is to placate an audience with entertainment for approximately two hours. As much as I may disagree with this system, it is what it is. Studios need to fill seats and sell DVDs, so they need to appeal to enough people to make that happen. Until something drastic comes along to change that fact, mass-produced Hollywood blockbusters will never die out and they will never become anything other than middle-of-the-road popcorn fare because that’s what they need to be to serve their function. If we accept this inevitability, then we can also accept the fact that out of these types of movies, there will be some that we enjoy and some we don’t, some that speak more to us than others. But I don’t know whether or not you can judge such a movie as “good” or “bad”, you can only judge whether it works for you or not.

On the flip side of the coin, films that are considered “Art House” are not usually as popular as the big-budget Hollywood flicks and may alienate large portions of the audience pool, but to the people who love them, a small, obscure art film might be the best thing they’ve ever seen. Does it have any less merit because it can’t sell as many tickets?

Films are such a complex medium that in a way, it’s a bit insulting to the hundreds of people that work together to create each one of them to dismiss something as being “bad” simply because it wasn’t what we were looking for. The fact of the matter remains that most of what we get out of films is not truly there, they are things that we project onto them. We can’t help but find our own meaning to things and with film there are many aspects that we free associate with that have a lot of influence over what we like. I may love a film because it delves into a topic that I find fascinating, but someone who is not fascinated with that same interest might have a very different relationship to that film. That’s the nature of the beast and it brings up yet another point. Maybe we treat movies too poorly in our culture.

If a film can mean different things to different people, then it also stands to reason that the same film can have different meanings to the same person at different points in his/her life. It’s always amazing when I watch a movie I used to love and recommend to everyone, only to discover that it now looks more like a steaming pile than the masterpiece I believed it to be all those years. Films are fluid and organic and though their content remains the same no matter when you watch them, our perceptions of them change throughout time. So why do so many of us treat movies as disposable curiosities that we consume, digest and toss to the side? Why are we so quick to label and so quick to dismiss in such black or white terms?

It’s not my place as a writer to stand on a pedestal, judging and dictating what films or television shows you should consume, but to interpret them, to analyze the choices and decisions made as a way of turning a mirror back on our culture because ultimately the things we do show us who we are – collectively and individually. In the end, I know that nobody really cares if some guy on the internet likes the latest “Star Trek” movie or not, but hearing me break down what I did or didn’t like about it and why may cause someone else to become more aware of the mechanisms that drive their own decision-making. Even if they don’t share my opinion, they can share in the fact that we base our opinions on personal interpretations, not on some arbitrary universal scale of good or bad. We can like what we like and still get something out of the things that don’t move us at the moment.