December 9th: Movies I have meh'd.

Quick note before we get started -- the latter half of the month is quite barren, so there's still time to get me to babble. Just leave a comment here.

kiki_miserychic wants to know: "are there any movies that you wanted to like, but didn't? meaning, a movie people loved, but you didn't"

There's plenty. While I am very fond of Citizen Kane, I feel it has narrative pacing problems around the middle that keep it from being the "greatest film of all time."

I think The Exorcist is a smug, self-important joke. Paranormal Activity had me rooting for the monster to kill the male protagonist quickly. In fact, there's more than a few horror films out there where I just don't get the love -- but I think that horror is an area where I'm going to be more critical in general, because I've spent enough time with it to have developed a very specific sensibility and taste. What might blow one person's mind is going to be a "Same old, same old" for me.

With blockbusters, I've had more than a few occasions when walking out of a movie theater with friends, where everyone else was going "Did you see?" and "OMG that part!". Meanwhile, I'm trying to start a conversation on the narrative flaws, logical problems, or thematic dissonance. Not because I didn't like the movie, but because I felt that was the most interesting conversation one could have about it at the time. Nobody else seemed to really agree.

Also, I didn't have a good textual response to Saturday's query about my user interest "Gregory Peck's Left Eyebrow" -- so have some visuals:

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