[QUOTE=Tamerlane]
Do you find that this level of “jadedness” ( for want of a better word ) compromises your enjoyment of older films you’ve seen multiple times? i.e. can you still enjoy something like Harvey that you’ve seen umpteenth times or has it become so old hat that it has permanently lost its allure ( assuming you liked Harvey to begin with )? Similarly does that mean that films that are new and exciting fade quickly for you once you’ve absorbed them?
I know you watch movies you like multiple times, but then you’re a film maven and I imagine you always have. But do you find even with good films you now burn out quicker than you once did, on average?
[/QUOTE]
Not to answer for Cervaise, but since his response could almost be appended word-for-word to my far less thoughtful one, I’ll answer your question for myself.
As someone who was equally “jaded” before I even began working in a video store—since which time I’ve watched, at minimum, a thousand movies a year—this question of jadedness has recently been a topic of cogitation for me.
First, a little math: for most people, when you, let’s say, compile a year-end list of ten best movies, you’re choosing those ten from probably far fewer than 100 movies seen that year (even 100 means an average of almost 2 per week). For me, I’m choosing from over a thousand movies. So a movie has to adhere to a much more rigid set of metrics to make it into those final ten. So, yeah, I tend to dismiss more movies than your average viewer. Like most people considered (mistakenly) to be movie “snobs,” in other words, I tend to dislike most movies. Because, after all, 90% of everything is crap. So yeah, if a customer asks my opinion of a movie, there are 900 movies a year I’m likely to give a bad review too. My percentages are no different from those of most movie watchers, but 900 thumbs-downs, percentage or not, comes off to the less thoughtless customer (or Doper) as simple snobbery. When, as a quick glance at the math proves, it’s not so much snobbery as simple jadedness; a disease of numbers, not of elitism.
The reason I’ve been thinking about this lately is that my general preferences have changed somewhat over the last ~couple years of 3-4 movies a day. I’m good and sick and tired, for example, of quirkly little faux-indie family dramas like Juno, Margot at the Wedding, The Savages, etc. Any movie in that genre is going to have to come up with something pretty dang fresh to rise above the 90% of crap. For some reason I haven’t quite quantified yet, Lars and the Real Girl is about the only such movie to have done so, for me, this year.
Another change in my movie tastes brought about by this jadedness is that I have a much higher tolerance for dumb, shit-blows-the-fuck-up movies (The Marine, Shooter, Shoot ’Em Up are among my recent favorites) and low-grade horror (like Inside, Borderland, Megasnake). Now this apparent lowering of standards is, I think, a direct result of my “jadedness” (though Cervaise’s response seems to be the opposite, so I think it would be interesting to discuss this in more detail). I think this is because, while 90% of these movies are still insupportable crap, there’s that 10% that seems to break through. When I try to analyze why I enjoy these schlocky Z-movies, the closest I can come is that the ones that I do enjoy all seem to convey a certain joy of filmmaking. A sense, somehow, that the people making these movies are just as jaded as I am, so they can think of no better way to have fun than throw a bucket of pig guts and chicken blood onto a scantily clad co-ed lit by a rented light. That sense of fun is what makes that 10% enjoyable to me. (Although, to be fair, some of these movies still display a seriousness of subtext, like Romero’s zombie films. You can’t get much more Z-grade gross-out than Cannibal Holocaust, but its social seriousness is undeniable, and makes it a very interesting movie on more than just the exploitation level.)
So, like Cervaise, when I watch a movie, my enjoyment of it—which can happen on many different levels, from dryly intellectual to viscerally fun—is usually going to be due to something unique (if I read his response correctly) somehow breaking through that 90%—at minimum—of jaded-making crap that’s out there.
(Sorry this response is so fragmented: I’m writing it at work, through a hail of distractions.)
