Eh. There has to be something that makes you like it that you can find. I’m wracking my brain to think of something I like that might fit that description…
Ok, The Mexican with Brad Pitt and Julia Roberts. Thinking…
Julia Roberts sucks like Hassel-The-Hoff’s new album, but Brad Pitt has some pretty funny dialogue throughout most of the movie. The plot is way over the top, which only Brad Pitt realizes, and he plays off of this. It’s funny.
If you like something, there must be some identifiable aspect of it that keeps your attention, which if you try hard enough, you can identify. IMO
Well, it becomes a ‘guilty pleasure’ since I typically lambast the “punk” scene, for it’s talentless hacks who can’t sing or play, while I listen to the Velvet Underground, the Beatles, Rodgers & Hammerstein musicals and Miles Davis.
I’m interested to hear some of the things that you feel you can find no reasonable defense for.
Here’s one: Ritz Bitz Cheez-filled crackers
Thats a 100% guilty pleasure.
P.S. I loved Showgirls, loved Lynch’s Dune, loved Commando. But none of those are nearly as guilty as the Ritz Bitz.
I can defend my love of a lot of stuff that could be considered “bad.” David Lynch’s Dune? Love it. The story’s all fucked up, but the visuals are amazing, and the fragmented and largely inexplicable plot make it feel like a two-hour theatrical trailer for a really kick ass movie.
The Mexican? It’s got Brad Pitt in it. I love Brad Pitt. Apparently, I love Brad Pitt enough to overlook the prescense of Julia Roberts, whom I loathe with the intensity one normally finds only in centuries-old ethnic conflicts.
I thought the second Matrix movie was better than the first. It had all the same stuff as the first one, times ten, and it was easier to ignore the hokey “humans are batteries” concept. However, I didn’t like either one enough to see the third movie.
None of those are numbered among my guilty pleasures. I unabashedly like them all.
Volcano
The Chase
Sylvester Stallone comedies Tough Crowd with Colin Quinn
The Big Hit
Almost any form of reality TV
If you can find anything good to say about any of those things, let me know: I’ve watched 'em a lot, and they all pretty much completely suck.
Damn. Haven’t seen any of them. Look at it this way:
People, in general, like songs due to any number of the elements comprising a song resonating with their particular tastes. Harmony, melody, rhythm, arrangement, orchestration, lyrics, etc.
What you are saying seems to be equivalent to “Well, I heard this song on the radio, and I didn’t like the lyrics, the melody, the rhythm, the orchestration, the arrangement, the vocal effects, the harmonies used, the production quality, the singer’s voice or the chord changes. But damn, I like that song.”
See where I’m coming from? Something in those films/shows appeals to you. I suspect that it’s more that we have hard time articulating what that is, rather than its nonexistence.
Perhaps you watch Volcano for the same reason I watch CSI: Miami. I hate David Caruso like you hate Julia Roberts. The show entertains me because the acting, storylines and characters are so over the top that I find it hilarious and enjoy laughing at the show and ridiculing it MST3K style.
See, where you’ve gone wrong is expecting me to have some sort of a rational basis for anything I do.
Nope. I have an honest-to-God emotional reaction to the film. I get choked up when I watch it. And I don’t know why: none of the characters whose lives are being threatened are in anyway compelling or sympathetic, and I’m generally of the idea that a volcano erupting in downtown LA would be a good thing. But this film makes me sad. And not “I’m sad I wasted ninety minutes of my life watching this” sad.
So, you find the movie emotionally compelling. Obviously something (the scenario, the characters, the performances) speaks to you on an emotional level and makes you care about the outcome. Obviously the characters are compelling or sympathetic, or the film wouldn’t make you choke up. Or perhaps it is the thought of everybody dying. A mood the director creates of intense fear of impending doom. Something speaks to you.
Your relationship with a work does not exist in a vacuum. The interplay between your experiences and the intrinsic intent of the piece is managed by extrinsic properties such as the melody, performances, whatever.
Well, I’d watch almost any Tommy Lee Jones movie more than once–except anything with the words *men, in, *and *black *in the title–so I’ll buy Volcano.
But I still agree with Ilsa: if you like it, you oughta be able–even with effort–to at least try to explain why you like it.
The only real guilty pleasures I can think of are porn or drugs or butter sliced thick as cheese on a danish. And those things not because you CAN’T explain why you like them, but because you’d be embarrassed to. Or something.
But I’m not embarrassed about liking *Showgirls *or The Shaggs or marshmallow fluff (well, OK, maybe the marshmallow fluff).
That’s more or less how I feel about Brad Pitt, so I understand where you’re coming from, but I’m not really a huge Tommy Lee Jones fan. IMO, his career has been going down hill since Nate and Hayes.
I agree in principle. In practice, there are some thing I like for reasons that I simply cannot intellectualize. Since intellectualizing stuff is pretty much the only thing I do, I can only assume that my reasons for liking these things are entirely non-rational.
Embarassed about porn and drugs? That’s crazy talk!
And you shouldn’t be (well, OK, maybe the marshmallow fluff). I’m guessing, based on your posts here on the SDMB, that you (and, I suppose, Ilsa) simply don’t have any guilty pleasures. That’s cool. I do. People are different that way.
I agree with Miller. I think the guilt in guilty pleasure comes from the fact that there is a part of each person that is not very good. For example, there is a part of me that occasionally scratches my butt and then smells my fingers. That part of me is not good. I struggle successfully (most of the time) to supress that part of me.
I have a really bad guilty pleasure. It’s You’ve Got Mail. I object to that movie on many many levels. You’ve Got Mail goes against everything I think is good and right. I don’t like Meg Ryan because Meg Ryan acts affectedly cute in a way that men can never seem to see through. I hate Tom Hanks because he stars in movies with Meg Ryan and acts affectedly cute in a way that everybody can see through. I hate Nora Ephron and all her “love lives of bantering rich people with very easy jobs” comedy. I hate formula romances. I hate AOL! I hate how, in the 90s, nobody seemed to worry about shelf life and put all kinds of really of-the-moment stuff into movies as if the world was really going to end on New Year’s Eve 1999.
But I love You’ve Got Mail because deep down Meg Ryan makes me believe that if you smile a lot and try to be kind, eventually things will turn out okay. It’s stupid to imagine that life could ever be that easy or simple or innocent and the more I indulge in that kind of fantasy the darker my reality looks by contrast but I still sometimes really want to watch that movie and fantasize.
It has nothing to do with what’s cool.
It’s true that in a sense it could ruin my street cred if everyone found this video which I hide better than porn but that’s because I know that the part of me that dislikes You’ve Got Mail is RIGHT and the part of me that likes it is the primitive fish brain part of me that can not be educated. It is the part of me that ate all those puddings earlier.
If you have no guilty pleasures it means that inside your world, anything you find value in has the same weight. If you enjoy flinging poo or listening to opera, neither one of those things is better or worse. In my world, it just isn’t enough that I find some value in something. My better judgement has to be on board.
Nothing personal of course. I just cannot believe that you can hear a song, think to yourself “I do not like any of the aspects that comprise that song” and yet still claim to like it, for some reason completely unfathomable to you. Don’t buy it.
