I maintain that it’s a crucial distinction that must be thought through carefully: was I bored because of the movie or because of me? I can’t tell you the number of movies I’ve been bored to tears through the first time and found extremely engaging on second viewings. It’s a lot. There’s so much depending upon the environment you watch a movie in, who you’re with, the size of the screen and immersiveness of the sound, and countless other factors. It’s just too easy to dismiss a movie as boring, as if that’s just a quality the movie possesses, rather than consider why you were bored while watching it. Sometimes I’m too distracted to get into something that demands a bit more attention. It happens. It’s not always the movie’s fault (although I’m not saying it never is).
The point I’m trying to get across with all this is this: to come across like you’ve given the quality of a movie a great amount of thought, rehashing old lines that people toss around all the time is not the way to do it. People who do this seem like they have an emotional reaction to seeing something and a handful of phrases they can use to express that to others. Simply saying “I don’t know” should be considered a more attractive option than it is. It’s hard to explain why a movie does or doesn’t work for you personally and even harder to try to figure out where it went wrong on the production level. There are very few people who are able to do this at all, let alone well. And almost none of them seem to write about it very much. So we’re left with a large number of people who, God love ‘em, try to sound like they know more than they do. And it becomes easier to identify the more you hear them do it.
I don’t know what I’m talking about either. But I try to make it clear that at the very least, I know that I’m mostly full of dumb reactionary opinions.
