Well, add a wife and three kids and that vow was tossed out the window. My wife loves RomComs, she thinks Jennifer Aniston is wonderful, and if the trailer for a movie involves a guy and a girl overcoming some sort of obstacle to be together then sign her (us) up. She also, oddly enough, enjoys a good "over the top" action movie every now and then, although I will give her credit she is at least picky about these (except the Fast and Furious franchise). My kids love anything that is magical, that involves swords, wizards, dragons, and fake/real British accents. They also love superhero/crazy action movies. I have actually grown to like a couple of the superhero movies like the X-Men movies, 4 of the Batman movies (the one with the Governator never happened in my mind), and Iron Man. Those are all okay with me. But what this is leading me up to is this: I vowed to never, ever watch a Harry Potter or Transformer movie and over the past two weeks I have done both.
Charter offered up one of the Transformer movies OnDemand the other day and the kids were stoked. "Please, please, please, Transformers look awesome. Can we watch that?" they screamed. Begrudgingly, I agreed. The reason I have wanted to avoid those was because it was directed by quite possibly the worst director in history, Micheal Bay. Everything he does is based on explosions, destruction, and a weak love story. I had seen the trailers for Transformers and it looked exactly what everyone of his other movies looked like except with giant robots. I had avoided seeing these from the start and had planned to live out the rest of my days this way, but the kids had other plans. I sat down to watch it and in complete nonsuprising fashion, it was exactly what I expected. I had no idea what was happening. All the robots fighting looked the same to me, I couldn't tell who was the good guy and who was the bad guy. It all looked like a giant mix of metallic parts being thrown against each other really hard. A lot of shit exploded, they destroyed the entire Middle East, and the main guy kissed Megan Fox at the end. That was it, I predicted everything before it happened because it followed the formula for all crappy action flicks. I even pointed out to the kids, "Don't you find it odd that these giant robots just killed like 100 soldiers and countless Egyptians but all the remaining soldiers rush to the aid of the main character when he falls down?" That part bothered me more than anything, I think. There were dead and injured people all around but when Shia fell down eveyone rushed to his aid, probably stepping over the bodies of other injured people in the process. The irony was lost on the kids but they are kids so they don't care about stuff like logic and solid storylines.
Next was the dreaded Harry Potter movie. I know that everyone loves this but me, everyone has read all the books but me, and that everyone understands but me. The kids happened to come across one of the first movies on TV one night and they were hooked. I figured that it was fine as long as I didn't have to watch it. But, I didn't realize that there was going to be a new one being released soon and that I would be expected to take them to see it. When they saw the trailer for the new Potter movie, they both squealed like little girls in delight and immediately begged me to take them to it. Not wanting to be a mean, crappy dad, I agreed. I took them the other day, with ZERO prior knowledge about the series for myself, and sat and watched the entire 2 and a half hour movie. I thought prior that the Transformer movie was confusing but it was nothing compared to watching a Harry Potter movie without knowing anything about it....at all. I tried to make it fun for myself by envisioning some of the older actors in some of their previous roles placed into the movie. It had Alan Rickman playing some Wizard teacher, so instead I envisioned him as the villian from the first Die Hard, Hans Gruber, and it worked a lot better. It sort of had Helena Bonham Carter in it, and I'm not really sure what she was doing but I thought of her as Marla Singer from Fight Club, chain smoking, being a complete wreck and not caring about anything. I noticied that Ralph Fiennes had lost his nose and all of his hair, so I pretended that he was still that evil Nazi from Schindler's List, it actually worked better that way and made more sense. And I saw Maggie Smith as the nun from Sister Act, which was much more fun to look at her that way.
I am not saying that it was a horrible movie because I had no frame of reference going into it. For all I know, it was a great movie (for Potterheads). But I am glad that I found my own way to enjoy it. Since I have gotten older and have had to watch movies that I would've never watched in the first place, I have made my own ways of having fun while watching them. Here are some guidelines for those of you stuck in a movie that you hate, they work for me and perhaps could work for you too.
- If it is a RomCom, the best way to "enjoy" these is by predicting everthing that is going to happen in the movie. It works well in two different ways. One method is predicting the whole thing before it even starts. All RomComs follow the same, exact formula so it's pretty easy to do. The other way to do the predicting is to make the prediciton right before whatever happens. For example, Matthew McConaughey gets stuck in a situation with Kate Hudson and they are acting like they despise one another. Well at that point you can shout out, "They are going to have sex within the next 2 minutes!!" Because thats part of the formula, if two characters seem to not really like each other and are in an argument, 9 times out of 10 they will start to passionately make out.
- During "over the top" action movies, you can always count on some good cheesy, cliche, one liners to come out of Vin Diesel's or whoever's mouths. The fun part is getting to see when the lines are used. Some good examples are, "I don't have time to bleed." "I have to do this, they are counting on me." or "I'm getting too old for this." Other fun cliches to watch for are everyone of the bad guys are terrible shooters (they never hit their mark), an abnormally hot female lead will get into trouble that only our hero can get her out of, the villian never dies on the first try, and a car chase through what would normally be deadlocked traffic but for whatever reason the streets are clear enough to manuever around in. Checking off the cliches in action movies is my favorite part to do.
- And if it is one of the odd "fantasy" type films or really any of the above mentioned movie, it can be fun to do what I did in the Harry Potter movie. Just take whatever actor it is and imagine them in the same movie but as one of their characters from another movie. Whenever I have to see Gerard Butler in some crappy RomCom, I like to think of him as King Leonidus from "300" fighting with Jennifer Aniston or Katherine Heigel.
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