"On Movies"

"...I'd rather read through the worst novel ever written than sit through the best movie ever made..."

The Cigarette-Smoking Man to Bill Mulder, "Musings of the Cigarette-Smoking Man'

Movies don't satisfy me for the most part. I find more release from looking at my father's golden retriever perform auto-analingus from across the room, or watching the NYM infielders drop game-ending pop ups.

A lot of people, particularly Syed Hossain, find my opinions of movies annoying. They also find my "in-movie commentary" as much a pestilence as I am forced to swallow down there unbridled silence. If you are with someone, and you are bearing witness to scenes that are absolutely ridiculous, or hysterically stupid, you have an obligation to make remarks during the film, while it is actually playing; not just retain these mental notes for use later. I find arching my head back for 3 hours to eat inflated prices of cancerous-inducent food that tastes like crap with a bunch of strangers in uncomfortable seats isn't the best usage of my time. Especially when you're with friends! Why would you go spend time with friends at a movie theater? Yes, you are physically sitting next to them, but your mind is fused into a screen. I actually think going out to the movies on legitimate "dates" is a catastrophic idea, I've never done it. Why would you want to spend the few hours you have with the woman you're trying to court, NOT paying attention to her?

Generally speaking, I find watching movies in cinemas to be unpleasurable and I'm not a big fan of doing it. Aside from trashing Keynesians and the State, my other muses in life consist of New York Yankees, jazz, family time and unprotected sex with multiple partners.

For the most part, it's my amateur opinion to say that the majority of films I've watched in my life were complete, disastrous flops and were probably produced as a result of a bunch of misallocated resources. There is a system I devised that I use to rate how much I like or dislike films. I've adopted a neoclassical approaching in translating my internal, subjective ordinal rankings of satisfaction that I receive from watching bad movies descending from 100 (highest) to 0 (least) into a numerical scale of cardinal values, using a utility function.

Only an Austrian will catch that last joke.

"Magnificent" = 99-100

"Decent" = 40-98.99999999

"Shit, terrible, fucktastic" or someother expletive in Spanish = -10,000,000 - 39.9

Here's a list of the worst of the worst that I could think of, there's so many more:

• Sicko
• The Preacher's Wife
• Titanic
• Wall-E
• Saving Private Ryan
• Deep Impact
• Bowling for Columbine
• Angels and Demons
• War of the Worlds
• Godfather, Pt. II
• Schindler's List
• Amadeus
• Iron Man
• Hitch
• Conspiracy Theory
• Borat
• The Departed
• The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
• World Trade Center
• Transformers I & II
• Mulan
• Aladdin
• The Lion King
• Billboard Dad

I also put the following films in my bag of all-time best, in no particular order:

• Wedding Crashers
• Star Wars
• Antz
• Up
• Bobby
• American Gangster
• Charlie Wilson's War
• Gangs of New York
• The Darjeeling Limited
• Mission to Mars/Red Planet
• A Clockwork Orange
• The Lord of the Rings
• Annie Hall
• Recount
• The Matrix
• Wall Street
• Old School
• Flubber
• Thank You For Smoking
• There Will Be Blood
• Godfather, Pt. III
• The Bank Job
• The Dark Knight
• Enemy of the State/Minority Report
• X-Files: Fight the Future
• Evolution
• Glengarry Glen Ross

And if you want an example of action packed, unrealistic, science fiction movie done right, watch The Dark Knight.