How we see it

From the Okay-this-is-it department:

Recently during a conversation with a friend whom I've know for over 20 years, we touched on the movie version of Watchmen. He had gone to a Saturday afternoon screening on the opening weekend. In part this was out of desire to see it, but for him, there was other motivation. Working in a comic shop, he needed to see it early, before customers started coming in and talking about it (and potentially spoiling it).

His assessment was that overall he enjoyed it, and more than he expected. It could have sucked, he noted, but it didn't. As superhero movies go, with (as he ranked them) Iron Man at the top and The Dark Knight at the bottom, Watchmen fell nicely in the middle.

Yes, with Dark Knight at the bottom.

That was another film he saw its opening weekend, again as much out of obligation as anything. He applauded Heath Ledger's performance, but otherwise he considered Batman Begins to be vastly superior. He didn't go into detail about the issues he had with DK, but clearly he didn't understand why it became the second-highest grossing film of all time.

I merely noted that I enjoyed DK, and the conversation moved on to other topics.

~

During a Facebook chat some time back with a different friend, he too noted having problems with DK (not liking how the Joker had no explained motivation for his anarchism, for example), and considering Slumdog Millionaire (back before it won the Oscar) to be much better.

I mentioned having liked Slumdog when I saw it (the weekend after it won the Golden Globe), but my visceral response in exiting the theater was stronger for DK, which at that moment I remember thinking it was pretty good.

~

Two people whose opinions I do heed had vastly different reactions than I did. It's not like some arbitrary movie reviewers panned it; these are people with whom I share at least a reasonable amount of similarities. How could our responses vary so much?

Is that not supposed to be something of a window to our personalities in contemporary society? What we like should make a statement about us and give an indication of with whom we would get along, right? Isn't that why sites like Facebook prompt for our favorites books and movies and bands, etc.? So we can find others who share those same faves, and by inference who share similar personality traits.

(You don't suppose the real answer is that Facebook prompts for that so it can allow advertisers to market to us individually, do you? Can we avoid going off on that cynical tangent? Yes, yes we can.)

Apparently what makes us be friends is not merely the coincidental similarity of reaction to the same stimuli. Egad—could human relationships actually be… complex?

Too bad movies that show that never seem to be ones everyone can agree on…