There are two sides to this gripe. One side believes that movies are meant to be judged based on their intent. So "B" movies are lovely, and B minus movies are even better. Their argument, as one commenter on imdb recently aptly put it, is that "sometimes a cigar is just a smoke, and a movie is just entertainment."
The other side of the gripe believes that this is patently absurd. The fact is, smoking a cigar will give you lung cancer, and there is no reason to watch a B movie when there are so many A movies out there.
Some might say, "but Andy, what if you just want to watch a movie, and you don't care about whether or not it is good, you just want to relax." This is the kind of thinking that recently persuaded a group of 8 young men to watch "Don't Be a Menace to South Central While Drinking Your Juice in the Hood," the Wayan brother's spoof on movies about the hood. And don't get me wrong, there were a lot of laughs between minutes one and ten of the movie. Quite a few laughs, indeed. But then everybody was bored. The movie was not good. Everybody knew that it was going to be not good. Many people had already seen it.
And yet we watched it anyway. Our American culture does not understand post-modernism. We don't know how to apply it constructively to our lives. It doesn't matter what the filmmakers were "trying" to do when they made the movie. To quote the sexual harassment video on The Office, "intent is irrelevant."
Unfortunately, this is just noise. Nobody is reading this post. Nobody cares. Everybody is going to continue watching horrible movies, and continue to post-hoc rationalize it by saying that they didn't want to watch a good movie, they just wanted to be entertained. Cognitive dissonance does not allow you to waste your time; if you chose to watch the movie and spent time watching it, you must have liked it. I'm losing my faith in the youth of America. Nobody is reading this post. Nobody understands post-modernism. Everybody is going to continue watching horrible movies. I don't understand post-modernism. My life is in shambles.
