10.5 Most Recent Movies I've Seen

Though I still have many more movies to add to my "Summer Movies I'm Excited to See" list, and about 80 movies to add to my "Movies I've Watched Since Fall 2011", I'm going to interrupt both pursuits to write about the most recent batch of movies I've seen, while they're still fresh in my mind.

A quick aside - the following list of movies is really quite an uneven assortment of films. One might wonder if I have any taste in movies at all, or even find yourself asking if I am a masochist (why else would I watch The Girl Next Door? Or the Footloose remake?)

I have two answers for why I watch the movies I watch:

1) The Intellectual Argument: Sometimes I think I am as interested in why we (as a culture, as a country, etc) watch and make the movies we do as I am interested in the movies themselves. I would love for some future species to judge us on only our best art, and come to all kinds of enlightened and admirable conclusions about the wondrous folk who created them. However, this would neither be fair nor accurate. The bleak facts are that $145,824,897 worth of people saw Beverly Hills Chihuahua, and people like Snooki are household names. I think that our worst artistic output says as much about us as our best, and I think that all the stuff in between perhaps says the most of all.

One thing I love to do is watch formulaic or genre movies and pinpoint who the intended target audience was and whether or not a movie delivered the goods to them. Studio execs have to believe that at least some aspect of a movie is marketable or it will never get the green light to begin with. This could be anything from "Channing Tatum's abs" to "we're really into vampires right now so I think that'll work." It's fascinating to me that certain cliches can simultaneously make me groan and grin (a first class example is the aforementioned "clothes-trying-on-montage" in chick flicks).

The point of all this is: there's a part of me that loves jumping on cultural bandwagons to see what all the fuss is about. Sometimes in the middle of all that fuss I find something that pleasantly surprises me, and sometimes I am morally, physically, and intellectually repulsed. But most of the time, I just scratch my head in disappointment and amusement.

Movies as a medium are unique in their ability to act as indicators of our current cultural fears, tastes, obsessions, hopes, secrets, and dreams. More widely consumed than books and more globally marketed than TV shows, movies literally reach the world. They tell our stories even as we're using them to tell the stories of others.

So yeah, that's one very long reason why sometimes I watch as many bad movies as good movies.

Reason Number Two.

2) The Truth, via Food Analogy: There are those foods that are good for you. There are those foods you have to work at (either acquired tastes or foods you literally have to spend a lot of time and effort making). There are those foods that are easy (microwavable Lean Cuisines! Frozen pizza!) And then there are those foods that sometimes, you just want (Funyuns, anyone?!).

Movies are the same. I don't always want that four-course Bergman, sometimes I just want the Hot-Guy -of-a-cheese-puff.

So here's the list of the 10.5 movies I've watched in the last two weeks, blurbs to follow:

Mirror, Mirror
28 Days Later
Secret Window
13 Going on 30
Like Crazy
Fish Tank
The Cabin in the Woods
Footloose
The Girl Next Door
*Captain America (haven't finished)
Insidious


P.S. - I have never actually watched Beverly Hills Chihuahua or so much as an episode of Jersey Shore. Give me some credit.