-Roman Polanski
Sitting in this worn-out cloth-covered chair, the slowly-dimming lights of the movie theater humming softly against the quick cuts of the previews, I find myself not paying attention to the gaping screen in front of me and, instead, worrying. Typical. I am worrying about my Business Calculus homework, left unfinished and nervously due. I am worrying about that one girl that I met, who might have taken my normal, slightly sexist joke a little too seriously. And I am that my humor has become too refined, too stuck-up for the likes of the only-slightly witty dialogue and the common thread of plot running through every TV show and movie that I have watched.
Half-asleep, distractingly checking my bright texts, I force myself to laugh at the predictable, the smug comment and its companion retort which had simply just been copy-and-pasted from the past fifteen movies about teenage girls struggling through high school. And, after the movie is over, the bleary-eyed audience and the friends of mine who I actually know nothing personal about murmuring excitedly about the absolutely hilarious scene in the middle of the movie and the positively wondrous part that closed the film, I can’t help but shrug at the mediocrity of it all, every film cell, every reel.
I have started to expect only the absolute best out of the four-dollar-ticket price: acting, story, dialogue, humor, and action must be superb for me to consider a movie “good.” And I guess, up to a point, this pickiness is good, stemming from my incessant need to check movie rating websites, trying to pluck the best cinematic experience for me, personally, out of the newspaper stars and television reviews.
But there hasn’t been a movie in a while that has pleased me, that has satisfied my need, my drive for perfection. I guess I’ll just have to make my own.
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