I used to tell people that I have only seen three movies. I thought it was a good way to illustrate that I haven't seen many movies. Instead, the person I was talking to (my own mother included) would then start naming movies that they knew I had seen, then gloat when they got to number four.
Person: "The Star Wars trilogy, and..."
Me: "Yes, I get it! Will you just let me exaggerate?! Sheesh."
Or I would tell people, "I mostly like movies that star rock bands." Then I would reel off titles such as A Hard Day's Night, Head, Spiceworld, and of course my beloved Can't Stop The Music starring Village People. That tactic would fail sometimes too, when people starting asking about The Wall. Not interested in that one, but can we talk about Paul's grandfather?
Anyway, keeping up with current movies really isn't my deal. I think most of the movies I have seen were made before 1975. I grew up without cable (unheard of these days) so my movie choices were limited to what the independent stations (9 and 29 for the locals) wanted to show on Saturdays. And those movies were frequently comedies from the late sixties. There was that one bleak Sunday when I sat through Judgement At Nuremberg, but for the most part, movies meant Cary Grant.
Then a new independent station was established, and my teen years were filled with bad movies. This station was KTMA, channel 23. That is the station whose movie stock provided the fodder for the first local season of Mystery Science Theater 3000. Well, they played those crappy movies all the time, so I have seen dozens of low budget monster movies. And since Kung Fu Theater was on right before MST3K, I have seen many poorly dubbed martial arts movies.
I had that AMC phase too, where I discovered that Martin and Lewis movies are funny. And the art movie phase when my friend the art student was back from college and we would rush to the art theater every week, because all the movies there only ran for seven days. But I don't really keep up on the latest movies. There are exceptions, of course. The Lord Of The Rings trilogy? I'm all over it, although a cold kept me from seeing the final installment last month. Soon. LCG and me go on opening night whenever The Rock releases a new movie, but other than that, I can take or leave movies. I frequently am part of this conversation:
LCG: Have you seen...oh, never mind, of course you haven't.
Although the other day I thought I had figured out part of the problem.
Me: You know why I can't go to movies? Because my two favorite shows are Beavis and Butthead...
LCG: ...and Mystery Science Theater.
Me: Exactly! In my world, it is perfectly acceptable to talk through a movie, but in the real world, I can't do that.
I can curb my urge to talk at the movies (I don't need to be throttled by a posse of Fametracker readers) but I prefer watching movies at home, because if I do need to let loose with an MST3K-style, "Rutger Hauer, NO!" I can. Point being, I like movies okay, but I don't seek them out. And one reason I do not seek them out is because of movie trailers.
Answer me this simple question: Why does every movie soundtrack ever compiled feature the song I Will Survive? That's not fair, it's probably closer to eighty percent. But when I see a trailer that features I Will Survive, I can rest assured that a monkey assembled the soundtrack. A monkey with no imagination. A monkey who had to catch a plane so just threw I Will Survive on there as filler.
Why is every single underdog scene set to that song? Need to win the big game? Need to make it in the big city? Just had a breakup? CUE THE DISCO BEAT! The disco beat cures all. While I agree that a disco beat cures many woes, I Will Survive is apparently the only disco beat that can cure the woes of determined movie characters. At first they were afraid. They. Were. Petrified. I actually like the song I Will Survive, but I started to tire of it when it was written into law that any disco compilation had to contain at least five percent Gloria Gaynor. The overuse in movie trailers is just bonus irritation.
But it is not the only offender. A while back I was reading The First Wives Club (a movie I wanted to see when it was released, and never got around to it) and I was haunted by a vision. I was reading an especially spunky scene when all of a sudden, I got a mental picture of Bette Midler, Goldie Hawn, and Diane Keaton dancing about a kitchen to the song Sisters Are Doin' It For Themselves. Was it real, or had I imagined it? I didn't know.
It occurred to me that I could be getting The First Wives Club confused with Hanging Up. That is another movie with three female principles, all of them dressed in black in the promotional materials, and both movies featured Diane Keaton. And the trio in that movie were playing sisters, so the song would do double duty. I never did figure it out, but the song left my head so I was fine.
And then a few weeks later, LCG and me were channel flipping and The First Wives Club was on TV. I had finished the book by then and wanted to stop and watch for a bit, because I like Bette Midler. Within a couple of minutes I was barking, "That isn't what happened in the book!" and then would turn to LCG and add, "it was better in the book." I realize that movies have to be shorter than books, and I understand that scenes and characters need to be deleted, but I hate it when main plotlines get twisted up (or sugarcoated, or both) so the movie is more palatable.
Anyway, a montage of the ladies working hard started up, and what do you suppose started playing? Yep. Sisters Are Doin' It For Themselves. No, they weren't! They had just extorted money from their ex-husbands! In the book they used their own funds. But the moviemakers needed to convey female empowerment, and the fastest way to do that is a montage of women signing checks and wearing hardhats while Sisters Are Doin' It For Themselves blasts in the background. It wouldn't surprise me at all if I Will Survive had appeared earlier in the movie, when the women all found themselves newly divorced. It's part of the formula that the monkey uses to create one very popular soundtrack and one very unhappy moviegoer.