Movie Nerds, and Turds – Why my movie afficionado friends annoy me sometimes.

**WARNING – Overcharged, and abused religious language is used in this post…**

I’m no movie critic, nor am I the son of a movie critic. I don’t care to be a movie critic, but I do care to critique movie critics. At least the self-appointed ones. Well, in one sense all are actually, self-appointed, but right now I’m going to critique your self-appointed movie critic friends.

You know them, they’re your best friends, your roommates or your siblings. They are self-appointed vicars of Gene Siskel, they infallibly declare a movie  ‘b-rated’ when they cannot get over the fact that someone jumped from two trailers onto another one, on a different highway, while she was being chased by cops pointing and shooting their guns.

Now, it’s not a real problem and maybe this is a local problem or maybe I have too many movie critic friends. I know I shy from saying I like a movie sometimes because I’ll be stoned for even suggesting that I enjoyed it. Below is a brief reaction to a friend who is a self-appointed vicar;

Firstly, all good stories have a plot twist, or a set of circumstances that place the character(s) in a situation with terrible odds that things will turn out in his/her favor. The Vicar of Siskel will usually pontificate on the unbelievable circumstances of a situation in a movie, and its solution. They will then follow it by a real life example or comparison and on this basis argue that the movie is too fantastical, it’s too unbelievable to accept.  He will proceed to decline in commenting on the quality of the movie or simply dismiss the movie as a miserable failure which should be thrown into the vault of such other fails as the Batman franchise, or anything by Nicholas Cage. He will declare the movie anathema.

But is it really necessary? Isn’t the movie after all a movie? Isn’t a story enjoyable because we can escape reality in one sense? If someone will complain about a movie about a CIA agent (like Salt) and her near super power strenght and spider-like qualities as nearly impossible, well then go watch something else – COPS.

(Cops is filmed on location with the men and women of law enforcement all suspects are innocent until proven guilty…in a court of law)

Now, don’t get me wrong some genres require more realistic situations, for example would this whining movie-pope whine the same way if he were watching the Chronicles of Narnia? “What as stupid movie dude, Lions don’t talk, and half man, half goats!? Seriously?” No, of course not, but the standards change but these people decry the movies for all the wrong reasons. A movie, whether drama, suspense, fantasy, anime all involve an element of the imagination that seeks to exit your living room, to take you away and place you in a different world. For the people watching the Chronicles of Narnia, you exit this world, and enter Narnia, exercising your God-given imagination and enjoying the twists and turns of this world. And this usually plays well with all movies, until you have Pope Siskel who in his self centeredness wants to make himself the center of the movie, instead of taking himself into the movie, Pope Siskel wants to be the movie, and brings the movie to him. Pope Siskel refuses to enter the world of the CIA Agent, the illegal immigrant, or the poor black boy. Pope Siskel is the movie.

Now, as I said before, I’m no movie critic but I sure do find movie critics annoying sometimes, especially when they argue the way the Vicars of Siskel do.