One of the surprisingly handy things about being married to someone who isn't a film buff in any way, shape or form is that she'll always say exactly what she thinks - she has no qualms about slaughtering sacred cows because the chances are she wasn't aware that they were sacred in the first place. My kids are similar, which is why it's so great when they really love something high-quality by Michel Ocelot or Hayao Miyazaki - I know it's entirely genuine, and not because they've bought into any hype.Sloper wrote:I feel incredibly nervous when watching favourite films with friends, to the point where I blush heavily and get sweaty palms. The worst thing is they're often too polite to say what they really think, especially after I've hyped the film to the skies. What I really need to do is hook them up to a lie detector.
I'll do it if I think it's necessary - for instance, when I showed Guy Maddin's Careful to my wife I said something like "yes, it really does look like this all the way through, and if you hate the first five minutes you might as well give up then". (She loved it, as it turned out).Does anyone else do the thing of pre-emptively criticising the film? As in "this one is a bit weird/the opening is quite slow but it picks up/be warned, the dubbing is pretty awful/the acting style takes some getting used to/it's what you might call 'stylised'/try not to be put off by the intertitles", all of which translate to "just make the sodding effort and enjoy it".
But with my regular filmgoing companion I normally don't bother - I know her tastes and knowledge well enough for me not to need to make any excuses, so all I need to do is come up with a capsule description that I know will push the right buttons. For instance, a rare screening of Ali Khamraev's The Seventh Bullet (1972) became "Fancy an Uzbek spaghetti western?", to which I suspect most people would reply "you what?", but hers was "wow!".
