Different Tastes
Movie reviewers are useful when they warn you of stinkers and alert you to gems. And so I try to find reviewers whose tastes I share, even though it's pretty unimportant since I see maybe six or eight movies a year. But I've found my perfect anti-reviewer, my exact opposite: Terry Teachout. He reminds me of Jim Cramer, the stock guy. I bought some e-commerce stocks in '00 on his recommendation. You know what happened.
Our tastes (Teachout's & mine) are perfectly opposite even in books - he writes that he is "one of those unfortunate folk who are allergic to most of the Major American Novelists who came of age in the Fifties. Roth, Bellow, Mailer, Updike - all leave me cold...". I like Updike and some of Bellow and Roth. But the kicker was when he wrote that he liked the film "High Fidelity" much more than the book. I read the book and loved it. I suffered through the film last night for my wife's sake.
I was flipping through the channels last night and came across The Human Stain, a movie of another book I'd read, and Teachout's main problem with the movie was that he couldn't see Anthony Hopkins in the lead role of someone who is half black but passes for white. And I'm thinking "geesh. That's the main problem? Didn't Shakespeare have women play men's roles in his plays? Can't you suspend disbelief a bit easier?" Teachout also was a big fan of Sideways.
I passed on The Human Stain but thought that Teachout should work out great. All I have to do is see movies he doesn't like and don't see the ones he does. Except he just quit reviewing for Crisis. Darn.
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