Acquired Tastes: I Watched This On Purpose

Every once in a while, I have to fight the urge to be contrary, just because. This willful turn towards contrariness oftentimes rears its head in the face of critical commentary, or commentary that carries with it the snap, crackle and pop of especially active synapses struggling for synthesis. Mostly, I fight the urge to be contrary whenever critical opinion reaches some sort of consensus.

I think:

"What if all these experts and intellectuals were somehow wrong?"

Then, I gloat:

"Who's the smart one now?"

Josh Modell posits the same subversive slant in what is hopefully a series of short articles on movies that critics might have panned unfairly. Here are some excerpts:

We at The A.V. Club—writers and readers—are imperfect culture warriors, knowledgeable of what we should like and its relation to what we actually like, but even so, we aren't always impervious to the sexy allure of ostensible garbage. Sometimes—frequently, even—a movie or TV show will actually have cartoon stink lines emanating from it, yet we can't stop ourselves from seeing it. It's all about that kernel of hope, that faint possibility that this will be the one in a hundred that all the critics—and our own instincts—were wrong about. Thus is born I Watched This On Purpose, a new feature that will explore the impulse to spend time with entertainments that are unlikely to reward us in any meaningful way, or sometimes any way at all. It isn't a matter of getting to know your enemy, or even of discovering guilty pleasures, but of playing the long odds in hopes of a real reward. And a good time.

The first movie? The Timothy Olyphant starrer, Hitman. Good times!

And yes, Ate Cecile. The picture has nothing to do with the post. You love it anyway!