Monday, January 19, 2004

My friend's blog had a listing of some of those on-line personality quizes. I took the Myers-Briggs Personality test again; this time I scored INTP (Introverted Intuitive Thinking Perceptive).

I have to admit this description is fairly close - this passage especially: "INTPs and Logic -- One of the tipoffs that a person is an INTP is her obsession with logical correctness. Errors are not often due to poor logic -- apparent faux pas in reasoning are usually a result of overlooking details or of incorrect context. "

The Reason I Watch Movies, or, Why You Will Never Hear Me Slam Jurassic Park:



The day Jurassic Park came out in the theaters, I was canned from my job. It was a joke of a job, doing returns in a warehouse, but I had never been fired before. I was let go because the company was losing money, not because I did a bad job, but it was a blow to my ego. So, when my brother and his friends called me up that Friday to go see JP, I was feeling rather shitty and tried to beg off. Fortunately, they dragged me along. And this is why I will never slam Jurassic Park: from the start of the movie until the credits rolled, I NEVER ONCE thought about my problems. I did NOT think about money, jobs, or the fact that I cried in front of my boss. I came out of the theater happy.

Perhaps for me, the difference between "I liked it" and "I loved it" is how well the story holds up in my mind after the lights come back on; how well it stands up to the nitpicky part of me. People nitpicked JP especially about the characters, but as far as I was concerned, Steven Spielberg took characters who weren't well-defined in the first place and cast distinct, likeable (to me, anyway) actors to play the parts. The characters in Jurassic Park were good enough for me. I love Jurassic Park.

Other than watching lots and lots of movies over the years, the only thing I have done above and beyond to learn about movies is read a textbook on "Narrative Film". I learned the difference between 'montage' and 'mise en scene'. Big deal.

My favorite movie: Aliens

Please note, I did not say it was the best movie of all time! I'm not about to try to take a stab at guessing that. It is my favorite movie. Period. Seen it dozens of time.

Since we're kind of sort of on the subject of James Cameron, I adored Terminator, liked the Abyss and Terminator 2, and I enjoyed Titanic when it was focusing on the disaster and not the hackneyed romance and 1-dimensional villains (although it was a joy to see David Warner again - where the hell have you been?).

The old insult, "there's no accounting for taste" is nonsense; if you dig deep enough, you can find out why you like what you like. A good example for me is the fact that I do not like country music. I will, however, listen to Patsy Kline. A friend of mine has a good singing voice. She has, over the years, recommended female singers for me to listen to. I remember her putting on an old tape of 'I fall to pieces', and I really listened to her voice for the first time. Doing so was important to my friend, so I obliged. Patsy Kline's voice is haunting. That experience stuck and is part of my 'taste' in music (most of which normally lies in the techno/industial arena).

So why do I mostly prefer mostly genre movies? Probably because I read way too much as a kid, and a great deal of it was Isaac Asimov and Ray Bradbury, as well as folks who wrote adventure stories like Robb White and Alistair MacLean. Yeah, but why did I read those?

Both my mom and dad are readers; and one of my earliest memories was my mom reading The Lord of the Rings to my sister and me when we were kids ( when I first saw the short trailer for the movies - just watching Gandalf, Legolas, Gimli, Frodo, Sam, Merry, Pippin, Aragorn and Boromir walk by was enough to put my heart in my throat). That event certainly accounts for a great deal of my attraction to genre stories.

I hate it when the characters are boring or poorly acted, or I am drawn in by the characters and possibilities in front of me then I notice a plot hole that jars me out of the experience. It's a slap in the face. I suppose that watching bad movies and yelling at the screen is the moral equivalent of slapping back (And a lot of fun!).

This post went nowhere. Eh.

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