Uncivil Wars

I've been involved for several months now on an e-mail discussion thread. It's a few guys who work at E! Entertainment Television, one guy who works on the TV show "American Dreams" over at Universal, and myself. Who works at a video store.

Anyway, we argue about movies most of the time. One guy on this thread, we'll call him Y, likes a lot of movies your humble blogger hates, like The Hulk, Ray, the Star Wars prequels, As Good As It Gets, Magnolia and Titanic. As well, I enjoy a number of movies Y hates, like Anchorman, the South Park movie, The Aviator and Fight Club.

From those lists, you can probably tell whose side you're on.

The interesting thing, to me, is that though I loathe all of the movies on Y's list up there, I don't loathe Y. In fact, he seems like a really bright, well-reasoned guy. You could even go so far as to say I like him, and I sense that if we saw each other more frequently in real life, as opposed to communicating through the cold, dark vacuum of cyberspace, we might even be friends.

Yet none of my friends have nearly this divergent an opinion of pop culture. All of my friends like "South Park," and most of them like those other movies I listed as well (except my friend Brian, who can't stand Anchorman, or Zoolander for that matter).

Our arguments tend to boil down to the same rote few ideas as well. No matter where we start, every conversation ends with another participant, C, agreeing with me on something. Then yet another participant, P, will agree with Y. Then the final writer, J, will come on and either confuse everyone or try to piss someone off. And finally, Y tells me that I'm either too immature or too intellectual to just let a positive, feel-good movie wash over me, and I tell him that the movie he's praising is overdone, cheesy, fake or just plain awful.

Ray provides a terrific recent example. If you read my review of Ray, you know that I thought it was a tremendous turd. A thoroughly rotten waste of celluloid that turned the fascinating, rich life of one of the 20th Century's most enduring musical icons into a rote, dreary, by-the-numbers biopic with some of the worst editing and least insightful dialogue of the year.

Y thought Ray was great, among the year's best films. He saw it not as a hopelessly vapid retelling of some famous incidents in the life of a famous guy, but as an emotional, old-fashioned melodrama of the highest order, the story of a celebrity rewritten and writ large for a mass audience to appreciate and enjoy.

Both opinions sound good when you say them like that (and Y's a good enough writer to make a case compelling). But how do you deal with the fact that, though we mutually respect one another, we also think the other person has the same ability to appreciate cinema as a cheese danish?

Our solution thus far has been to either mock the other person or get angry and stop e-mailing for a few days, before one of the other participant's starts the whole thing up again with some general question, like "What's the Best Martin Scorsese Movie?" or "You kind of look like that one character on 'Deadwood.' The Chinese guy. Wu, I think."