The other night a friend nudged me with what I think she believed was a shameful admission. She'd rented Eraserhead on the recommendation of a friend, and after half an hour was getting cold feet. "Is it bad that I find this boring?" she asked me.
My response was: No. It is perfectly okay for a movie to be boring. If you a bored by a movie, then for god's sake turn it off. Do not sit through anything because you feel you'll be doing someone else an injustice if you don't. A friend's perspective is not meant to become your new dogma, no matter how smart or cultured you think they are. Sometimes you're going to be disappointed by them; that's the cost of also having them bring you joy you would otherwise never find on your own.
Talking about what we like or don't like is not prescriptive. It's an invitation, not a commandment. It's easy to fool ourselves into thinking it needs to be, though; such is the beginning of snobbism. I thought Street of Crocodiles and most of the rest of the Brothers Quay's work was phenomenal. I couldn't get my friends to watch five minutes of any of it. It took me years to quit thinking I'd somehow gone about introducing them to it the wrong way. They were all adults. (I never got around to showing them Begotten because I was 99% sure they'd hate it with a passion.)
I thought Transformers was boring. What I will never say (or at least endeavor not to say) is, "People who like Transformers must be boring and stupid people." Many of them are not. Some are, but many aren't. I know other people who also love Eraserhead. Some of them, I won't give the time of day. I'll take a good friend with bad taste over bad friends with good taste any day. I should know: I've had both.
My friends love my dearly. Many of them do not, however, share my enthusiasm for Merzbow. (Yes, Bara, you're the exception.) They read my review of Amlux and wonder if we were listening to the same record. To which I can only answer: no, we didn't, because we don't have the same ears. But I will never say that their ears are boring.
La difference, c'est entre nous.
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I remember watching Tarkovsky's Stalker when I was fifteen or sixteen, with a friend from high school, and really pissing him off because I wouldn't stop laughing and eye-rolling over HOW FRICKIN' LONG everything seemed to take. More recently, I saw Solaris, and loved it; the fact that it was lengthy, oblique and utter un-self-explanatory seemed like a plus, not a minus, because it allowed me to submerge myself in a truly alien world--like dreaming someone else's dream. This is, I believe, an acquired taste, and I know that being a film critic helped me develop it. Most people, however, not only won't have that experience, but will probably do just fine without it.
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I honestly don't mind having friends of varying tastes, as long as I know this going on and can accommodate it. I loved both "Stalker" and "Solaris" (I must talk about both of them at some point, inasmuch as they are Tarkovsky films and the latter is a Stanisław Lem adaptation), while knowing full well most people would get bored with them. Takashi Miike had the nerve to bore some of his biggest fans with "Izo", but I thought "Sukiyaki Western Django" was far more interminable than "Izo".
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