Regretted Recommendations
Erik Bates | January 25, 2015
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Scott Hardie | February 7, 2015
For a guy who writes movie reviews for fun (and briefly got paid for it), I'm not so good at recommending movies in person. I like to avoid spoilers at all costs, so I go into a movie knowing very little and often being totally wrong about it. This doesn't bother me, but it doesn't always turn out well for the friends going with me. Back in college, Jackie Mason fell victim to this twice. I told her all that I knew about Waking Life, that it was a dreamy watercolor-animated film that would appeal to her art-major sensibilities, but she and especially her boyfriend were taken aback that the film is entirely just philosophical monologues about consciousness. (His comment afterwards: "If any movie ever needed a good car chase...") I also heard that The Princess and the Warrior was a spiritual sequel to Run Lola Run, so we watched Lola on DVD before heading to the theater for Warrior for a tiring double-feature, but the two films have nothing in common except director Tom Tykwer and star Franka Potente, so I dragged everybody through it for nothing.
I also tend to misremember movies years later, recalling the few good parts and forgetting the many slow or off-putting parts, which makes for really bad recommendations. This happened to Kelly with Korean thriller Save the Green Planet!, which I remembered as a visually inventive and surprising black comedy, but there's very little funny about it and the many scenes of grisly, brutal violence kept us from getting more than halfway through together. It happened to Kelly's parents when I suggested that they augment their visit to Florida by watching the John Sayles drama Sunshine State, which I remembered for its witty dialogue and topping my annual ten-best list, but I forgot that it's a very dry drama with long scenes where very little happens, the kind of movie that might appeal to a film buff but that would bore anyone else. However, the worst recommendation was Happiness, which was a mistake of "dear God, what have I done" proportions. I recalled it to be a cruelly pitch-black comedy about bleak subject matter like acquaintance rape and child molestation. Kelly's father and brother enjoy a twisted sense of humor that makes Cards Against Humanity a highlight of our visits to see them, so after the family wrapped up a joyous, merry Christmas, I suggested putting on this comedy, warning them that its subject matter was grim. I was right about the content, but wrong about the tone: It's a shockingly depressing drama about miserable people, with very little to laugh at. For Kelly and her brother and his boyfriend, it merely killed the good mood and they went to bed partway through, but Kelly's father stuck around in an increasingly melancholy mood, and stayed depressed for two days afterwards, opting out of more Christmas festivities. He had worked many years as a prison guard and de-facto therapist for the child molesters on his wing, and the movie dredged up tons of depressing memories. I couldn't apologize enough, feeling like I had dropped an emotional nuke on the whole visit, and it was enough to put me off of recommending movies for good. (Want an impression of Happiness? The trailer pretends to be funny and feel-good, but imagine it without the music and brisk editing. It's horrible.)
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Scott Hardie | January 24, 2015
Awkward story time: Do you have any tales of making a suggestion to someone that turned out badly? This can be something big such as life advice, or something small like recommending a book or a movie.