What do you think is fun? Aside from watching animated films, I think every reader to this blog would have a different answer to that question. And yet why do we assume that everyone will think the same movies are fun?
This years seems to be the year of “fun movies” and I must have heard 100 times “oh come on, just have fun with this movie”. I have also caught myself saying it on videos and with blogs.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately because it seems to me fun movies are great when you enjoy them but when other people tell you to have fun and you’re not it is very annoying.
For example, I had fun with Jupiter Ascending because it was so over-the-top. To me it felt like a campy soap opera and I laughed but I don’t try to pretend it is a good movie. I totally get why most people hated it. In fact, I may have just been in a good mood that day. At the least it is bad in ways I’d never seen before which I found entertaining.
In contrast, San Andreas was not a fun movie for me because it didn’t show me anything new. The special effects looked tired and were things I had seen in many other movies. The dialogue was bad without being over the top enough soap opera silly bad (with a few exceptions). The acting is terrible but not in an especially entertaining way. It’s not so bad it’s good but just kind of lame. Other people had fun with San Andreas and that’s great but how can they expect everyone to have that same experience?
And then there are the films I do have fun with but I don’t seem to like as much as other people. For example, Jurassic World I thought was entertaining but I didn’t rave about it like others. I didn’t mind they liked it more than I did until I started getting flack for it. It seemed to bother some people that I didn’t have as much fun as they did. I find that fascinating because again I can’t think of any other activity where level of funness would matter? I had fun. I was entertained by it. Why isn’t that good enough?
I know I am guilty of this as much as anyone else particularly when it comes to animation I deem ‘fun’ . I am going to try and not do that any more. Going to try and stick to explaining why I think it is fun and be a little less defensive if others don’t have the same experience. I don’t think I’m terrible in that regard but I have done it and am going to try to avoid it in the future.
