Cinematic complex

Watching “High Fidelity” with my brother last week (he’d borrowed the book from me and wanted to see the film), I was struck by one of John Cusak’s lines - “Did I listen to pop music because I was depressed or was I depressed because I listened to pop music?”. Now, while my listening tastes do err to the slightly unusual and slightly obscure (well, for the most part…currently, I’m listening to Madeleine Peyroux’s cover of Leonard Cohen’s “Dance me to the end of love”, swooooon!), what came to mind was actually my movie collection and what it potentially says about me. Not that I have a huge collection, but a list of the dvds that I’ve bought (not including gifted ones) goes as follows:

Lost in translation
High Fidelity
Fight Club
21 Grams
Monster’s Ball
Secretary
Amelie
Chasing Amy
Requiem for a dream
Velvet Goldmine
The Hours
28 Days Later
Igby Goes Down
Fahrenheit 9/11
Supersize Me
Magnolia
Gosford Park
The importance of being earnest
The Royal Tenenbaums
Napoleon Dynamite
Reality Bites
The Office disc set (the UK series, of course)
A Scanner Darkly
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
Closer
Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas
Orgazmo
Pan’s Labyrinth
Reign Over Me
Good Night & Good Luck
Citizen Kane
Confessions of a Dangerous Mind

Now, there’s a couple of odd comedies scattered around, but for the most part they tend to be serious, to varying degrees, depressing storylines…why is that? I mean, they’re certainly not the only kind of movies that I see - the week before last I saw both Enchanted and Alvin & the Chipmunks (with girlfriends my age…and yes, both movies were completely voluntary) and thoroughly enjoyed both!

Okay, so I do have a bit of snobbishness about the rest of pop culture (I watch very little TV, listen to no radio voluntarily, do not read any trash mags and frown on anything toted as “reality…”) but it doesn’t really cross over into the realm of cinema, and I’m happy to watch my share of silly movies, most usually those Dreamworks/Pixar animations. So what on earth does it say about me that, though I enjoy most movies (that have some semblance of a storyline), I only pay money for the ones that will most likely throw me into a horribly depressed, introverted funk?

Perhaps I just need to put away this glass of wine and get some bloody sleep?!