I’ve become a movie evangelist lately. When I see a movie again that I love (latest example: “The Big Lebowski”), or even if I just think about a great movie, I have this impulse to go up to people and say, “Have you seen this? …You haven’t? Will you? Come over right now and we’ll watch it. You *have* to see this movie.” Clearly this is my father coming out in me, since whenever “Cool Hand Luke” was on TV while we were growing up, my father would require that we plop down and watch it. I must have seen Luke eat those 50 eggs about 1,000 times.
Unfortunately, this impulse to evangelize movies doesn’t take into account how different people’s tastes in movies are, and how different they can be from mine. Not to mention the “overselling” problem, which has bitten me in the past. But I tend to think to myself, “How can anyone not like ‘Fearless’? I just don’t understand it.”
I understand your viewpoint on that. When you commit to a movie (and it is a commitment), you look for confirmation from the outside world that, yes, indeed, you’ve made the right move. When someone doesn’t agree with you, you want to change their minds, or your faith in the movie might be shaken. You can even get angry with someone who doesn’t like it.
“Evagelistic” is a perfect word for it. Evangelical movie watchers.
At some point, either you won’t be speaking to anyone you know, or you will reach a point of perfect faith where you know in your heart that your movie choice is right, and you need no agreement from others.
It’s sort of Zen.