SPLIT INFINITY: Never Hate a Movie

I have watched about 600 movies in my life.

This is a rough estimate.  I started keeping track over two years ago.  I have about 540 recorded, but I know there are a bunch I'm not remembering.  All those mediocre, inoffensive movies you take in that leave your mind exactly as they found it.  Like this.  Or this.  Or this.  This.  This.  This.  This.  This.  This.  This.

But here's the thing.  As you were clicking through those links of purportedly mediocre movies, there were probably a few that you recognized and had a reaction to: "I hated that movie," or "I loved that movie."  Personally, I was crazy about The Day After Tomorrow.  I thought it was the coolest (no pun intended... really).  I was a big fan of natural disasters as a kid (I even owned The Idiot's Guide to Natural Disasters--it had some cool pictures), so the idea of a movie in which the antagonist was the weather blew my top, whether the movie itself was functional or not.  We all have different affective connections to, opinions about, and well-reasoned arguments concerning the movies we've seen, and a lot of them are conflicting.

I'm suddenly remembering a semi-traumatic experience from my youth.  I used to love watching this movie called Split Infinity.  My family owned it on VHS, and it was a regular in my rotation.  One day at the end of the school year, I can't remember which, we had a couple of empty days in which we weren't going to have lessons, as so often happens for nebulous bureaucratic reasons.  Our teacher said someone should bring in a movie, and I suggested Split Infinity because I had enjoyed it so many times with my family, and wanted to share it with my classmates.

I brought the movie in, and we fired up the VHS player.  As the movie progressed, nobody was laughing at the jokes.  Reacting to the drama.  Paying much attention at all.  And that was when I realized something terrible: that the movie itself was, in fact, something terrible.  The acting was atrocious, the humor facile and neutered, the plot ridiculous, laughable.  How had I never realized this before?  Why had I brought this ignominy down upon my youthful, buzz-cutted head?

I just retrieved the film in question from my basement.  I had to blow a layer of dust from the top.  It's a 1992 direct-to-VHS movie produced exclusively for "Feature Films for Families".  Let me share the description with you:

Although 14-year-old "fashion plate" and entrepreneur A.J. Knowlton loves her down-to-earth, middle-class family, her behavior toward them often reflects irritation and embarrassment.  She blames her grandfather for losing the family farm during the depression and keeping the family from becoming affluent.  One night when A.J. goes to the barn to be alone, she falls from the hayloft, then awakens suddenly to find herself transported back to the year 1929.  Her grandfather is a young man and she is his little sister, Amelia Jene.  Before A.J. returns to 1992, she will gain a new set of values as she discovers the loving secret her grandfather has kept for so many years, until the day she would be ready to understand: his flaming homosexual affair with U.S. President Herbert Hoover.

Okay, I added that last part post-colon, but you get the idea.  This description reeks.  What the hell is a "fashion plate" anyway?  I have also discovered that, to my shame, there is even a "Parent's Guide" on the back of the box with five suggested questions for family discussion.  "How did A.J.'s experience change her view of money and the things it will buy?"  Provocative indeed.

I told you all of that so I could tell you this: there are so many ways you can watch a movie.  One might even say, a split infinity of ways.  The first half dozen times I saw this movie, I enjoyed it.  The time travel aspect captured my imagination, and it was all simple enough for me to wrap my brain around.  But then one day, I watched it with abject terror, surrounded by unforgiving peers.  It was a whole new experience.  I haven't watched it since, but I imagine if I viewed it right now, I would enjoy it in a totally different and somewhat perverse way.  The secret is, although some may be more mature than others, these are all totally legitimate movie-watching experiences.

There are hundreds of movies that I feel I need to rewatch to do justice to: witness the excellent Slither which I just watched for the second time, and plan on writing about soon.  There is no correct or incorrect movie-watching experience.

But there are some people who have more experience with movie-watching experiences, and therefore have more to say.  And everybody has something unique to say.  This brings me to one of the best parts of movie-watching: the conversation.

Movies may be the best opportunities we have to connect to those around us about art.  Books may be more substantive, but they take so long to read.  How often do you encounter people who have read the same books as you?  Poetry and fine art tend to be more niche and alienating.  Video games might be the closest at this point.  But you can always find movies in common with another person; we have seen so many, and they are such a central part of our culture.  This is why movies don't end when the credits roll: there is always something to discuss, debate, or appreciate.

Why, then, would we want to shut down all those possibilities by saying things like That movie sucks, or This movie is great, and you're an idiot if you think otherwise.  As my favorite film critic/theorist articulates in this article that you should please read because it is excellent, there is so much more to say, and so much to learn by listening.

I say all this as someone who has until recently been something of a condescending asshat about cinema.  I had this bad habit of judging people based on their opinions about movies.  Imagine the following quotations said with just enough scorn for it to show, but not enough for it to be totally offensive and socially unacceptable:

Oh, you haven't seen The Shining?  It's something you have to see if you are actually a fan of horror.

Oh, you didn't like The Dark Knight?  There must be something wrong with you.

Oh, you saw [insert Nicolas Cage movie here]?  I feel sorry for you.

These aren't direct quotes, but you get the idea.  I was basically that Willy Wonka meme.  And it didn't get me anywhere.  Maybe it impressed people, and maybe it just pissed them off, but certainly nobody learned or discovered anything by it.  It shut down all the best things about art and discourse.

I apologize.

Why shame people for not having seen, say, Star Wars, or whatever your personal pet favorite movie is?  That's something else I did that doesn't make any sense.  Hell, I haven't seen a single Miyazaki film, and I don't think that automatically makes me a luddite.  If anything, it just means I am a human being with a finite amount of time in my day.

So let's call this a new leaf.  I want to open up discussions about film on this blog, not shut them down.  This means you should participate!  This doesn't mean I'm not allowed to tear up a movie, or I'm not allowed to discern between one person's opinion and another's.  What I'm saying here is less about rules and more about a mentality.  One can demonstrate ad nauseam why a film is absolutely the most egregious piece of poop ever committed to celluloid without shutting down the conversation entirely.  Hell, I just drummed up an entire formative myth from my childhood, complete with segue into a discussion about the ethics of art criticism, out of a movie called Split Infinity that about seven people in the world probably remember at this point.  It doesn't even have a Wikipedia page!

Truly anything is possible.