Feel Good? We Dare You!

摘要

A confession is in order: there are movies whose feel-good sentiments and slick craft annoy me so deeply that I know they will become box-office successes or top prizewinners. I call this internal mechanism my Built-in Hit Detector. I squirm through these masterpieces of emotional pornography, jotting down derisive notes. Oh, if the contrivance is blatant enough, I may get a bit teary; it is, after all, no more difficult for filmmakers to make an audience cry by depicting, say, a child in jeopardy than it is for a lap dancer to evoke an erection in her client. At the end I have the gloomy certitude that moviegoers will love Ghost or Cinema Paradiso or The Full Monty every bit as much as I disliked it. There—I've said it. Is everyone alienated?