What I added by way of commentary was this:He’s right … it’s harder than it looks.
Especially because even if you can think of such a movie, you might not want to admit that you like it. (smile)
And hey – even “Pacific Rim” got a 72% freshness score from the critics (!!) and a 77% score from the audience. “Transformers” (2007) got 58% from the critics and 85% from the audience. So it’s not like there are a lot of popular movies that routinely get BELOW 50%.
So does that mean it's impossible? No. Just that it's really hard to admit to your friends that you like such a movie. I can name one right away, because this is an anonymous blog: a movie that scored 29% from the critics, and 56% from the audience. For what it's worth, though, one of the few critics who liked it -- maybe the only one, now that I think about it -- was Roger Ebert. So there's that.
The movie is "Threesome" (1994) with Lara Flynn Boyle, Josh Charles, and Stephen Baldwin, and I really like it. Why?
OK, the setup is preposterous: it's a college dorm where a girl named Alex is assigned to a dorm room with two guys because some administrator assumed that "Alex" must be male. OK, fine, it could have been anything else. That's just what threw the three of them together.
But then they become friends, ... with a complicated set of attractions among each other. (One of the guys is attracted to Alex, who is attracted to the other guy, who is gay and attracted to the first guy. As I said, complicated.) And I think what I like about it is that I find them believable. They find themselves in a confusing situation, and they talk a lot more than they fuck -- but that's college, isn't it? A time when everyone wants to be fucking like bunnies, but all these complicated thoughts keep getting in the way and so they have to have long, earnest conversations about it all. Later in life this becomes simpler, but in college we are all still feeling our way. Err ... so to speak.
And the movie carries the story far enough along that we also see them drift apart, leaving a nostalgia not only for what was, but for what might have been and wasn't. That, too, feels really true for me.
Yes, at one point they do finally all end up in bed together. And whenever I watch the movie I always think, "Finally!" But it's really not the focus of the story, and it all happens towards the very end. There's other sex that happens in-between scenes, but we don't see that at all. As in Greek tragedy, it's all reported by a herald who runs in from offstage. (Well, not literally but you know what I mean.) And that's because, while they are all thinking about sex all the time, actual real-life sex is not the center of the friendship. Most of the story lives in that in-between state, where each of the three is thinking, "I think I know what I want, but do you know what you want? And is it the same thing?" College students.
As I say, I really like the movie. Roger Ebert liked it too, but apparently almost nobody else does. An unpopular opinion.
Not that I'll ever admit it in real life.
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