Terminate All Thought.

“Leave your brain at the door”, people are fond of telling me.  “You have to switch your brain off, and you’ll enjoy it”.  These are things I hear so often, generally as needless justification for one’s guilty cinematic pleasures, or to excuse a lack of confidence in one’s own opinions.  Even film critics use these tired clichés when they feel they are overstepping the boundary of what they, as critics, are permitted to like.  It means they can slap another star on the rating for that Jason Statham film without embarrassment. 

Firstly, all art is of course subjective, and therefore nobody need be ashamed of their likes or dislikes.  Secondly, when did the world become a place where people want to stop thinking?  The last thing I want to do is put a freeze on my thoughts.  Escapism?  Fine.  Dumb action?  Lovely.  It’s just something I’ll never understand, this whole not wanting to think.  It is our constant thought processes which make us human, no?

It really niggles my nadgers when people tell me that I would have enjoyed a lousy piece of cinematic excrement like Transformers had I had the foresight to just “switch my brain off”.  Because guess what, bitches?  I DON’T WANT TO.  My mind was whirring like the sprockets on the projector while watching Transformers, thinking up new, novel ways to express such bottomless abhorrence, and wondering how viewers can be insulted and belittled for over two hours and still go home happy.  Is society to blame?  And this is not, as someone on every imdb message board would suggest (by way of defending their tastes), snobbery.  I enjoy a dumb modern action flick as much as anyone, so long as it delivers (see Die Hard 4, Con Air), it’s just that even the action scenes in Transformers were weak, juvenile and unexciting.  And the big joke is that Mr. Bay actually does consider his films to have some meaning and importance, while even his defenders wouldn’t claim such a thing.  I remember reading an interview with him around the time The Island came out, and he was wittering on about how he is now less interested in blowing stuff up, and his new money shot is to look into an actor’s eyes, into their soul!  Ha Haaaaa Michael Bay!  I laughed and laughed.

And so I implore you readers, watch what you want, and enjoy films on whatever level you wish, but always keep your brain switched on.  There is as much to consider while watching some swill by Roland Emmerich as there is watching Apocalypse Now.  Maybe give Transformers 3 a miss though.