Ohm
Fellow Exhauster Bryan has been doing movie reviews for over five years on his site Missile Test, under the title, Shitty Movie Sundays.
While we have enjoyed some hilariously bad movies together (Trancers, anyone?), I could not subject myself to the volume of shitty movies Bryan watches.
He explains his philosophy in his review of Resident Evil:
Regular readers will be aware of my affinity for shitty movies. I relish the escape. The right shitty movie can create an emptiness of mind similar to that attained by meditating. Done correctly, all conscious thought is pushed aside while considering a single, meaningless word, like ‘ohm’ or something. When I watch shitty movies, the carnival in my mind stops, the racket quiets and slows, and vision becomes separate from consciousness. I can enter the mindless, the pure and content, through the medium of terrible cinema.
Movies like Resident Evil, then, are therapy. They are escape from the pressures of work and the intellectual workout required in the reading of politics, history, and philosophy, etc. Shitty movies don’t reside in the realm of the vacuous. They are a pressure release valve, a way to expunge the stress of overusing the mind. I’m only partly joking.
Regardless of what I’m willing to watch, I can appreciate his thinking.