The banal movie conversations of ordinary people

If you're like me, your ears always prick up when you hear strangers start talking about movies. 

However, if you're like me, they also shrivel up again in no time at all.

I might not have written about the phenomenon of being utterly unstimulated by other people's movie conversations, except that in the last 48 hours, I caught two such conversations, with two predictably dispiriting sets of results.

The first was after I got out of Mickey 17 on Thursday night, and if you want to hear my thoughts on that particular disaster, you can go here. 

I was waiting for the train and I heard a couple talking on one of the benches a few down from me. It was after 11 p.m. so there were no other conversations into which theirs could disappear. She had her head in his lap.

He was saying something about how there were three characters in the movie, and the city was like a third character. While that is, in fact, a banal observation within cinephile circles, it's not a bad way for an ordinary person to stretch themselves and try seeing what we all see in the power of movies.

However, then it did get banal.

"See one character is Bruce Wayne, and then the second is Batman," he explained.

I kind of tuned out from there. So I'm not really sure which of the many Batman movies he had to choose from felt to him particularly like the city was a character. 

Then Friday morning I was in the doctor's office. This time the conversation was between the two in-take ladies behind the desk. 

"Is the movie from this year?" I heard one of them saying. 

Ears at attention. I could only hear her half of the conversation, so I couldn't tell if she was on the phone or if the other woman was just really, really quiet.

"Because I really liked the one where she was pregnant," she continued.

Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy. Although the second comment would have been a reference to Bridget Jones' Baby. 

I tuned out again.

(And while we're here: How does the critic in the poster above know this is the best Bridget "ever"? Has he or she looked into the future?)

Look, I'm not trying to be a snob. I'm really not. In fact, I fight movie snobs on a regular basis. If not literally, then at least metaphorically.

But there was something deflating about two people trying to interact with the world of cinema and confirming so clearly our worst fears: The movies better pander to our most basic instincts or we will not see them, let alone talk about them in banal ways with other banal people.