What if My Taste Just Fucking Sucks?
A few days back I decided to re-watch the ill-fated 2014 romantic comedy Playing It Cool for the Fractured Mirror book. I’m not entirely sure why I was in a terrible hurry to revisit a movie that seemingly no one even knows about, let alone likes, and one that I had an EXTREMELY negative response to the first time around.
I suppose you could say that I was eager to re-watch Playing it Cool precisely because it did terribly and also I fucking hated it. That’s kind of my deal! I dig things that are bad and didn’t do too good.
So as the fifteenth patron-only entry in The Fractured Mirror I rewatched Playing it Cool and was surprised to discover that a movie that I hated with a feverish, deeply personal intensity just a few years back I now enjoyed.
I went from despising the movie with my whole soul and every fiber of my being to thinking that it was an enjoyable little trifle with a clever script and a crazily overqualified cast that includes Anthony Mackie, Aubrey Plaza, Philip Baker Hall, Martin Starr, Patrick Warburton, Luke Wilson, Evans’ Fantastic Four cast-mate Ioan Gruffudd and Kiss Kiss Bang Bang’s Michelle Monaghan.
This amuses me!
I don’t want to over-sell Playing It Cool, a movie I previously begged people to avoid but it’s a slick and painless 90 minutes and much better than I remembered it.
I vaguely recalled writing up Playing it Cool for The Dissolve or possibly The A.V Club but it turns out that I wrote about it for this site about two months into its existence, which means that I could have just condensed my old review instead of watching and writing about it all over again.
So who’s right? The Nathan Rabin that fucking hated Playing it Cool in 2017 or the one that thought that, actually, it was pretty good five years later?
Here’s the thing: it doesn’t matter! There’s no such thing as “right”, just different opinions. That’s why when I worked at The A.V. Club and The Dissolve and people would gush that I was a great writer because they always agreed with me it rang hollow because it’s not about having the “right” take on something or agreeing with the right people.
Rather, it’s about having opinions that are informed, interesting and entertainingly expressed. THAT’s what I want readers to think of my writing, not that I’m good because I agree with them or am right.
I don’t know if I have good taste! I don’t know if I’m wrong about everything. Hell, I think the Oscar-winning contemporary classic Platoon fucking sucks and that Nothing But Trouble is super entertaining.
I’d rather take a fuck ton of drugs and watch Insane Clown Posse or Phish perform live than do just about anything else.
Do those seem like the thoughts or opinions of a sane man or a responsible public intellectual with good taste? I’m not sure that it’s entirely coincidental that I came out as a Juggalo and shortly afterwards publications stopped wanting me to write about anything on their behalf.
I worry sometimes that instead of improving, my taste is actually getting substantially worse with time.
I’ve been digging a lot of the movies I’ve been writing about for The Fractured Mirror book. I suspect that’s partially because I’ve gotten more positive and sympathetic but also because writing an exhaustively researched tome about movies about movies will lead me to love movies about movies specifically because they’re movies about movies, a sub-genre I’m obviously obsessed with or I wouldn’t be writing the book.
Will Stockholm syndrome set in with The Fractured Mirror? Has Stockholm Syndrome already set in?
Who cares? There are much worse things in life than mellowing with age and my career has been nothing if not a celebration of weird, vulgar and defiantly incorrect taste.
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