Guilty Displeasures

I was reading the other day on the A.V. Club website and came across an interesting debate among its writers. Instead of debating their guilty pleasures, they were debating their guilty displeasures. They describe a guilty displeasure (whether a film, a book or etc.) as "respected parts of the cultural canon that we've tried, often at great length, but have just been unable to get into to the same degree as our fellow cultural commentators." That basically a guilty displeasure is something that is considered worthwhile, from an artistic standpoint, and that by it's nature one should or would have thought they be in to.

In mind of that...here are some of my guilty displeasures.

Neil Young. I respect Young as a iconic rocker and I really like some of his songs (Cinnamon Girl & Keep on Rocking in the Free World) but I've just never been head over heels with his music. And it's not from a lack of trying. At some point in college I purchased Harvest (generally considered to be one of his strongest albums) but I just never got into it. In fact I looked for the album this morning and couldn't find it. Sadly I wasn't too heart broken over it. It's not that I think his music is bad. It's more to the point that it hasn't done anything for me. Additionally...I've been into almost every iconic classic rocker from the '60's and '70's but Young's music alludes me.

Woody Allen. Allen is one of the most prolific filmmakers of our time. And to be fair I've only seen a handful of his movies. But that's the thing, I have no desire to watch his movies. I don't really have a compelling reason why (after all I did think that Annie Hall was a pretty good film). For whatever reason it's just not happening for me. I love movies but when I hear that Woody Allen has a new film coming out...I have no reaction--either positive or negative. I feel that I should like Allen's films because he and along with many of his films are so well respected but I'm just so indifferent about them.

The Graduate. I find myself slowly railing against the Baby Boomer generation and there's no better representation of that than the 1967 film, The Graduate. Let me preface this and say that The Graduate is a very good film with some fine transcendent performances. And I understand the cultural significance of the movie. But the cultural impact of the movie has overshadowed the film itself and the reality that the movie is not what people make it out to be. It's considered one of the best American films of all-time (as it routinely places high on critic's lists) and I don't believe that to be the case. It's a film that captured a moment in time but I don't believe that it has aged all that well. I find the film to self-important and it takes itself way too seriously.