I put this in my Netflix queue because it was by the same guy who directed the brilliant and startling political thriller "Z." I didn't make it through more than 20 minutes of this one, however. Once Jack Lemmon enters the picture, and starts ranting about what a good-for-nothing writer his son is, you can tell exactly where things are going. Though of course, this did win an Oscar for best screenplay, so . . . .

A separate point is that you can see a dozen films from the 1920s or 30s, with all the old-fashioned clothing, hairstyles, slang, social situations, and so on. But why is it that nothing looks more dated than a film from the early 80s?

2/10

7/10

The 300 is racist, jingoistic, anachronistic, and vaguely propagandic. It has all the artistic sensibility of a Meatloaf album-cover, and from beginning to end it is possibly the most ridiculous movie ever made. The problem, however, is that I knew all of these things beforehand; I’d read all the reviews. But yet I went in and saw it anyway, and within 24 hours of its release no less.

These facts inspired me to invent a new category midway through watching it (trust me, there wasn’t much else to do). Let me first give a little background about a common philosophical term that I incorporate into this new category. “Akrasia,” or “weakness of will,” is an ethical state midway between virtue and vice. The virtuous person knows what is wrong, and avoids it; the vicious person doesn’t know what is wrong, and doesn’t avoid it. The person of akrasia, in contrast to both, knows something is wrong but does it anyway. This phenomenon has been deeply troubling to moral philosophers since Socrates. For what do you do with such people? It’s not as if you can just tell them something is bad for them. They already know it’s bad for them. How then can you get them to change?

“Cinemakrasia,” a term introduced here for the first time in history, is the same problem in the realm of film. We know certain movies are awful but go and see them anyway. This seems like quite a common experience. My wife, for instance, went and saw “Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason” last summer with the same advance knowledge of it that I had of “The 300.” I bet you yourself have done the same thing at some time or other. Why?

Socrates famously resolved the moral problem by denying that akrasia is possible. He claimed that it is never the case that we can know something is wrong and do it anyway. For if you really KNEW it was wrong, you would never do it. Later philosophers, however, have taken the more commonsensical view that akrasia is indeed a big part of human life, and have tried to explain how such a phenomenon arises. Further analysis of my experience with cinemakrasia, however, would seem to confirm the Socratic view. For even though I’d read the reviews, right before I bought the ticket I thought that the reviewers might be out of touch, the movie might have its redeeming qualities, and so on. That is to say, I made a whole bunch of rationalizations that changed the content of my judgment about the movie. So in fact, at the moment I bought the ticket I didn’t actually “know” that it was a bad movie. Therefore, cinemakrasia is impossible. Is this right??

1/10

9/10

8/10