Love films, hate pretension

When confronted with Lovefilm's rental queue I get all self-conscious and feel the need to stuff the list with films I feel I should see, even if I'm not really interested. This reached a peak when the Martin Scorsese Cape Fear turned up in the mail. Haven't seen it, have no interest in it, it wasn't even the Robert Mitchum original (which I shamefully also haven't seen) and I'm never going to watch it but, at some point in the past, I seem to have decided that I should. This has been happening for a while now so last week I took executive action, purged the list of all half-thought out foreign film titles and stacked the top priority of the queue with utter trash such as JCVD and Death Race. I'm reaping the whirlwind now as Hitman turned up in the post yesterday, but at least there's a certain honesty in the titles I've selected.

Lovefilm seems to be more a searching psychological evaluation mechanism than a DVD rental service. I had perceived it as a way of catching up on a backlog of classic movies that I hadn't seen. However it seems that rather than a conscientious cinephile I am actually a lowest-common-denominator consumer of trash (anyone with access to my cinema visits over the last two years would have long suspected this). I'm not entirely happy with this new self-knowledge but at least I might watch some of the films I get sent.