What is Entertainment…and What is Not

I’m angry. I’ve just spent the last hour and forty-five minutes watching She’s the Man–new on DVD–and I’m not sure that I have felt that my intelligence has been insulted in this long. There’s nothing especially artistically offensive about the movie like, say, The Hot Chick or Jackass: The Movie. It’s just dull, contrived, cliched–to the extreme. It’s nonsense. Unpleasurable nonsense. Usually, stupid movies like this one have something to redeem them–a performance, a witty subplot, something–but this one is devoid in all areas. I thought I liked Bynes, but perhaps not. She certainly doesn’t come close to saving She’s the Man, much less make it entertaining.

I’m not exactly an artistic-purist. I don’t believe that a movie has to be high on brains to be entertaining. I do believe that anything entertaining should also be considered art, but that’s an entirely different debate. When it comes to viewing a film, all I ask is that it be a pleasant experience for me and the company that I’m watching it with. That’s all. Not much more. It may be the characterizations that I like, the dialogue, the staging, the setting, the scenery, the cinematography; I’m very open-minded. All I need to have is something to chew on, something comforting.

So, with that idea in mind–and a distaste for the uninteresting She’s the Man–I present to you a bare-bones list of twenty of the best comfort movies ever made for the purpose of entertainment.

· Airplane! (Zucker, 1980)

· Aliens (Cameron, 1986)

· Big Momma’s House (Mitchell, 2000)

· Dude, Where’s My Car? (Leiner, 2000)

· Fargo (Coen, 1996)

· Forrest Gump (Zemeckis, 1994)

· Friday the 13th (Cunningham, 1980)

· Ghost World (Zwigoff, 2001)

· The Girl Next Door (Greenfield, 2004)

· Halloween (Carpenter, 1978)

· The Lady from Shanghai (Welles, 1947)

· Legally Blonde (Luketic, 2001)

· Monty Python’s The Life of Brian (Jones, 1979)

· Pulp Fiction (Tarantino, 1994)

· Spirited Away (Miyazaki, 2002)

· The Station Agent (McCarthy, 2003)

· The Stepford Wives (Forbes, 1976)

· Terminator (Cameron, 1984)

· Titanic (Cameron, 1997)

· Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (Stuart, 1971)

I tried to keep the list to one-film-per-director, but James Cameron repeats himself thrice. It’s not definitive in any way, nor do I consider many of these to be the best of all-time (or their genres) in any way, shape, or form. Heck, I’ve just put Dude, Where’s My Car? next to Fago. And it deserves its title.