My Lousy Intuition

The recent elections in New Hampshire showed the fallibility of pollsters. And like those pollsters, my ability to predict is often lousy. I'm fairly good at political predictions both in terms of office politics and governmental politics. I simply assume that people operate strictly on the basis of self interest never mind their rhetoric. Using the self interest principle usually is good at making predictions on a wide variety of political topics from the actions of a university dean to the actions of Congress.

Where I often fail is at a more personal level. I'll meet someone and my intuition will tell me that this person is a jerk. And eventually I'll find out that I'm quite wrong. The opposite is true as well. I'm a horrible judge of character based on first impressions. My gut is good at judging food not people.

And then there are my predictions as to art. For example, I'm not really a person who likes movies - mostly I view them as "books for dummies" - but there are exceptions. It's my ability to predict those exceptions that is lousy. I've seen three movies recently and my intuition was wrong on every one of them.

First I went to see the movie Atonement. I wasn't expecting much. The movie is based on a wonderful book by one of the best writers in the English language today, Ian McEwan. When I read McEwan, I find some of his sentences so exquisite that I involuntarily stop for a bit just to savor them. My intuition told me that there was no way a movie could come close to the experience of reading a McEwan novel. The movie was bound to be a book for dummies.

But I was wrong. The movie was well made and intelligently written. It couldn't possibly replicate the wonderful prose of McEwan. Rather it substituted exquisitely precise writing with exquisitely precise cinematography. And what I found out from the movie is that the plot of McEwan's Atonement, unlike many wonderful novels, is good enough to stand on its own. Take away the world class prose and you still have a damn good story.

Score zero for one for my intuition. Usually I try to stay away from dramas like Atonement. It's true that I still don't understand why anyone needed to make a movie out of the thing when there was already a near perfect book. But I probably should go see dramas more often.

Comedy is my thing when it comes to movies. I like a good laugh. And I was expecting a good laugh when it came to Tamara Jenkins' The Savages. Ms. Jenkins wrote and directed another movie, Slums of Beverly Hills, a few years ago that I thought was funny as hell. Based on Ms. Jenkins' experiences growing up, the movie hit very close to home. The character of her brother - a pot smoking, conniver who liked to try out for musicals - was essentially me at 13. There was a scene in that movie where her brother is practicing for an audition in his underwear in front of a mirror. Oh my god. That was me to a T. It had me cackling.

But The Savages didn't have me laughing much at all. It was a dreary kind of thing. The acting was superb - it doesn't get any better than Laura Linney and Phillip Hoffman folks - but the script was flat. The drama was trite. The comedic scenes were predictable. It was very much like a bad Albert Brooks movie. Score zero for two for my intuition.

And now on to zero for three. My sweetie got the movie Hot Fuzz from the library. I'd read positive reviews. But I was convinced that this was not going to be a movie for me. I'm not a fan of cop movies so the idea of a parody of them left me cold. I'm in general not a fan of parodies; they tend to be rather crude. I'd recently seen a very dumb comedy - Superbad - that was so bad and crude that I almost turned it off in the middle and that's what I was expecting with Hot Fuzz.

But it wasn't so. I thought Hot Fuzz was clever and funny as hell. The fact that I didn't know any of the specific cop movies being parodied didn't seem to matter. The movie stood on its own. The dialog was snappy. It went on a bit too long, but it ended up being a very cute buddy movie with a nice little twist at the end.

Given that I'm 0 for 3, maybe I should just pick movies at random. Maybe I should go to the next Spiderman. Um. No.