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Sloper wrote:I feel incredibly nervous when watching favourite films with friends, to the point where I blush heavily and get sweaty palms. The worst thing is they're often too polite to say what they really think, especially after I've hyped the film to the skies. What I really need to do is hook them up to a lie detector.

One of the surprisingly handy things about being married to someone who isn't a film buff in any way, shape or form is that she'll always say exactly what she thinks - she has no qualms about slaughtering sacred cows because the chances are she wasn't aware that they were sacred in the first place. My kids are similar, which is why it's so great when they really love something high-quality by Michel Ocelot or Hayao Miyazaki - I know it's entirely genuine, and not because they've bought into any hype.

Does anyone else do the thing of pre-emptively criticising the film? As in "this one is a bit weird/the opening is quite slow but it picks up/be warned, the dubbing is pretty awful/the acting style takes some getting used to/it's what you might call 'stylised'/try not to be put off by the intertitles", all of which translate to "just make the sodding effort and enjoy it".

I'll do it if I think it's necessary - for instance, when I showed Guy Maddin's Careful to my wife I said something like "yes, it really does look like this all the way through, and if you hate the first five minutes you might as well give up then". (She loved it, as it turned out).

But with my regular filmgoing companion I normally don't bother - I know her tastes and knowledge well enough for me not to need to make any excuses, so all I need to do is come up with a capsule description that I know will push the right buttons. For instance, a rare screening of Ali Khamraev's The Seventh Bullet (1972) became "Fancy an Uzbek spaghetti western?", to which I suspect most people would reply "you what?", but hers was "wow!".

That sounds like a lot of effort, vs. "Hey, you wanna do your yoga or play your instrument [or whatever] while I watch this movie? Awesome. See ya in 104 minutes. Could you close that door?"

MichaelB wrote:One of the surprisingly handy things about being married to someone who isn't a film buff in any way, shape or form is that she'll always say exactly what she thinks - she has no qualms about slaughtering sacred cows because the chances are she wasn't aware that they were sacred in the first place.

My wife's the same way; when we were first going out, she nodded politely at various classics, but it wasn't long before she was honing her (admittedly very funny) Carl Dreyer 'once more but slower and with less feeling' routine. We generally take the Perkins Cobb approach now.

We had an odd experience the other day when, sitting in a manky hotel room, I was watching The Outlaw and His Wife in silence on my laptop, while she peered at It's a Wonderful Life on her ipod (with headphones in), occasionally glancing over at my screen. As far as she's concerned, the climactic falling-out between Kari and Halla in their icy hovel was conducted to the tune of 'Buffalo Gal won't you come out tonight', and Kari was promising to lasso the moon for Halla, and telling her how the moonbeams would shoot out of her fingers.

I used to force my friends to watch my favourites when they were visiting, always worrying whether they would like or not, and usually explaining some of the films qualities after the movie, or explaining hard plot points during. However I have stopped that approach, since I felt it wasnt much fun for either me or and maybe not my visitor (being lectured or being expected to love something).

Now the approach is to tailor movies for each of my friends, and always something that I havent seen. So when I watch movies with my twin (whos not a cinephile), its usually noir/action/war/comedy. Another friend friend its scifi/manga/docs, another friend its italian/epics/james bondish. It may sound crazy, but I actually stack up movies that I havent seen that I think are friends-friendly.

I never watch unseen films with friends unless we're going to the movies or something, because I feel that if I show a film, that's an endorsement from me and I don't want to endorse a film that ends up sucking.

Of course, it's always good to cater your choices to your friend but sometimes you can lose perspective. I don't know what I was thinking, for instance, when I decided that the first Hitchcock film my ex should see should be I Confess?!

I only have one friend who is into cinema the way I am, so it does make that endorsement factor a little less problematic, as 90% of the time he is as clued up or clueless about the quality of the film we have put on as I am. But on the whole, I need to see a film alone before I share a viewing, if only so I don't get distracted and ruin an experience that could have been so much more if I were focused.

I'm actually becoming something of a net-nanny-esque person as more and more subversive and daring films find DVD releases. My mum and my brother's girlfriend are pretty open to new experiences (although the viewing can be very hit or miss - there really is no way to tell) and they really aren't prudish or squeemish on the whole, but I can't help but sit back and wonder everytime I pick up a film or two to lend them, if there is anything overly explicit or horrific in it. Saying that, my mum is in possession of my Come and See DVD at the moment, but I have given her strong warnings. I also nanny over what my other friends may think if they ever were to see some of the films I have. They are, on the whole, music / pub / band / pub people and restricted to films that have Vince Vaughn, Owen Wilson and bare boobs, and I can't see them getting their heads around or past aesthetic details, with films such as Triumph of the Will, Salo, Lucile Hadzihalilovic's Innocence, In the Realm of the Senses or to be honest, 80% of my collection that'd suggest to them i'm both arrogant and a snob (or in the cases of the films listed above, a nazi, a deviant, a paedophile and a pervert). I lent one such friend Irriversible (because he asked if I had it) and I don't think he's yet forgiven me. I just steer them clear of troublesome waters now whenever they are looking over my films.

After responding to domino's post yesterday, I had to share last night's baffling film request:
"I want to see something like the one with the labrador in it [i.e. Le Monde vivant - fortunately I know this code]"

This had me clutching at straws (Rivette, early Carax), and we ended up going for the 'wild card' option (The Arabian Nights).

Sloper wrote:Does anyone else do the thing of pre-emptively criticising the film? As in "this one is a bit weird/the opening is quite slow but it picks up/be warned, the dubbing is pretty awful/the acting style takes some getting used to/it's what you might call 'stylised'/try not to be put off by the intertitles", all of which translate to "just make the sodding effort and enjoy it".

I've stopped hyping films entirely before I watch them. I'll say something like "I don't want to hype this film up too much, but I do really like it" or something like that. Or, I'll mention really bad/unenjoyable aspects of a film before showing them.

Something I've found myself doing when watching films with others is assume that they hate the film, and then I try to figure out what would make them hate it. This is, actually, the best method I have of criticizing films, since when I watch a movie on my own I find myself much less active in my viewing than when I'm with others.

For example, I run the screening club at my university, and we had a screening of Stalker in which half the people walked out at the end of disc 1. I spent the entire film figuring out every little flaw with the movie, even though I love it and would easily rank it in a top 10 overall films. It was a strange experience, since it was the first time I realized I was doing this when I watched a film with others.