Image courtesy of Gibsonsgolfer. Licensed under CC BY SA 2.0.

I occasionally joke that I don’t watch movies. There’s some grain of truth in it—I much prefer TV, if given control of the Netflix account—but just this week I saw two separate films in theaters, and another a few weeks before that. The issue is that the movies that I pay an unholy amount of money to see are not just a little bit embarrassing to disclose.

I haven’t seen a single serious film this year, but I have managed to see Frozen, The Lego Movie, and (most camp-fabulously) Vampire Academy. The first two made me cry. For all that I give off the impression of being a terrible snob, I delight in some particular campy-awful aspects of pop culture. I bored a coworker half to death with my Feelings* About Teen Vampires the other day, and then managed to fail to get a Big Lebowski joke***.

Y’all, I am failing hard at my East Coast Private Liberal Arts College snobbery.

(Maybe it’s because I went to a Methodist school. They’re so earnestly nice, guys. So nice.)

The fun part about all of these films has been seeing the audiences. I know who I’m going to get when I see the most recent Hobbit film, or Iron Man, or some soft-focus Instagram ad for growing up as a lost boy in the 1970’s. Those are certainly My People.

But these films are full of children! And it is great fun to watch them watch a film. The Lego Movie had quite a bit of legitimately funny writing in it, which the adults in the theatre laughed at. But the kids were super into watching the main character fall down long passages and whack into walls in defiance of all physics. This was a hit with the 4-8 crowd in our theatre. In Frozen, the kids were entranced by the talking snowman character. I wasn’t into either, but then again I’m 15 years older than the target demographic, so I really have leg to stand on.

So, I do watch movies. They’re just mostly very, very silly. I’ll just balance it out with a Spotify play history full of African jazz and Eliott Smith (while keeping Ke$ha to private play mode).

* Which are: Vampire Academy has at its core a great female friendship, and in all of its complete bonkersosity (and it is legion!) does manage to capture a weird intensity of high school closeness while still being totally okay that a high school student is trying to bang her hot hand-to-hand combat** teacher. A+, everyone should watch it drunk on their very own Couch of Plausible Deniability.

** Yes, really. He’s Russian.

*** All I know about this film is that it involves White Russians, and certain categories of Dudes Who Used to Be Philosophy Majors think I’m awful for not having seen it and will occasionally alert me to this.