Some movies you just can't turn off

I was in self-imposed exile from the living room the other day. My wife and daughter were watching some movie which was built around the premise that Heather Locklear couldn’t get a date.
I went back into bedroom to fold the laundry that had been piling up on the bed and see what was on the TV back there. That’s how Stacy and I divvy up the laundry. The kids and I pull all the dirty clothes out and pile them in front of the laundry room. Stacy divides it all into piles of appropriate size and color and pushes it through the system. I pull it out of the dryer and pile it on the bed where I eventually fold and hang it up.
The kids’ clean laundry gets loaded back into the hamper the dirt laundry came down stairs in and they put it away. Well, Max puts his away. Madison lives out of the hamper for a week before the process starts over again the following weekend.
Anyway, like any guy with full control of the remote control, I couldn’t decide on what to watch until I’d checked every channel – and we get them all. So I surfed through and couple of times before finding what I was looking for, even though I didn’t know it.
“A Few Good Men.” This is one of a long list of movies that once it comes on I have to watch it all the way to the end. I can’t turn it off until Jack Nicholson tells Tom Cruise that he (Cruise) can’t handle the truth.
I sat folding laundry on a Sunday afternoon and watched the movie build toward the familiar conclusion. And as I watched I asked myself why I was watching. I must have seen all or part of this movie 25 times. Yet there was nothing I’d rather be watching.
I started thinking about all the movies I’ll watch even though I’ve seen them all many times. It’s sort of a couch-potato Oscars. I came to a couple of conclusions. First, the movies that I watch even though I’ve seen them many times fall into three basic categories: good movies, bad movies and comedies.
The good movie list includes, but is not limited to, “A Few Good Men,” “The Shawshank Redemption,” “The Usual Suspects,” “The Hunt for Red October,” “Silverado” and, even though it’s a little before my time, “The Dirty Dozen.”
These are all great movies. I’ve seen them all many times, but I still can’t turn them off until Nicholson admits he ordered the code red, Morgan Freeman shows up on the beach in Mexico or Kevin Spacey’s limp goes away and we find out he’s Keyser Soze.
The comedy list is familiar to anyone my age. “Animal House,” “Stripes,” “Fletch,” “Monty Python & the Holy Grail,” “Blazing Saddles” and, of course, “Caddyshack.”
I find it interesting, or at least telling, that most of the comedies are about five to 10 years older than most of the dramas. I’m sure there were good dramas made when I was in high school and college, but they didn’t burrow into my brain the way the comedies did. The dramas all came along after I graduated and became, for lack of a better word, and adult.
All of that is somewhat understandable. It’s the bad movie list that concerns me, at least a little. We’re not talking about Ed Wood bad here, although some of them are close. But these are movies that don’t belong on the same list with Shawshank and “Silverado.”
This list includes a brief plot synopsis since theses movies aren’t as well known as the others. “No Escape,” Ray Liotta is sent to island prison to fend for himself and battle cartoonish bad guys. He meets svengali-like fellow prisoner dying of cancer played by Lance Henriksen.
“Next of Kin,” Patrick Swayze is the middle of three Kentucky brothers who moves to Chicago, marries Helen Hunt and becomes a cop. The younger brother follows him to the big city and is murdered. The older brother, played by, I’m not kidding, Liam Neeson, comes to the city to take on the mob and avenge the younger brother. The hillbillies outsmart the mob.
“Roadhouse,” Swayze is the hired as the bouncer in a bar in a town controlled by Ben Gazarra, who’s determined to run the bar out of business. Sam Elliot is super cool as the Yoda of bouncers, Gazarra chews up scenery and Swayze gets to take his shirt off a lot. This is the Godfather of bad movies.
But my personal favorite on the bad movie list is “The Quick and the Dead.” This has to be the worst movie ever made with five Academy Award nominated actors, three of who actually won (but not for this movie).
Sharon Stone plays a mysterious female gunfighter in a quick-draw tournament being run by Gene Hackman who is a caricature of every western bad guy ever put on film. It’s the bad guy he played in “Unforgiven” times five. Also entered in the tournament are Russell Crowe and Leonardo DiCaprio. Rounding out the list of Oscar nominees is Gary Senise as Stone’s father. We see him only in flashbacks and it turns out that Gene Hackman didn’t kill him; he forced Stone to do it.
It’s a cinematic train wreck and when it’s on I can’t change the channel or go to bed before Stone gets her revenge and blows a hole in Hackman that you can see in his shadow. Why is that? It’s bad, I know how it ends and still I watch.
The second thing that I know about my Couch-Potato Oscars list is that it’s very different that my wife’s. Most guys’ lists are going to be different than most women’s. Stacy’s includes “Mystic Pizza” and “Say Anything.” It doesn’t include the movie where Heather Locklear can’t find a man. She’ll only watch that one once.