I’ve been a movie lover all my life.  Since I was a kid I’ve been fascinated with the classics from the Golden Age.  (Ask my friends.  It’s always Bette Davis this or Joan Crawford that.  They don’t know what I’m talking about half the time.)  But I’m not stuck in the studio days.  I keep finding new films that move me or make me laugh my head off or touch me in some unexpected way.  

Like a lot of movie buffs, part of my enjoyment is in sharing them.  For instance, a few years ago – quite a few, in fact – I got to introduce a friend who had written off all black and white films as old and boring and irrelevant to the world of pre-1960 cinema.  I got a kick out of watching her experience All About Eve, The Philadelphia Story and Sunset Boulevard and realize they might be old, but they are never boring.

Once she turned to me in the middle of All About Eve and asked, “Am I supposed to get all of this?”

“No!  That’s the cool part,” I told her.  “You can watch it over and over and get something new every time.”

A little more recently, I was out for drinks with some twenty- and thirty-something friends and their friends.  I ordered a martini with a twist and, because it’s what I do, said, “Auntie Mame says olives take up too much room in such a small glass.”

I expected it to go into the now massive file of “weird things Chris says,” but one of the guys (who’d been pretty detached up to that point) suddenly lit up.  “I LOVE that movie!” he said.  In a nanosecond we were best friends and Auntie Mame was the theme of the rest of the night.

So last week when my friend Josh told me that I was flat out not allowed to see The Heat, Sandra Bullock and Melissa McCarthy’s new buddy pic, without him, I knew it was another one of those “sharing a great movie” moments.  For him at least.  For me?  Not so much.

I went in with high expectations.  First off, I love Sandra and Melissa.  I hadn’t read a review, but I’d heard generally good things and Josh could not stop raving about it.  “Wear a diaper,” he warned me.  “You’ll laugh that hard.”

No diaper was necessary.

I didn’t hate it.  Actually, it wasn’t bad.  I didn’t want my money back and I wasn’t angry that I’d spent the time.  It was your formula oil-meets-water action comedy.  Sandra’s an uptight cocaine and munitions-hunting savant of an FBI agent who is generally hated by her fellow agents.  Melissa’s a take-no-prisoners, I-play-by-my-own-rules badass Boston cop who’s generally feared by the rest of the force.  They meet, they hate each other, they have to work together, they learn to respect each other.  And the rest is Hollywood cookie-cutter history.  It had its moments, but I didn’t find any of them hysterical.

That’s a particularly bad thing when you’re sitting in a theater next to someone who did need a diaper, who wants you to need a diaper and who you know is monitoring your every response to see if you’re having as good a time as he did.

I felt so bad.  I wanted to laugh.  I always want to laugh.  I’m always ready to laugh.  By the middle of the movie I was praying for something really funny to happen.  I know what it’s like to build a movie up to a friend and have them simply not get it when I showed it to them.

When the lights came up there was no denying the truth.  If you sit through a two-hour comedy without laughing even total strangers know you didn’t like it.

“So what’d you think?” Josh asked, knowing the answer.

An unconvincing “It was cute” was all I could manage in return, feeling the full weight of the guilt my Catholic mother had ingrained in me.

We discussed neither The Heat nor the diaper on the drive home..