The Critical Drinker recently put an interesting review of a movie his Dad recommended to him twenty years ago and he finally watched a few weeks ago:

Indian, here, refers to an Indian brand motorcycle. If you didn’t watch the review I linked above, the tl;dw is that it’s the story of Burt Monro who is a New Zealand retired farmer, motorcycle salesman, farmer, and motorcycle racer (he did various things to earn his living) who now, in his sixties, spends much of his time tinkering on his old Indian motorcycle. He dreams of traveling to the Bonneville salt flats and setting a world record, eventually saves up barely enough money to try, goes, and eventually succeeds. (It’s based on a true story.)

In the Drinker’s review, there’s an interesting quote (salty language warning):

The story of a little guy with big dreams given a once-in-a-lifetime shot at glory is the stuff of cinema legend at this point and it’s been done so many times that it’s easy to become cynical about movies like World’s Fastest Indian. What, prey tell, is the angle? You might ask. What makes it stand out from the crowd? How does it subvert the tropes of the genre? The answer, quite simply, is that it doesn’t. And fuck you for asking. Because it doesn’t need to. Because not every movie needs to reinvent the wheel just to get your attention.

This is an interesting point. I think that this is related to the difference between watching movies as a reviewer and watching them as an ordinary human being. Reviewers watch a ton of movies, and moreover they watch them with an eye to evaluating them. That is, they watch the movies for the sake of the movies. Ordinary human beings watch movies for entertainment or enjoyment or to witness art—in short, as a means to something else. We watch movies for the sake of humor, or to have pretend friends for a few hours, to be inspired, to be reminded that happiness is possible, to consider human sadness, for the thrill of romance or the romance of adventure—whatever it is, we watch movies for the things that they depict. If what we want is to be inspired by seeing a man defy the world for the sake of something nobler or even if we just want to see a proud man humbled by being hit in the balls, the things that we want are timeless. Different movies will bring out different aspects of these timeless things, and some will do them better than others. Variation helps us because at times we need different help in contemplating the timeless truths, whether they’re big or small. But the variation is only helpful because the help we need in contemplating the timeless things varies. The variation is not good in itself and variation from what we need at the moment is anti-helpful.

A man who has watched a thousand movies about two a man and a woman falling in love may be desperate to be reminded that there is humor in a man being hit in the crotch with a baseball, but very few of us watch a thousand movies about two people falling in love. We watch however many we need to be reminded of what we wanted to remember, then we get on with life.

So the Critical Drinker is right. Movies don’t need to surprise people who are tired of their genre to be good. They just need to be good at their genre. If a genre has gotten less popular, that means that there will be fewer people who are interested in it, but that’s OK. Sometimes you have to wait twenty years until you’re in the mood for it a movie. The nice thing about movies is that they’ll still be there when you’re ready.