In which I like many movies, and they are all cool.

As with TV shows, I feel that if I watch it, it must be cool, but I know my kids don't agree with that at all. They have spent some happy hours mocking my favorite movies, with special attention to anything by Robert Altman.

My friend Axel, from work, is the movie guru. He can give you the year of release and the director and leading actors in almost any movie you ask him about. He owns a large library of movies, and has loaned me quite a few.

When I watched movies, the kids got so they could recognize Axel's influence, and they thought he had terrible taste. I told them they wre getting an education in film that they would appreciate later, and assured them that I was doing them a favor, really.

When Rachel was younger, we had a fun activity we called a "Crapfest", in which we would go to the movie rental store on a weekend night and rent anything that looked the slightest bit like it might be ok, even if we suspected it would be terrible. We would rent a movie based on who was in it, like Steve Zahn (who we both love and it's too bad he can't pick a decent script), or based on a review on an obscure film website, or just the blurb on the back of the box.

We had rules, like if the movie had a member of the Friends cast in it, we knew it was going to be crap, but sometimes we rented them anyway. Unless it had David Schwimmer in it, then we knew there was no hope at all. (The only exception to the Friends rule ever was The Good Girl.)

Another rule was that if it said on the box that the movie was "hilarious", we wouldn't touch it. Hilarious almost always means that it is stupid and/or slapstick, and I hate both of those things.

One memorable weekend, we accidently struck gold - three of the four movies we rented that weekend were wonderful! That never happened again, but we have seen lots of movies that we enjoyed, but we would never have rented them if we hadn't been having a crapfest.

There is one movie that I am famous among my family for loving and making each of them watch with me, insisting it is part of their film education. I won't even tell you the title of it, but when I ask them what movie I like that is uncool, each of them will tell me the same thing. (I just called Rachel and asked her, and she said it right off!)