...much like the title of this week’s Musing on Movies, there are great expectations set on everything. On the writer of this blog by it’s readers, on you by your family, or your employer, or yourself. Sometimes we meet those, sometimes we beat them, and sometimes... we don’t.

Just a little something to think about while you read on.

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**Great Expectations**

"Sydney, the man is the leader of the free world. He's brilliant, funny, handsome. He's an above-average dancer. Isn't it possible our standards are just a tad high?"
~~The American President

I don't know about you, but I am often more disappointed in a movie that should have been good and wasn't, than I am in films that were only okay but I didn't expect them to be great. What movies did you have high hopes for but were disappointed when you actually saw the film? (We'll discuss films that exceeded expectations another week.)

Oh, so many movies could answer this question. ‘Willow’, ‘Legend’, ‘The Corpse Bride’ (although that was very good)… I had rather high hopes for ‘Eyes Wide Shut’, but my eyes shut in sleep during that movie. ‘Finding Neverland’ seemed like a home run for me, but I ended up turning it off halfway through, bored out of my skull. Maybe I wasn’t in the right mood for that one.

I held great promise for ‘Clerks’ and ‘Pompatus of Love’ – hated them both. They’re famous for the turned them off in a certain number of minutes award – 20 minutes for ‘Clerks’, and 4 minutes 18 seconds for ‘Pompatus of Love’. Shame, because I like Jon Cryer, but ‘Love’ wasn’t worth sitting through. Really.

It’s like someone once said about the movie ‘Starship Troopers’ – you can’t get those two hours of your life back. I like making the correlation to that of “Life’s too short to waste it watching a bad movie” – I’d much rather waste those two hours watching good cinema.

Anyway, most movies I actually like… it’s a rare one that disappoints me, but it seems that I’m getting more critical as I get older and as I get exposed to more and more independent cinema which can be stunningly beautiful and terrible at the same time. Two such examples come from Sundance last year. ‘This Charming Girl’ and ‘High School Record’ held such interesting promise, and they were two of the worst things that I’ve ever seen. ‘High School Record’ – complete waste of celluloid. I think most of the audience was lost within minutes in that movie. DH and I… ugh. We were telling lots of people not to bother when they asked how it was. My corollary was to go see it, because maybe you *would* like it, it wasn’t my cup of tea, but if you don’t then it’s a perfect example of how bad a Sundance movie could get.

And then we saw ‘This Charming Girl’ – I really wanted to love that movie. I really wanted it to be good. And it just wasn’t. It was too artistic, too obtuse. Too depressing and bizarre and repetitive. And if just a few things had changed, then it would have been a truly excellent film. Ah well, it’s the director’s vision, right?

Anyway, there’s a few examples of things that I expected to be good, or held great promise, and truly disappointed me. I know that there are more, I just can’t think of them at the moment.