Both I (M19) and my older sibling (NB21) are big fans of movies. We both grew up with a shared love of the cinema and as a result grew up to have a deep love of the art of filmmaking. Our tastes diverged around high school and we kind of naturally grew distant at the same time, but we would still bond over that shared love. Now I’m in college and they live at home with my mom, and we don’t talk super often. I got a job at a movie theater last summer and got to see as many movies as I wanted for free, so when I moved back to college over the school year I kept up my hobby with an AMC stubs membership. I like to go to the movies between 1 and 3 times a week just to keep up with what’s coming out and strengthen my skills with media criticism.
I consider my taste medium levels of out there because most of the movies I end up liking are somewhat obscure and artsy. Not so obscure that they don’t hit theaters, but still somewhat obscure. I mention this only because my sibling takes great pride in how unknown the movies they watch are. They also watch a great deal more movies than I do. In one month they were able to pack away 80 movies (unemployed). Their most frequented streaming service is Tubi and they frequent EUM (EffedUpMovies). I rag on them a bit for this but it’s all in good fun.
The conflict is that I’ll often text them after seeing a movie and tell them what I think about it because even though our tastes don’t really overlap, we still have that shared interest. Recently however they’ve been giving me recommendations for movies that I frankly have absolutely no interest in seeing. For example, they recently recommended I watch "Spidarlings," which is, as they describe it, a movie about "a lesbian that gets fucked by a spider." They’ve also recommended five hour long splatterpunk films that I just find absolutely unpleasant and probably one of the worst ways I could spend what little free time I have.
Whenever I tell them I probably wont be watching their movie recommendations, they tend to get upset and claim I’m shooting down their bids for connection. They’re making all of these recommendations in response to the movies I see, asserting how much better their taste in film is. Recently in response to my poor review of Wicked 2, they gave me a slew of unappealing recommendations and said I was "submitting \[myself\] to the mainstream."
They seem to have an odd sense of superiority when it comes to their taste in films. To be clear I enjoy a great deal of foreign movies, but they act as if a movie being foreign automatically makes it better. To them, obscurity might as well be as important as cinematography or score.
My problem here is that the only way to appease them, to my understanding, is to put myself through a curated selection of the world’s most unpleasant and distressing movies and act like I don’t hate them. I should probably just stop talking to them about the movies I see. It’s just not fun anymore.
NTA. Tastes are idiosyncratic. Your sibling seems very uncompromising and perhaps should find something else to talk about with you if she wants to feel a connection, as it were.
NTA. “I should probably just stop talking to them about the movies I see. It’s just not fun anymore.” Sounds like a plan.
My siblings and I seldom like the same kinds of movies. Add my aunt and she does not like what any of us watch. You like your movies, they like theirs. Their tastes are not any better or worse than yours. Same with music.
Not the asshole. My parents do the same thing and it’s dreadful.
NTA.
You simply don’t have that in common. Stop talking about that subject.
NTA It seems they treat a hobby like some kind of competition – a way to feel superior to you. Berating you for watching a mainstream movie is laughably stupid. It’s like saying, “Oh no, you ate pizza! Shame on you! A real foodie would eat surströmming only!”
A true gourmet – or a true movie lover – usually has diverse taste. Just saying.[](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surstr%C3%B6mming)
What really kills me is that I was talking about why I didn’t like the movie when they said that to me, lol.
Put them on review diet)
NTA. It sounds like they’re trying to recommend things that have some kind of cachet to have watched rather than things they enjoyed. It might be worth asking for, like, favorite movie of the last month (under two hours) if you want to try a structured way of answering their ‘bid for connection’? But NTA if you don’t, either. You can connect about other stuff.
But also if you do find yourself with a huge chunk of time to kill, I highly recommend Jodhaa Akbar. It features two of the prettiest people on the planet (Aishwarya Rai and Hrithik Roshan) in a serious historical movie about a crucial piece of Indian history that consulted hundreds of experts because the core message is religious tolerance. Beautifully costumed and dreamily scored, and they managed to incorporate a dance scene to entwine with and honor modern Bollywood without it being out of place. It clocks in at three and a half hours. It’s a fascinating counterpoint to a movie they did two years before, Dhoom 2 (you do not need to have seen the first), which is a delirious Bollywood action romp.
Actually, stuff like that might be a fun way to connect? Just, picking specific actors and watching their old stuff. Like Ryan Reynolds did a movie several years ago called Safe House and The Hitman’s Bodyguard is really obviously him revisiting the same premise but he’s got the money now so he’s having a lot of fun instead of being super serious. And then sibling can go whole hog on the deep cuts. Like, the guy who voiced the demon king in K-pop Demon Hunters is a very serious and accomplished Korean actor, but you don’t have time for 24 hours of fraught Korean history in the k-drama Mr. Sunshine, but they might, and can tell you what they thought.
Just stop all the movie chat between you. You have different tastes, period. Move on, find some other topic of interest to share and enjoy the movies you see on your own.
NTA
The Etiquette is when you recommend something, you understand the person might not watch it, but if they do, they know they can chat about it with you.
Furthermore, most people have enough self awareness to know a film about a lesbian being fucked by a spider is not everyone’s cup of tea and is pretty normal to not want to watch it.
This divide isn’t about you having different tastes in cinema. Plenty of people can talk respectfully about cinema when they have different tastes. It’s about your sibling shitting on your tastes, pushing movies onto you with no self-awareness and then refusing to respect your fair boundaries.
NTA if they were genuinely making bids for connection, they would recommend a movie you might like. They know you’re not interested in watching spider fucking or splatterpunk. They’re trolling you.
It’s got to be tough on them being unemployed and at home while their little brother is out there expanding his horizons. I’d bet that being able to watch so many movies is one of the few advantages their lifestyle has over yours. So it’s understandable that they’d want to affirm their choice and superiority over their brother through teasing – the universal language of siblings.
Anyway enough armchair psychology. Just give em a “no thanks!” and move on with your more interesting life.