Read this in a Kubrick FAQ:
Kubrick grew up on the Grand Concourse and 196th Street in the Bronx, attending Taft High School. His love of film began at an early age he would go to Loew's Paradise and R.K.O. Fordham twice a week to view the double features. He would later say of this experience: "One of the important things about seeing run-of-the-mill Hollywood films eight times a week was that many of them were so bad [...] Without even beginning to understand what the problems of making films were, I was taken with the impression that I could not do a film any worse than the ones I was seeing. I also felt I could, in fact, do them a lot better."
Now when you pick films to see - will you allow yourself to see the crap and dross because it makes you a better film viewer?
I wish I still had the time to do what I used to do (and I wish there was still such a thing as a $1 or $2 theater). When I was in grad school there was an 8-screen dollar theater near where I lived. When I had some time on the way home from school or in the evening, I would go there and simply buy a ticket to the next movie showing. I did see a lot of crap this way, but I also stumbled across movies I'd probably never have seen otherwise (like
Candyman that we were talking about on another thread).
Now it feels like my time is so tight that I have to plan an exact show to go see and decide ahead of time (days ahead of time, often) to see a movie. And there are so many quality movies that I haven't seen, both out and in my home via DVDs I own but haven't watched, Netflix DVDs to watch, and stuff available on streaming Netflix at any time, that it doesn't seem justifiable to travel to a movie theater and spend a minimum of $5.00 (if I go to the first matinee of the day before noon) to see something that might utterly suck. When I was spending a $1.00 or $2.00 it didn't bother me to walk out of a movie partway through and into another one that was half over, or just go home and try again another day.
Now...when I can stream Kurosawa's stuff on Netflix, how can I justify going to see Couples Therapy or Armored?