“It’s life’s simple pleasures that count.” Somewhere along the line, my cynical mind decided that this statement was both patently false and inherently misleading.

I realized this following a screening of Ratatouille. I was in a room full of smiling people, each discussing the novelty of a talking rat.

“Did you see that part where the rat was talking and he shouldn’t have been because he’s a rat, and rats don’t talk?”

“How about that part where we found out that the title was a pun because the main character is a rat who cooks and also because ratatouille is a traditional French ProvenÁal stewed vegetable dish?”

Their little praise party lasted for about five minutes, and grumpy old me sat in the corner and thought about how I could have better spent the last two hours of my life. I didn’t like the movie. I didn’t like the fact that it was about a rat who could talk. The best praise I could possibly offer was that Ratatouille wasn’t an exact copy of Stuart Little, given that Stuart was a mouse. The reviews hailed it as “heartwarming” and “uplifting.” But when Ratatouille ended, my heart was as cold, if not colder, than it had been when the movie started.

And it got me thinking: my heart has never been warmed by a movie. It would take one hell of a metaphorical heart microwave to bring it to the status of barely lukewarm.

It’s because I won’t, and can’t, let a movie do that to me.

In fact, I realized, I can’t let a movie do anything to me that I don’t want it to do. I have to enjoy a movie on my own terms. And this always amounts to a sort of ironic appreciation.

There are two ways to appreciate both life and movies: you can laugh with them or laugh at them. And because I’m so smarmy, I’m incapable of the former. I have to enjoy something at its own expense.

As a consequence, if a movie sets out to do something, I can’t accept it. Horror movies can’t and shouldn’t be scary, action movies shouldn’t inspire me to blow things up, and comedy movies, the one category I might appreciate on its own terms, aren’t as good as funny horror movies.

And I’m fairly confident it’s not just me. A sizable post-modern subset of our generation is incapable of any kind of genuine appreciation for something. Any enjoyment we obtain from public media has to reflect well upon ourselves. As a sort of narcissism, laughing at people (formerly known as bullying) has become a high art form.

Add to this mix YouTube. Here we find an entire Web site dedicated to videos we mock, deride and laugh at. A video can still be funny in itself, but the best kind of YouTube clip is the kind in which the presenter is having an unintended effect on his/her audience. And because of virtual distance, it has become easier to mock without consequences. Anyone who has ever read the eloquently phrased comments below a YouTube video knows all about this.

The post-modern era has made a mockery of intention. You can’t set out to do anything anymore because everyone who enjoys your movie will be doing so for a different reason.

The best you can do is actually set out to do the opposite. The most heart-warming movie I have ever seen is "Requiem for a Dream," which set out to be one of the most depressing movies ever made.

I could set out here to mock my own attitude, but I think it makes for its own mockery. Which itself is one of the greatest assets of this way of thinking: I don’t have to answer for anything.

"Ratatouille," you failed because I couldn’t accept you on any other terms than those you specified. And, ultimately, you failed because our generation is too cynical to enjoy life’s simplest pleasures, unless they’re wrought at someone else’s expense.