I work on the basic principle that novels and films are always valid if the person or people for whom they were created enjoy them. I’m not a fan of self-indulgence on the part of writers but I try never to criticise a genre because it isn’t for me, because there may be others who derive much more pleasure than I do from a film or a book and I’m simply not target audience.

My own taste in films is fairly broad. My favourite films range from Everything is Illuminated to In Bruges, from Withnail and I to Stuart: A Life Backwards, from Jean de Florette to Korkoro. I wouldn’t expect others to like the same films as I do. But, partly because I’m a writer and partly because I’m inquisitive, I like to watch things from other genres I might not necessarily like myself in order to expand how I view the world, although I do try to approach them positively and supportively.

Recently, because it was raining and I was on a running machine for a long time, I watched a few daytime romance films on television. I’m not sure what I expected but I was struck by the sameness of them all. The main protagonists were all women, mostly in their twenties, although one character was approaching forty and a single mum. The women were all modern, long haired, attractive, middle-class slim Caucasians, all heterosexual, with mostly professional jobs: actor, writer, film maker, editor, business woman, model, PhD, wedding planner, cup-cake maker. They had few defining characteristics either in terms of their personalities or their appearances: no-one had bright red hair, spectacles, Asperger’s Syndrome, a wheelchair, OCD, shyness. They all dressed uniformly smartly, drove tidy cars, lived in nice houses and had friends. None of them was, in fact, like me or anyone I know. The one thing the women had in common was a failed romance and the thrust of the storyline was, generally, that they weren’t looking for love so, clearly, the viewer expected them to find it by the end of the film.

The ‘male interest’ was invariably of a similar age, usually a bit older, Caucasian, professional, middle class, smart, etc etc. There were a couple of traits the men had which the women didn’t: a tendency to conceal their emotions, not to admit their feelings, or to be stubborn (in an attractively needy way…) There were no awkward men, thin men, unintelligent men, myopic men, stutterers. Mostly they had thick hair, cleanly parted, and square jaws. There wasn’t a bald man although one had a beard but that was because he was the outdoor type! They were all physically strong, with clearly defined leadership qualities. I found all of them boring.

To accompany the above minimal character differences, the story lines were very similar. The couple met, they didn’t get on well, then they pretended they didn’t get on well to cover their attraction to each other, then they fell out over a mistake or a misunderstanding, then in the final five minutes they admitted that they had feelings for each other. The final shot in every film was a kiss – on a boat, up a mountain, on a veranda, at a wedding – but it was always the final shot. This left me wondering what happened next, after the film: their lives would probably be happily predictable and bland. There was a tangible lack of passion, lust or genuinely deep feelings. It was as if life has to be sanitised within the boundaries of an underexplored romance story. It wasn’t for me.

So my most recent film exploration has been a foray into (sort of) action movies, ones with a bit of bloodshed and violence, which is, I suppose, the other side of the romance coin. Many of the storylines are equally predictable. Male heroes in this broad genre are invariably in charge, fearless Alpha males, all demanding a high status, strong and brave in the face of all types of danger. Women’s roles range from the kick-ass sidekick to the needy damsel or the corpse.

To a certain extent, the success of the movie depends on main character and plot. Based on this, for me, all films featuring Steven Seagal aren’t worth pursuing, due to the egocentricity of his roles and the marginalisation of all female characters.

One film I enjoyed was Kingsman: The Golden Circle, which is one of those rare second films that is as good as the first one. Due to a lively script, clever humour and a sparky character played by Taron Egerton, it is saved from being simply a parody, and some of the action scenes are well staged and funny. The cameo from Elton John is hilarious.

Even better is Spike Lee’s BlacKKKlansman, which has a clearly political motive and achieves everything it intends to spectacularly and in a very moving way. It is violent, intelligent, scary in places, but based on real people in the real world and it is very cleverly contrived.

Bad Times at the El Royale was a strange film, a little Noir and very violent in the Tarantino style. At the beginning, I found it slow, but it developed into a more interesting film and by the end I thought I’d enjoyed it, as it was explosive and surprising. It was an example of a film you have to embrace from the outset, to make excuses for tropes and stereotypes as it goes along and invest in the characters and storyline: in short, I had to cut it some slack. It is long and indulgent but, by sticking with it, I managed to get something positive from watching it.

Another film in the category of ‘move the boundaries of your expectations before you start to watch’ is Venom. The film would have been silly but for Tom Hardy who managed to create the title role with sensitivity and quirky humour. He made it watchable in the sense that the viewer sympathised with his vulnerable and fair-minded character and therefore tolerated the screeching cartoon figure who yelled in his ear. I’m not sure if I’d watch a sequel, though.

Finally, I branched into fantasy/ action and watched Aquaman. I’m not sure what I was expecting, but it was interesting. The film had a thin storyline with strong female roles who stood persuasively behind their hero. Aquaman himself was a hybrid between Atlantan demi-god and American goofball. Tenuous links to Camelot were a bit obvious – his name was Arthur; he pulled out the trident that no-one had managed to pull before. Multilingual, with a classical home-education derived from his human father the lighthouse keeper, the character of Aquaman didn’t quite work for me, although the ‘save the planet’ references were very pertinent. The greatest success of this film was the huge number of people who must have been employed to create the impressive CGI. I’m a sucker for all that clever animation stuff and, watched in the cinema, the fragmented story line and token characters wouldn’t matter: the film was a spectacular triumph of scenery, colour and action.

It’s an interesting exercise, trying different genres one mightn’t be normally inclined to watch. I’ve done this with war films, Hitchcock, horror, western, Noir, old movies, fantasy and epics. I’m not sure where to go next. Science Fiction is often beyond my comprehension and I can’t sit through a whole film of Chicago or Wayne’s World. Right: historical it is then.