No Accounting For Tastes

My husband and I have a running battle over the film we will choose to watch through out television monitor after dinner most evenings.  He wants action film, science fiction film, I want dramas involving human reactions to each other.  Last night we watched "Hotel Rawanda" which depicted a truly horrendous human event, I kept running scenes from the Holocaust through my head, and deploring how the world yet again turned a blind eye to the massacre.  But I could not become engaged in the film, I did not find the development of the Don Cheadle character rich enough neither as he evolved into the savior of the refugees nor in his relationship with his wife; in the first instance his tendency to make nice as befits a luxury hotel manager motivates his humanitarian tendencies--let's keep things neat, quiet, and nice; and as a husband he was so strikingly like a modernized European or American as was the wife that that oddity was a character treat needing exploiting for me.  In sum the mass murder was horrendous, the failure of the UN and the west ghastly, the hotel manager and those who assisted him were heroic.  I didn't need the exposition in a two hour movie.  The night before we watched the Ivory-Merchant "Heat and Dust" in which a contemporary English woman's search for her ancestor's life in India is interwoven with the drama of that woman's entering as a bride into the life of the British colonials, her gradual rejection of it, and her surrender to the local Nawab, a shocking event in the rigid structured society of that time.  The film which drove my husband mad features, first of all, incredibly beautiful interiors and gorgeous clothing, then a very slow development of the heroine's revolt against her life in India, her gradual enchantment the Nawab, all of it couched in terms of personal beauty as both these actors are seductive and glorious.  The psychological reaction to everyone party to this growing attraction is well developed as is the parallel experience of the granddaughter in her Indian exploration of a historical fact and her own inner growth and development.  For me the story was interesting, although none of these people "mattered" in any way on either the world's stage or the smaller place of a little kingdom in India.  My husband claims I always like to look at movies featuring upper class people. I have to admit I like the refinements, details, and subtleties of conventional repressive manners among the so called upper classes, I like to watch the way they play out.  On the other hand, proof that I am not the star fucker he insists I am, I can scarcely endure that soap opera "Downton Abbey," so many gauche, vulgar, obvious behaviors coupled with such lack of imagination, and downright stupidity.  And for all his man of the people stance, he is glued to "Downton Abbey."  Curious