There’s a phrase among some of my oldest friends having to do with your non-Hollywood, more esoteric type films — plus basically anything with subtitles. They’ve come to be known as “Mikey movies.” We’re talking flicks like, “The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai (above photo),” “Death Race 2000” and “Swamp Thing” on the wild/goofier side, to “King of Hearts,” ”Cinema Paradiso,” “Il Postino,” ”Amelie,” and Kieslowski’s Three Colors Trilogy on the gentler/deeper, more humane side.

I say this as a disclaimer of sorts so that when I tell you that it was hard for me to sit through last night’s showing of “Vactionland” and “Live Free or Die” at The Music Hall, you’ll at least know that I’ve got an open mind.

I wanted to like these movies, and maybe even would have had they been flipped. I’m really not sure what “Vacationland” was about, and I think that’s partly due to its extremely slow pacing — pacing which left me ample room to talk to myself inside my head. (Not a good thing in my book — at least when we’re talkin’ movies.) Had I first seen the more quick-paced “Live Free or Die,” which had some genuinely humorous moments, perhaps I would have been better prepared for “Vacationland.”

Honestly though, Slaid Cleaves song “Live Free or Die,” about a New Hampshire kid who “steals the blue lights off a cruiser at the Dunkin’ Donuts parking lot,” who then goes on the charm the judge into setting him free, will always conjure up a better mental movie in my head than what I saw last night.

I know, I know, I should be more understanding. It’s hard to make a movie, a helluva lot harder than I can rightly imagine, I suspect. And again, who am I to judge? Well, if you’re reading this and you disagree, then by all means, chime in and tell me what I missed.

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