After how suspenseful Sinister was, I'm more interested now to see another recent movie go the tension route. I'm planning on watching the three Insidious movies and The Conjuring (I might also rewatch The Exorcism of Emily Rose, which I remember loving when it came out and which was an early effort from the guy who did Sinister) and I'll also put Paranormal Activity 3 on the list.
Well I didn't like Sinister, so this is all up in the air. For tension though, PA3 is the only horror i can really respect since The Strangers, which I would say it far surpasses on tension.
But some people truly don't get it!
There's a reason film schools exist, there's a reason people take classes and read books. My favorite part about studying film is that it's very intuitive, it's an extension of something that comes natural to all of us: Watching a movie, having thoughts and feelings as a result, and trying to articulate what we thought and felt. But just because something is intuitive, just because something comes natural, doesn't mean it doesn't need to be cultivated, doesn't mean there's no need for education.
I think you've extended to not just a dangerous degree but to a counterproductive degree the democratic nature of opinions. It goes without saying that everyone is welcome to their own opinion, but it should also go without saying that some opinions are stupid. Just as much as it's wrong to reject the claim that Back to the Future is the best movie ever made without considering the reasons behind the claim, it's equally wrong to accept the same claim without considering the reasons.
Another film studies quote, this one from Victor Perkins in Film as Film:
"What any of us wants from the movies is his personal affair. But, although we each assign functions, hence criteria, on our own behalf, our decisions need not be arbitrary [...] we have a duty to ourselves to ensure that our standards are as clear and consistent, as perceptively applied, as we can make them. Individually, we can do no more, but we should do no less."
It should always come down to the specific and individual claim. If someone's opinion of Taxi Driver is that it's bad, the "you didn't get it" claim won't always be valid, but it'll sometimes be valid because sometimes people say stupid shit.
I fundamentally disagree with this. It's really boring to say, but art's inherent subjectivity prevents us from talking about best from a position of intelligence (until we take it into more proper, quantifiable contexts). The more intelligent you claim a statement to be, the dumber it becomes by nature. It's like debating time-travel mechanics intelligently. There are intuitively smarter things to say, but there's an irony there.
Atheists run into a similar wall when talking about morality. We intuitively decide good/bad ideas and behaviors to ward off the self-destructive reality that nihilism makes as much sense as anything else. It's perfectly intelligent to be hedonistic. So as long as the conversation hasn't shifted, and we're still talking about best and favorite...this just doesn't fly with me, or logic, or reality. You may be tempted to bring up "the meaningful sense of the word" at this point, but I argue that that's a specific context separate from "personal best/favorite". It's meaningful to talk about "getting it" if you want to make claims against its importance, or it's attractiveness to others, or it's artistic worth, or anything EXCEPT objective good/bad.
My second thought on this relates to being a musician - and I'm kind of surprised this doesn't happen to you, being so deep in the film world and having taken steps that bring you much closer to film making than most - but I remember picking up a guitar, learning how to play it, and realizing that I destroyed a part of me that could hear a song and appreciate it at the most primal, instinctual level. I'm very hesitant to dismiss that context as ignorant and worthless. It's just
another context, and I try to respect the benefits inherent in it.
We've hit this point before, as well. I never have and never will object to this on principle. My only problem is that you seem to move from this - that, for you, Persona shouldn't get bonus points for complexity because you didn't find it enjoyable - to a more general claim that the value of films like Persona is nil because they're inherently unenjoyable.
This is the move from subjective to objective that underlies my anxiety with respect to best/favorite. Your negative subjective opinion about the enjoyability of most artsy movies implies that someone else's equally subjective but positive opinion about the enjoyability of most artsy movies is fundamentally wrong because they're allegedly ignoring the putatively objective difficulty of finding enjoyment in artsy movies, when the reality is that what you consider a hindrance to enjoyment is what those people find conducive to enjoyment.
Your orientation to Persona and movies like it is fundamentally alien to fans of it/them, and because of this, it's not only unfair but impossible to generalize your experience as the baseline and to consign others' experiences to anomalies resulting from pretention, disingenuousness, and/or brainwashing.
I always make a point to specifically criticize the claim that it's more sophisticated and that these are more artistic moves being made, and I think I've made sound arguments to put the accessible right alongside them (above for me).
At some point in that conversation, I always ask whomever I am against to simply admit that they enjoy the abstract. That would alleviate everything. There would be no pretense left to condemn. You enjoy that, I don't, cool. No one's left talking about objectively better art. The refusal of that olive branch, I can't call it anything but pretense. I don't know what it would take to convince me otherwise, and I imagine you'd be wasting your time trying.
Too much of your strategy is to throw the baby out with the bathwater and that's just not helpful. Historical context - and anything else that comes into play when talking about movies - can of course be used for evil, but that doesn't mean it's evil. Things can also be used for good. You should stick to going after specific people and the contingencies of their claims. You abstract too much from specific shit and then move straight to scorching the Earth.
I don't think I do. I feel like I'm very specific with my targeting, and you are always fearful that I'm not, so we have to have this talk. But this talk always comes when you jump into a debate I'm having with a pretentious dude. You're always there to make sure I'm not what I'm not.
I know different people, but even so, I think you understimate how deeply the subjective/objective dialectic has permeated "normal" conversations. Even regular people know the difference between speaking for themselves and speaking for others and they just as frequently pin that to the best/favorite divide.
Then I have more work ahead of me. Can someone explain to me why, when asked what
you think, answering with not what
you think is the right move? More to the point, when answering what
you think is the wrong move?
