Adam Cadre ([info]adamcadre) wrote,
@ 2009-06-25 00:00:00
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Calendar page updated.
25 June: Eyes Wide Shut (second article)

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[info]colinmarshall
2009-06-26 07:40 am UTC (link)
Solid writeup. That left-sidebar clarification was smart to write, though I doubt anyone would mistake your position as anti-cinematic quality, exactly. The most unusual element of your taste in film — or at least my remotely-constructed image of your taste in film — is, as you lay out in the post, that success in one or two dimensions — here, "plot" and "the characters" — is a prerequisite for overall success. The majority of the critics/friends I read/talk to about this sort of thing seem to find that a film can succeed in one dimension to the relative exclusion of the others — just plot, just aesthetics, just character, just dialogue, whatever — and, if it's strong enough in its area of expertise, still come out a worthwhile whole. While I myself lean more toward that position and harbor something of a bias against the plottiest movies, I wouldn't say that one or the other way of viewing is correct.

Much of this likely boils down to a subject I'm quite interested in: the nature of the exchange between a work of art and its viewer/listener/reader and how it varies from mind to mind. It may well be that one man's ciphers are another's rich, engaging human beings, and thus some perceive a certain picture as actually succeeding on the character as well as the textural level while others think it pulls off only the latter. Some viewers' imaginations build whole worlds out of the sparsest of provided detail, even if the creator didn't intend it to be the tip of an iceberg.

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[info]arctangent
2009-06-26 03:52 pm UTC (link)
Really? You think one-dimensional success really makes the movie itself a success among mainstream critics? Because "Beyond the awe-inspiring visuals, this movie is ultimately hollow; thumbs down" is almost a fucking acerbic-movie-critic cliche.

Indeed, there's almost too many examples of movies that get praised for awe-inspiring visuals but damned as movies for me to count. The Fountain, for example, I think *everyone* agreed had incredibly awe-inspiring visuals (I was still going "Whoaaa..." for a long time upon exiting the theater) that nonetheless got uniformly bad reviews as a movie. (And this may tie into Adam's long-ago critique of the difference between "good" and "awesome" as orthogonal descriptors of value.)

I think that educated Western culture and especially the class of people who become critics of whatever are biased toward verbal communication as a medium -- it's how we communicate our own criticism, after all -- so "awesome visuals, terrible movie" is less common than "great script, shitty movie" as a critique. It's still a valid thing to accuse a movie of, though, and now that the shine has worn off certain cult films like Clerks I'm pretty willing to come out and say that Clerks is the #1 example of AMAZING dialogue and an ultimately kind of hollow crappy film. (Since I started following Adam because of IF, I'll also point out that Adam was once known for defending the overall quality of Robb Sherwin's work against critics, and I agree that Sherwin's games had some of the best fucking comedic *writing* I've ever seen in an IF piece -- I will also say that I think Sherwin's games are, nonetheless, taken as complete works of art, kind of terrible.)

I think if you see a lot of amateur live theater -- or worse, participate in it -- you become very aware of the script/performance disconnect, which becomes far more obvious than the world of cinema which sort of pushes you to imagine the film as this single organic whole indelibly recorded for all time on film (or on tape or on disc, as the technology of the day may have it). And I think it's a not uncommon opinion among theater nerds that watching a good director and good cast try to redeem a stupid script is far preferable to watching the slow, agonizing mutilation of a beautiful script by idiot performers.

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[info]arctangent
2009-06-26 03:36 pm UTC (link)
The best thing about this article is how it doesn't need to actually say "Scientology" for our minds to all simultaneously go there once you mention Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes + "decadent insanity flourishing behind the castle walls of America's isolated elite".

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