cerebel | (no subject)

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There is little I find more irritating than cinephile elitism. I go to a near-Ivy League school, and I live in a dorm full of movie and television fans, and I see it all the damn time. To hear them talk, there's never been a movie that's reached half the level of Citizen Kane in terms of overall quality - and, moreover, they make a distinction between 'good' movies and movies they enjoy watching.

I'm pretty sure that if you watch a 'good' movie and you're miserable the entire time, you find it boring and/or gross (I'm looking at you, Eraserhead), and it doesn't change anything about you, it doesn't emotionally affect you, then it's doing something wrong. No matter how symbolic everything is, if it doesn't work a kind of magic on you, then holding it to some kind of objective standard and calling it good is false.

On the other hand, if there's a movie that everyone sees and everyone loves (with exceptions, of course, there are always exceptions) - like, say, The Dark Knight or Iron Man, you have no real right to call those movies 'bad' while claiming that enjoyment doesn't necessarily equal quality.

This just pisses me off unbelievably. It makes an elitist, snobbish judgment about 'most people' and their loose standards for good films, and portrays the general Hollywood-viewing public as a bunch of sheep who couldn't tell a good movie if it bit them on the ass.

Okay, so maybe this corresponds with the way artists treat any kind of art, but with movies, it annoys the crap out of me, because I love movies.

Like, let's take Quantum of Solace. The cinephiles around me hated this movie, as did most newspaper critics. They claimed that it didn't fulfill its potential, that it wasn't James Bond enough, and that the fight scenes were confusing and unfulfilling. They're actually wrong. I mean, they're right, but they're also wrong.

There were a lot of fight scenes in QoS. Possibly too many. But it's not because they were trying to sell the movie on fight scenes alone. In fact, if you're not a complete moron and you actually pay attention, it's pretty clear that the bad guy and the evil plot are not, in fact, the A plot of the movie. They're the B plot. The A plot is completely, 100% about James Bond and the fallout from his relationship with Vesper.

He's absolutely as badass as usual. He still kicks bad guy ass, still fights, still can go up against, y'know, fifty or sixty armed men and come out with a few artistic scratches and marginally fewer pieces of clothing. But there's something different about this movie in that he's doing it almost automatically. He doesn't ever smile, but he's still cocky and confident - you can read it in his actions, not his dialogue.

This is a little bit of a change from the usual James Bond in that he doesn't really snark. There's notable "You were supposed to shoot her!" - "I missed" moment, which was hilarious, but, as someone I was talking to put it, it seems more out of frustration than any sort of James Bond-ly quips.

The fight scenes, again, were many, slightly confusing, a little bit ridiculous (but it's a James Bond movie, what the hell are you expecting?), and most of them ended on somewhat of an anticlimax. This wasn't done because the filmmakers were clumsy idiots who don't know how to frame a fight scene. It was done because Bond himself was frustrated, and that was reflected in every aspect of the movie.

As for the girl, she was actually interesting, and the relationship with her may have, in fact, been as important to Bond as Vesper was, though in a different way. This movie cut straight to the quick of the character, and Daniel Craig played it vulnerable - and played it as a completely badass motherfucker.

I think the people who don't like this movie don't like it because they want it to be something its not, and they refuse to judge it for what it really is. Because they don't believe it conforms to their preconceived idea of what the cinema should be, or what the James Bond franchise should be.

For what it's worth, I'm for sure going to see this movie again, and for sure buying it when it comes out on DVD.

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THIS. SO MUCH THIS.

Mmm, just wanted to make two points:

1. As a film geek, I'll tell you I've watched a LOT of the so-called 'great' movies. You know, those type of films that become the paragon to which all other 'lesser' movies are compared against. It's been my experience that some of them are really...boring! I can have a convo on great directors and art direction, etc., but I find it somewhat difficult to back a movie if I don't feel any connection to it. It's all part of being human, I guess.

2. I went to see QoS last night. In truth, I liked how the movie was more about the emotional fallout James Bond felt in regards to his relationship with Vesper (as well as with her death). It would have been really lame to see Bond acting like whatever it was he had had with Vesper in Casino Royale had been nothing else than another notch on the bedpost.

1) Before I became a film major I hadn't seen many, but now that I have? On some of them I'd have to agree. For example, Citizen Kane, which appears to be on the top of basically everyone's list, never chimed with me. I'm sure there are some people out there who watched Citizen Kane and it totally changed their lives, but I never felt any emotional connection to it. And I don't think that makes me a bad person or someone who 'just doesn't understand' what makes a good movie.

2) And YES. I thought Daniel Craig did a ridiculously fantastic job with it, too. The movie didn't go to far with it, didn't beat us over the head with the character arc, and didn't even make any moral judgment on the idea of revenge. It was all understated and felt, not said, and I really think it was amazing.

1. Well, a lot of times, what people in the film studies/criticism world(s) ascertain as 'great' can be reduced to a lot of words that become nothing more than esoteric blather. Or, imho, in the case of Citizen Kane it is more about all the technical stuff (including cinematography) than the actual story. In addition, the majority of cinema elitists tend to have almost-to-none sense of humour about movies in general. It's almost as if they've gotten so wrapped up in the 'grandiosity of cinema as art' that they are unable to see how important it is for the audience to FEEL something while watching a movie.

2. Personally, I've always liked Daniel Craig as a Bond (and I swear that has nothing to do with having seen him play Francis Bacon's lovah in some artsy movie that came out about 10 years ago). Craig's Bond has a certain physicality combined with a peculiar level of vulnerability that makes the eternal spy more real. Mind you, I firmly believe this despite the fact that my Bond has always been the very campy version Roger Moore brought to the screen. I think Craig is a really good actor, but I don't see him doing camp anytime soon. :)

I think all of art is about feeling, that good art elicits an emotional response. For the most part, at least. Cinema has always been, for me, about story and character, as well as cinematography, technical prowess - they all work together to create a whole. It's really easy to say that this part of a film was good while that part failed, but you might say it's like saying the colors of a painting are really bold, but the perspective is kind of skew-y, but the woman's face is really great. I mean, if there's a flaw with part of the movie, there's a flaw with all of it, because, in the end, it's actually one whole piece of art.

I love that they made James Bond more real. Some people argued with me, saying that there's virtue in having James Bond movies be a genre that's consistent, but really, I like this, and I think it keeps the vast majority of the trappings that make James Bond James Bond.

Eech, camp Daniel Craig. That'd be the day :P

I am deeply amused, because NU is where I started my "I like movies more than films" thing. The cinephile elitism was deep at NU 30 years ago and it's sort of reassuring to know that some things don't change.

Hahaha. Yeah, well, rich people, snobbishness. I kinda get the worst of it because I hang out with film majors all the time.

God, this summer I wanted to kill this guy because he would criticize any movie we picked by calling it "overrated" and then he made us watch weird, confusing, and uninteresting art house movies. Just because they're indie doesn't make them better!

On the other hand, I recognize that some of the films I enjoy are just not good films. Like Constantine. And Tomb Raider. I don't think anyone would argue that these are cinematic works of genius.

Overrated is an overrated word.

No, indie just means free to explore a style that doesn't have to be liked by the majority of Americans. The fact that people actually like and are willing to spend money to go out and watch something doesn't automatically make it bad.

See, a friend of mine said that movies aren't just on a scale of good to bad. They're on a grid - one dimension good to bad, the other dimension lame to awesome. I'd say I agree, at least partially, but with the caveat that it's a different scale for everyone.

Edited 2008-11-20 02:51 (UTC)

I agree with the grid idea. Everyone has different ideas of what makes a good film, everyone enjoys different things.

Oh my. My majors at University were Theater/Media/Film, German Literatur and Art History. I wrote my master thesis on feminist film theory and how it relates to The X-Files and had my oral finals (among other things) about David Lynch.

And this? So much word. I did my intermediate exam about Orson Welles/Citizen Kane and I really love the movie... But, oh my god, it's godawful boring. And Eraserhead? Might be fascinating like all of Lynch's stuff but I don't want a movie to depress me. At least not like this.

I always stayed far away from most of my fellow students at the film department, but I still remember this one time when I was sitting with a bunch of them and we were going through our "Watch list" aka "Movies you have to have seen if you want to survive University" and I mentioned that I'm missing stuff like "Star Wars" on there. Because, yeah, it's a popcorn flick, but it also had an enormous influence on lots of movies that came later and you should at least know what you are talking about. They looked at me as if I'd lost my mind. They just couldn't understand why I would want that movie on the same list as "Don't look now" (again: horribly boring movie and only on that list because of one sex scene).

So, my point is I'd rather have people make a difference between "influentional movies" and good/bad movies instead of "good movies" (aka "Citizen Kane") and movies for the plebs.
That's not to say that influential movies can't also be good movies, but personally I have always shyed away from the idea that only influential movies can be good movies.

Citizen Kane was a good movie. It didn't stop me from dropping out of the narrative a few times while I was watching it because I was bored.

Eraserhead really just grossed me out. Like, to the max. I understand that it's a deeply symbolic and surrealist film about male sexual fear, but you know what? I don't ever want to see it again ever ever kthnx.

Influential is certainly a category on its own, and much more factual and provable than 'good' or even 'well-made'. I would definitely agree with that.

Quantum of Solace disappointed me. Craig's performance was strong, and the plot had several dramatic developments (like M's bodyguard suddenly turning on her). But it is still an action movie, and like all action movies, (at least the good ones), the story depends on the action sequences working. And that's where the movie failed me.

I think when you said this: "This wasn't done because the filmmakers were clumsy idiots who don't know how to frame a fight scene. It was done because Bond himself was frustrated, and that was reflected in every aspect of the movie." that you were mistaken. I think the film makers were clumsy idiots, either by accident or by design.

Good art, effective art, requires large helpings of artifice, and this movie didn't have much of that in the fights and chases. I couldn't tell what Bond was doing, or whether the bad guys were catching up or falling behind, or... well, much of anything. This had the effect of disengaging me from the story, and even boring me a couple of times. Turning the focus of the movie onto his interactions with the woman who was out for revenge was a good choice, and was very interesting, but the uninteresting action scenes (a marked contrast to Casino Royale, where the action was not only riveting, it drove the story) drained a lot of the emotional energy.

It also didn't help that the story didn't make that much sense. Why would anyone build a hotel that's basically designed to sequentially explode? And how is this dam project going to help Quantum when the water really dries up? (Which it is, because the glaciers really are shrinking because of climate change.)

Anyway, not terrible, but not much better than mediocre. I hope it's just a sophomore slump.

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