Posts by Rich Lock
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DOES NOT COMPUTE!
I was once offered a job in the UK 'up north'. I was living in London at the time, where a car is something of a liability, unless you're the sort of weirdo who enjoys spending hours looking for a parking space, and cleaning up glass from broken side windows once a week or so where the junkies have broken in looking for stuff to steal.
Once the job was accepted, and I was in negotiations with the HR dept, I was asked on several separate occasions by different people: 'do you have a car?', to which I would answer 'no'. Now, I swiftly realised that my answer was actually completely irrelevant, and I might as well have said 'yes', 'no', 'cheese', 'boobies' or 'I want cake' as the whim struck me, as the HR droids had clearly been pre-programmed with a single chirpy answer, which was 'well, you'll find there's plenty of parking round here! No need to worry about that!'
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What this entire argument has boiled down is whether there is such a thing as quality independent of personal taste. And of course there is.
So is there quality independent of group taste?
If so, give me a set of objective tools so I can start measuring stuff.
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As someone pointed out a few pages ago, we arrive at judgements of what is 'good' or 'bad' by an overall consensus.
Not me, buddy. I can think for myself. ;)
Allow me to rephrase: society and subsets thereof arrive at...
The way you put it, there's no difference between 'good' and 'popular', is there? (genuine question.)
Ah, but popular amongst what set or subset? Critics or general public? Teenaged boys or parents of teenaged boys?
I personally don't think tax cuts are a 'good' thing. But they do appear to be terribly popular.
And apparently even critics are allowed to change their mind on a week-to-week basis.
I'm a very different person from the teenage theatregoer who found Peter Shaffer's Equus the most thrilling of plays, and who could never understand why Chekhov's Three Sisters didn't just get on a train to Moscow. There are some playwrights – Chekhov and Beckett among them – who I think you can only truly appreciate once you've experienced the compromises and disappointments of adult life.
I remember feeling almost exactly this on reading 'never let me go'. And subsequently reading a review on Amazon which more or less said 'we had to read this as part of english at school, and I don't understand it, therefore it's rubbish'. Well, of course you don't, because you're at school, and you haven't yet 'experienced the compromises and disappointments of adult life'. Which is what the entire bloody book is about.
If I'd read it as a teen, I'd probably feel the same way. Reading it as an adult, I thought it was excellent. So is it a good book, or a bad book?
I guess it would be terribly old-fashioned to consider 'false consciousness'.
Well, we did start talking about The Matrix, after all. But you might have to expand on that one.
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Someone may be a car enthusiast, and have a favourite car. They may not have a specific reason, or they may have a set of reasons that ultimately add up to: it just is – it has that X-factor. That’s a preference; it’s the “best car” for him, but has no particular objective value.
But if he were given two cars to choose from, an economical and fairly roomy sedan and a drag racer, he could tell you which was one the best car for a drag race. And the best car would actually be the best car – it wouldn’t just be best in his opinion. Quality judgements are often subjective if you have no context, just preference. But things quickly become less subjective once a context is introduced, which I think is what Philip and 3410 might be getting at.I think Gio covered this one off fairly well, but I'll add my 2c.
A few years ago, when I was in my early-20's, I had a long conversation with my teenage cousin about whether Terminator 1 or Terminator 2 was the 'better' film. I was arguing for T1, because it aligned more closely with things I thought were important: originality, tone, scripting, intelligence. He was arguing for T2 because it had more of what was important to him: explosions, shiny things, better special effects.
At the time, both of us would have dismissed Citizen Kane out of hand. I mean, really, it's in black and white, grandad!
From an older and more experienced* perspective, if pushed, i'd probably say that Citizen Kane deserves pretty much all the praise that's lavished on it. It's a great film.
Now, your (teenage) car enthusiast may go for the Evo7 over the People Carrier, but his priorities are going to change significantly as his life changes. He's going to start caring about luggage space, economy, reliability as he gets older.
So sure, he's going to be able to tell you what the best car for a drag race is. But in a few years time he may not be all that interested in drag racing.
As someone pointed out a few pages ago, we arrive at judgements of what is 'good' or 'bad' by an overall consensus. And those judgements are going to be affected by how the question is framed.
Is this route for a new road 'good', or 'bad'? Or possibly that's the wrong question to ask - maybe we need to reframe the question and ask whether we need a road or a light railway? And as a society we employ experts not only to provide answers but to frame the questions.
Now, I have a lot of sympathy for the people who view the fuss made over 'Avatar' and 'The Matrix' with bemusement and horror, because it seems that daring to point out that not only is the emperor naked, but he's not particularly well-hung either, can elicit something of a ferocious overreaction.
*I deliberately didn't use the word 'sophisticated' here, because it carries a lot of negative freight with it in this context.
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Hoi, hoi u embleer Hrair, M'salon ule hraka vair.
And you asked for this:
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Strangely captivating.
Quite Zen, really.
A series of koans which we can mediate on in order to find enlightenment.
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Some truly great writers have used formulaic scripts
Well, there's not necessarily anything wrong with the formula, just in the way it's applied.
Not many people complain about the use of verse-chorus-verse-chorus-bridge-chorus in, for example, a Pixies track.
If your formula is always to have 'a significant event' of some sort occur at the 2/3 point, that might be fine. but if you always apply the formula by having the significant event being the killing off of a secondary character, that probably isn't.
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Yep, that was what I was referring to as the 'break into act 2' a page or so ago.
However, it's any film that tells a story. That has a narrative arc.
If your film is intended to do something else, like set a mood, then a different set of standards apply.
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Why not the best human?
Modesty prevents, old chap...
Which proves nothing other than that the running/cinematography analogy wasn't much good to start with.
No, but it does help to support my hypothesis that there is no way of empirically/objectively measuring what is a 'good' film.
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But would the best runner be the best athlete full stop?
Or do we have separate 'runners' out as a subset of 'athletes', and put the 'pole vaulters' over there, and the 'swimmers' over here, and the 'shotputters' in another separate area? And then try to come up with some sort of empirical set of measurable standards to objectively define 'best athlete' which applies to all of them?
No, it's how they felt when they ran, and the message they conveyed. Also, the originality of the running is very important. We need to see running in a different way. It's not just about speed, but also about the narrative arc, the way the runners interacted and developed through the race.
You've been watching that 'Chariots of fire' again, haven't you?