Posts by philipmatthews
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Ah, but you'd probably choose a different type of film, based on whichever one of those scenarios was applicable, no?
If you wanted to impress a date, you probably wouldn't go to see L'Humanité - a film which (and not to beat about the bush, if you'll excuse the phrase) opens with an extreme close-up of a dead womans vagina.
Depending on the date, of course. On the first date with the lady who was subsequently foolish enough to marry me, I thought it was quite appropriate to choose 'Apocalypse Now'. Hmmmm, I love the smell of romance in the morning.
So whether a film is 'good', or 'bad' is going to be contextually dependent.
But that's not good or bad. That's just appropriate or inappropriate, suitable or unsuitable. If you're putting a DVD on to entertain your kids, The Little Mermaid would be more suitable than The Godfather. But it's not a better movie.
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I really don't get how the matrix can be seen as a deep movie.
Type Zizek and Matrix into Google some time.
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Compelling enough for you?
Well, it's not quite "you provide the prose poems and I'll provide the war" ...
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It was his first film and the powers that be ensured he'd almost do nothing else in cinema. Mankiewicz and Toland both died within twelve years or so but made nothing else of lasting value. Cotten is the person who came closer to having a career and let's face it, it wasn't much of one.
From our perspective, in 2010, we would look at (the legend surrounding) The Magnificent Ambersons, Chimes at Midnight, Touch of Evil, The Trial, the prodigious radio career etc ... The story of Welles -- the promise and the disappointment and the way he then worked outside of the system -- is a big part of why Citizen Kane matters now.
Yes, according to the standards we agree to measure cinema by, Citizen Kane ticks the boxes (which this Ebert column kind of sends up). But those values may one day change, I agree. I also think that the way people like Michael Medved talk about bad films has damaged the reputations of some genuinely experimental films: within the 50 worst films list devised by the Medveds, who are responsible for attaching the "worst film ever" label to Plan 9 from Outer Space, are films like Zabriskie Point, Last Year at Marienbad and The Last Movie. None of those deserve to be there, in my opinion. So, a canon based on the kind of technical accomplishment I was talking about does risk being a narrow one.
Being about a serious subject surely is not a prerequisite for being of value? I mean the subject of Don Quixote is not serious.
I haven't read Don Quixote but in the case of Kane I think one of the reasons it's in the canon is because it's a study of American ambition, reinvention and failure similar I guess to The Great Gatsby. But it did take a while for it to become "the greatest" -- again, the importance of a critical consensus.
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I've been wondering if that's what Philip was thinking of when he wrote of the Uses of Avatar.
Homage not plagiarism!
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You must accept that Citizen Kane is not objectively better than Robot Monster or any other film, yes. On the other hand, so long as enough people subjectively maintain that Citizen Kane is better (therefore deserving of more analysis, better conservation, greater circulation) than Robot Monster, we're okay, no?
But there are things that Citizen Kane does objectively better than Robot Monster. Its acting is more persuasive. Its cinematography was groundbreaking. Its dialogue is more compelling. It is -- as this is important in terms of the canon -- about a serious subject (if Charles Foster Kane had been a spaceship commander, we wouldn't be hearing as much about Citizen Kane). It is from a film-maker whose other work we recognise as important and valuable. All this is objective. Even people who prefer watching Robot Monster couldn't argue with that.
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Christchurch art critic Andrew Paul Wood on the Weta statue:
Would someone please explain to me why the fuck Weta is doing this and not an artist? Why is Weta taking bread out of the mouths of New Zealand’s sculptors with this unimaginative pseudo-Fascist tat? Sadly it appears that art in this country is getting assimilated into entertainment, which means New Zealand audiences and patrons are going to have some very strange expectations of our artists. I would rather see the most hackneyed Neil Dawson (a giant lacework rugby ball probably) than this uninspired piece of Hitleresque nonsense.
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The tripod is:
- relevant to Weta's industry;
- site-specific;
- self-mocking;
- playful.I thought they were just channelling Louise Bourgeois.
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But that point - analysing the film is an incorrect response - has come up time and again on PAS as well.
But only on PAS, interestingly. Out on the wider internet, you couldn't move in December and January for analyses of Avatar. From a green perspective. From a socialist perspective. From a Native American perspective. From a SF genre perspective. From a Christian perspective. From a Hindu perspective. And then all those reviews that complained it was anti-war and anti-American.
Last year, David Bordwell, the American film scholar, talked about how amazed he was at the amount and the quality of the analyses of Inglourious Basterds that he found online, as an internet-age phenomenon. It used to be that you would wait months for that stuff to turn up in journals. But that was dwarfed by the responses to Avatar.
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my choice would be Tarkovsky, that drive into the city at the start of Solaris is mesmeric... as are many of the transcendent scenes later that may (or may not) be on the planet and Stalker, of course...
will put you firmly in the Zone!I'd recommend some Bela Tarr too: Werckmeister Harmonies, Satantango. Tarr jokes that the 11 minute roll of film is a form of censorship.