Over on the great Pamie.com blog, Pamie’s east-coast male co-blogger Dan posted a little ditty about movies he finds overrated and how he hates the disapproving looks and comments he receives from friends who can’t understand why he doesn’t enjoy what they found to be a masterpiece.
I would tend to disagree with Dan on the choices in his list (especially Adaptation, and he seems to be gunning for Eternal Sunshine …), but I’m a big defender of being able to criticize films with exaggeration. For instance, I love to say that anyone who likes Buffalo 66 needs a frontal lobotomy; or that just because Lost Highway (which I hated) comes first and Mulholland Drive (which I loved) resembles it in many ways, doesn’t mean that the former is superior to the latter. It’s not. I realize some people agree with me, and some people don’t, and obviously (or maybe not so much to some) the very nature of my having an opinion means that I think I’m right and someone else is wrong. I find both Buffalo 66 and Lost Highway to be masturbatory, overly self-indulgent examples of filmmakers orgasming onscreen in an effort to show how indie, artsy, creative, original and cool they are. In the case of Lynch, it was a misstep. In the case of Gallo, it’s his personality.
Anyway, it seems that many of Pamie and Dan’s readers (and I consider myself an avid fan of their blog and Pamie’s journal entries) get very defensive and protective, which is nice. I posted some comments to Dan’s post and whole shitstorm seems to have erupted, albeit a brief one. I don’t want to take up more of Pamie’s comment section, and there isn’t really anything more for me to say anyway, but if it brought you here and you still have something to say to me … be my guest. Besides, it is an interesting discussion and examination about how varied opinions can be over something as obscure as “quality.”
And by the way, since few seemed to actually understand my point over there, I’ll briefly (HA!) restate it here. I was not arguing against Dan’s opinions about the “overrated” movies he listed, regardless of how much I may disagree with him. I was primarily commenting on how his post was basically treating the opinions of those people who do “overrate” the film with the same disregard that so offends him when he is underwhelmed by a film others love.
And just to prove that I don’t have some weird fixation and ragging on Dan, you should all check-out his America’s Next Top Model recaps at Television Without Pity. They’re almost as good as the show.
Out of Focus 