Why is the ratio of ILM posts to ILF posts approximately 8,793 to 1?

Could it be film buffs don't feel they have as much 'original' to say as music heads (often mistakenly) do? I'm always seeing a ton of stuff and feel I have nothing to say about it that you can't find online by a real writer.

Yeah, and I feel like the enemy whenever I post here

[in psychoanalyst's voice] I'd like to hear you expand on this.

< / bait >

In fact, and ducktailing off of ken's point about amateurist, the fact that the only ILF topics that even generate ANY discussion of more than four or five posts are the ones that bitch about the gap between ILE and ILF also says something.

In fact, that's why I feel like the enemy sometimes, because I often only post here during threads like this.

But you're also right that there's been a simple dearth of conversation. ILF's reputation as a group of "elitists" started in early 2004 with jay blanchard and BabyBuddha (no offense, dudes), but at least there was more lively conversation around then. (Or maybe it just seemed that way.)

2004
December (18)
November (31)
October (17)
September (21)
August (22)
July (22)
June (28)
May (28)
April (35)
March (21)
February (24)
January (52)

2003
December (22)
November (29)
October (30)
September (18)
August (24)
July (35)
June (27)
May (99)
April (27)

Is that why those ILE types hardly ever acknowledge foreign films, much like later PK? (anime doesn't count)

The idea of championing mainstream commercial cinema at its all-time nadir qualifying as "populism" -- you gotta laugh, or slap 'em.

This is the rub, though, and probably the strongest case FOR the conception of an ILF. Maybe it's because up until a year or two ago (when I started shadowing and posting on the ILX cortex) I used to almost always hang around forums discussing movies exclusively, but I can't say that I ever noticed so strong a division between elitism/populism in any of the forums I've ever been to. Sure, there would be similar turf-wars over the entertainment-art continuum, but usually all the participants would at least refrain from attempting to diffuse said differences by pulling the PC "it's only movies"/"film school has rotted your brain" card.

As to the stats over the dwindling number of posts here (which don't actually seem to indicate a trend, jaymc, since there are spikes all throughout that timeline), I guess it only proves my suspicion (with apologies to everyone else who posts here) that ILF will live or die with Jay Blanchard. I haven't seen him post here for a couple weeks now.

The idea of championing mainstream commercial cinema at its all-time nadir qualifying as "populism" -- you gotta laugh, or slap 'em.

See, I really bristle at the objectivity implied here.

"ILE types": ppl who think Trains, Planes and Automobiles is about as good as comedy gets.

Lofty? My next 3 library DVDs are Sullivan's Travels, The Bad News Bears and Black Orpheus.

I did? I was the one who was really happy for Poltergeist making the ILX '80s poll.

I really bristle at the objectivity implied here.

It's really a question of where you're coming from when discussing movies. Film "criticism," or rather any criticism if I may, must at least attempt something resembling objectivity -- though I guess a more accurate faux-word would be "dispassionism." Whereas connoisseurship, which I'm not holding below criticism (or really anywhere in relation), pretty much requires the opposite attitude.

Which is basically the point I'm trying to make here. Most of the other MBs I'm on are just happy that people are interested in movies and like watching them and though, yes, rating them and contrasting one's opinions of them against others' opinions of them enters into the discussion, they don't dwell on calling out people for being AAA or BBB (don't even want to type any of the words at this point).

Jesus, that parallel breaks down with the recognition that Roberto Benigni, Kusturica, Stephen Chow and Apichatpong Weerasethakul are all foreign.

Which is the strongest argument in favor of eradicating the existence of ILF. I can handle the catcalls on ILE just fine, thanks, and not having a place for people to brandish as a form of banishment is all the better.

mozart:takashi miike :: beethoven: _______________

a) ingmar bergman
b) abbas kiarostami
c) akuri kaurismaki
d) ousmane sembene

(basically xpost morbius)

A thread for discussing the classic Indian film "Mughal-e-Azam" (and my FT essay on it ;-) )
Luis Buñuel
Untergang
ILE has never had a thread about Wim Wenders
Now I'm sure there was a thread about the film Oldboy
Disney just put out 3 more (americanized) Miyazaki DVDs!!!!
"baise moi" = the worst film I have ever seen.
Val Lewton (& Jacques Tourneur)
Roy Andersson (the director)
are JEAN DE FLORETTE/MANON DES SOUCRES all they're cracked up to be?
The Motorcycle Diaries - ¿Classic or Dud?
DVDs and world cinema
U.S. ILX'ers: So Where Do You Buy Your Foreign DVD's
last life in the universe - pen-ak ratanaraung
Contemporary Russian Cinema

(Or they were started by "ILF types" like me... *wink*)

I need to revive that page something fierce. Internet publishing has been such an albatross lately. At least the Slant reviews are picking up again, though.

(x-post: i was thinking the same thing, jaymc... it was almost eerie that said thread popped up this afternoon.)

Which is sort of why I put "ILE types" in quotes, anyway. It's not like they're two different species.

Holy crap that's flattering...thank you. But I have to disagree--even though I've had debates and even harsh words with them, Dr Morbius, Girolamo S, jaymc, Ken L., Eric H. and many others. have been here longer than me and have probably contributed more than me, and I highly respect their opinions, especially when they differ from my own.

I also really miss the contributions of amateurist and Baby Buddha (although the latter has a good excuse--he's busy running the FANTASTIC blog "Like Anna Karina's Sweater". If you haven't seen it lately, check it out.

My apologies as well to those that feel that I brought a sense of elitism to ILF, but that was never my intention. I tried to just give an alternative to the "alternative criticism" that I saw was a big part of ILE, an attempt at a post-post-modern approach to looking at films where we got past the relativism and embrace of all, and were left with the appreciation of things outside the normal canon, but could approach them on a new level and give them criteria to be judged by. My goal in posting was never to dismiss, but instead play the Devil's Advocate--people always fight and develop their ideas harder when they feel they feel they are under attack.

I also apologize for not posting here lately. I used to do most of my posting at work while I had projects rendering, but my company blocked ILX from their servers. I was also having some major attacks on my network at home that resulted in an identity theft fiasco with several unauthorized credit card charges.

To make a long story short, I now have a firewall and a kickin' AirPort connection, so I'm ready to start posting to ILF again. I've also joined a few listservs (such as "a_film_by" and "DVDBeaver"), so I should be able to contribute some crossover from those sites in my new posts.

I hope this site stays alive and kicking. It's a great forum with some great people, and it would be a shame for it to go down the tubes.

The problem is not the perception of the views of the forum - it is in the lack of outsiders coming in. ILF is largely composed of people from ILX. Whereas ILE, ILM, and even certain side boards, like ILB, have been able to draw a fair percentage of their members from the outside.

I've tried to straddle the divide to a certain extent, but I am not convinced that ILF will be able to become fully fecund until it at least has some cross-pollination with other film-related websites or blogs. I mean, that's half the fun of ILM - it has a great variety of people there, and a hell of a lot of them just came because the discussion was good, so it started to get linked to a lot in the blogosphere, among other places.

(xpost) Thanks for the namecheck! :)

PS - I fully intend to continue the Random 10 once my life settles down again. (ie not before mid-June, likely)

In any case, this looks like it's shaping up to be the thread where we play nice before returning to our usual bickering.

1) While ILE has a certain core constituency - the Insiders - those people are, frankly, very accepting of discussions on film, low or high. But not necessarily knowledgable.

2) Any perception of the (ILE) board by ILFers as populist is equally matched by the ILE 'populist' constituency viewing the ILFers as elitist. Neither is strictly true, but both have pretty valid points.

3) The fact that many of us here (ILF) are more schooled - academically, practically, historically, vocationally, or critically - on the subject of film does NOT allow us Rightness on subjective matters. It does, however give us a wider range of discussion and comparison. Take the stupid parable:

A man has never had pie. He's given two. Mud-pie and dirt pie. He forms an opinion of a favorite: Mud-pie (easier to swallow). Next week he's given a rotten apple pie, and a half-decent blueberry pie. He walks around trumpeting the virtues of blueberry pie. Lacking contextualization, and lacking an understanding of crusting techniques and varieties of filling he develops a theory of all pies. As a matter of fact, the blueberry pie council has a powerful damn lobby and more advertising money behind it than any other pie, tart, or confection, including the (foreign) mince organization and the (artsier) strawberry-rubarb crisp posse. And when this man tries these pies, he complains that they're 'flawed' and don't having the the blueberry pallor and the bleached-flour crust. And he's right! They don't! Since the half-decent blueberry pie council (BPC) determines most of the output of pie in any given year, this man's criticisms are repeated, and he's considered an expert on pie. No matter that 90% of the pies he eats are blueberry (even if there's variety... frozen blueberry, blueberry-apple, blueberry-turnover, each with strong adherants), he's the pie authority. And those Other people who're interested, sincerely, in non-blueberry pie (though occasionally a slice or blueberry is nice), are seen, proverbially, as marching to beat of their own drummer. For not getting the blueberry fad, which has now become the dominant ideology of pie-making. And though they've never changed - they've often been desert fanatics for longer than the Blueberry Man has existed - they're now seen as outsiders, snobs, idiosyncratic aesthetes, self-indulgent, overly-academic, and condescending. And while they can be all of these things, but not, by definition. They're just more engaged in pie-culture. Now, I've stretched this dumb metaphor far thinner than necessary. But as a raspberry custard aficionado, and an apple brown-betty champion, I think it's more of a noble duty to try to expose blueberry-eaters to the wide world of desserts than attack them for liking Vaccinium occidentalis, which is most of what's available to most of us at most points, these days.

ILF is dead, long live ILF.

the failure of ILF is interesting. it's been accused of being a rockist oasis in the ILX community which is just strange to me--because i dont think there is a single thread where anything like that went unchallenged. on the other hand, i welcome those kind of debates, it's always fun to argue over what we value and why.

I reckon this is a good point.

One of the things that appeals to me about music, and why I've chosen to stake my writing life on it more than anything else, is that it can be experienced in such different ways -- on the radio vs. on CD, on headphones by yourself vs. at a live concert with thousands of others, as a whole album vs. shuffled on an iPod, in the background barely paid attention to vs. cranked up loud and listening alertly -- all of which constitute the fabric of our daily lives and none of which are considered the Right Way to Listen. Music is always happening, and we're always drifting toward and away from it, seizing it when we're compelled by it, ignoring it when we get annoyed or bored.

And more than that, there's SO MUCH MUSIC that it's impossible to hear it all, and we all know that. If I admit I've never heard a Stones album in its entirety, no one will totally discredit my opinion (at least I hope not!) because it's understood that I've made choices as to what to listen to, and that I probably make up for it by being informed about plenty of other acts. We can't all listen to French disco, so I'm the guy who listens to French disco instead of the Stones. (And then there are the schools that will tell me the Stones are irrelevant, anyway, so no worries.)

So a good music discussion, I think, is perhaps one that assembles some of these ongoing fragmentary, chaotic experiences and reflections into a cohesive structure.

But film, because it a) usually entails a more deliberate, focused experience, and b) has a more limited range of choices (only a few hundred films released each year, in a few genres, as opposed to several thousand records, in many more genres), I think there's maybe a desire to be more on the same page when entering into the discussion. You can either choose to work within the parameters of the serious film fan, by immersing yourself in the important, innovative, and audacious works within the medium and viewing with attentiveness, or you have no excuse. There's a lot less patience for the dilettante.

TS: watching films in bite-sized pieces (farber) vs. only watching them once (kael)

this is painfully OTM.... not necessarily re: film discussions on ILE (which i don't read much, so i have no idea if it's true) but re: the direction that so much published criticism seems to be heading. music writers seem much more obsessed with this kind of stylistic snappiness than film writers (or maybe i'm just reading the right/wrong magazines and journals) but i think that this infects a lot of criticism these days. which is not to say that clever turns of phrase and thoughtful insights have to be mutually exclusive, but it's rare that they're both present. in film writing, sometimes dave kehr covers both bases.

I'd say Farber, but I do it so often and feel guilty for it, so I can't endorse either. I'm pretty close to jaymc in that an uninterrupted viewing is the preferred route for the initial viewing, and then afterwards clipping it up is OK.

You're right--I can't believe I forgot them either. Without Ryan, the infamous "film rockism" thread would have never got off the ground, and a spectator bird's recommendations have inspired me to watch quite a few films I never would have seen.

As for the new discussion re: continuous/discontinuous viewing, I'm pretty indifferent to it. There's really no such thing as an "ideal" viewing as a work of art (we had a discussion on public vs. private film viewing a few months back that addressed this), so you could get down to the point that a person who blinks more per minute or shifts in their seat more than another isn't getting a "continuous" viewing. I'll agree that some films really demand a "no-breaks" viewing experience, but I'll take Kiarostami's approach that sometimes it's more of a compliment for the audience to fall asleep mid-film.

argument for (based on personal experience): Viridiana
argument against: Batman & Robin
jury is still out: Mysterious Object at Noon

I practically never fall asleep during movies.

Good call.

I've tried to stop watching films when I'm tired, because the grumpyness that often accompanies the sleepiness has often made me hate films that I end up loving on a more awake re-watch.

It's great to have those movies that you've seen so many times and are so comfortable with that you feel no guilt at falling asleep during any part of the film.

And there are no guilty pleasures, Ken.

I don't seem capable of enjoying most films as a purely visceral experience (and guess I never was, I didn't get 'into' movies until I was out of my teens), my reaction is often a step removed and enjoyment comes from what the film made me think (or think about feeling) rather than pure feeling itself.

I was, of course, referring to his Film Comment columns in particular, which are absurd and rarely amount to more than "oh they so wacky!" Almost identical to what I'd expect from a Tarantino column on kung fu or Blaxploitation.

Well, in the case of Maddin, esp in Saddest and Cowards, I can't disagree more. I think he amped up the wackiness for the FC column since 'guilty pleasures' generally translates as 'films I like that aren't good.'

I actually like the short films of his I've seen, Heart of the World of course, Cowards, the one that came with The Believer a few months ago.

His FC column isn't guilty pleasures, though, or it doesn't claim to be. (I just think it could be called that.) Supposedly it's just old films he recommends which often coincide with TCM runs - I dunno if he's programming for them or just reacting. I don't have a problem with the films he chooses, some look quite interesting, but the way he writes about them is off-putting in its shallowness in exactly the same way that I find Tarantino's kung fu love off-putting.

Unless, of course, the day comes when some ILF regulars actually do get banned from ILE...

It's gorgeous. As a merely part-time, fair-weather fan of old-style MGM musicals and someone who'll admit to "respecting" the new Moulin Rouge without ever wanting to really see it again, this is the great synthesis. And it might even be a better icon than Apocalypse Now for epitomizing Coppola's almost popped hubris. Tom Waits's songs aren't exactly bad.

This is my last post in ILF
He wILFight no more forever.

ILE film threads can be annoying with a lot of redundancy of their own (how many times do we need to argue the "spielberg is sentimental" thing ?) but they are often more spirited and fun. if im looking for well-informed original and interesting opinions and discussion about, i dont think ILE or ILF is really consistent enough to qualify.

This kinda hits the nail on the head, as far as I'm concerned, more so than the whole elitism issue. I Love Baseball, for instance, was started because although threads about the post-season did pretty well on ILE, those on more arcane baseball-related topics easily got lost in the shuffle. The number of ILE posters who are quite interested in baseball is still a small subset of the board as a whole. Whereas it's obvious that lots of people on ILE are quite interested in film, based on the response that ILE film threads receive. Which maybe then explain the elitism issue, because the only way that ILF can justify its existence in the midst of hugely popular ILE threads about film is to say "no, no, we're not about that kind of film." Or actually, remember when ILF first started and it seemed like it was going to be more about making films, like what I Make Music is now? Maybe that would've been a better direction for it, ultimately.

with ppl who say War of the Worlds, Mars Attacks! and Independence Day are all "based on the same source material."

I have no intention of looking at that film rockism thread again, but if calling the standard level of ILE film "discussion" cin-illiterate is elitist, gimme my pince-nez. That a bunch of ppl posted on ILF in 2003-04 have since abandoned it (and don't seem to post much now on ILE, btw) seems a poor reason to declare this board dead.

Or I'll just stick to the Slant forum.

bcz there are ppl like enrique

What's your beef with that fule now?

OK, now I see.