The Death of Cinema pt. 94

where's Southy with the 'it HAS to be grainy, you cannot watch it on cellphone' rockismo

-- blueski, Thursday, September 13, 2007 3:34 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Link

haha indeed.

fwiw i will chip in with: CRT televisions >>>> pwn the shit out of >>>> digital bullshit.

well cinema may be dead, but so is the novel, poetry, the fine arts, classical music.....or maybe it's just dispersing itself into smaller and smaller audiences, all part of the inevitable march of modernity surely?

what sight and sound and the like seem to be yearning for is a whitman-esque "return to the common people" aesthetic that will find some way of bridging the increasing distance we all feel between each other and our values and experiences. a super film that will unite us all!

whitman aside, this is not a new desire, and it's always been utopian.

and like all utopian desires it projects itself into the past as much as the future.

i don't get morbs on this score. the "original cinephiles", the parisians in the 50s, were crazy for uncomplicated, populist filmmaking.

xpost

no sight and sound don't think the golden age can return. it's not a new lament, but it's not that old either. your line of thinking tends to say nothing ever changes, but of course it does.

What was "uncomplicated, populist filmmaking" in the heyday of French cinephilia was also filled with solid formalism that is basically not even in the equation w.r.t Apatow.

yeees, i.e. Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?is a superior example of uncomplicated, p*pulist (GODDAMN YOU) filmmaking, and that Napoleon Dynamite is a horrid one.

there were bad movies lots of ppl liked in the old days too dude

not that knocked up is even bad

i hate 'napoleon dynamite' and it isn't populist. but both of you are mental to think late '50s hollywood was particularly golden, it's sheer cineaste myth-making.

xpost

i like 'knocked up' a lot.

me too it's great

i like 'knocked up' a lot.

We noticed

(I used ND as I haven't seen any Apatow films, but substantial critics who've liked his stuff have generally said "well, this isn't cinema")

Was there popular trash in the '50s? Of course. Was there a higher % of watchable studio films? Fuck yes.

substantial critics who've liked his stuff have generally said "well, this isn't cinema"

name names

(I used ND as I haven't seen any Apatow films, but substantial critics who've liked his stuff have generally said "well, this isn't cinema")

sigh

you might want to try actually watching movies sometime morbius.

but both of you are mental to think late '50s hollywood was particularly golden

Who is arguing that? Nobody's claiming every last studio film between 1953-1958 was blindly accepted as an artistic breakthrough.

As this thread proves, the real problem with cinema is that cinephilia refuses to fucking die.

this is an interesting discussion and i'm sorry to say i don't have much to add to it, except that whenever e.g. godard pops his head out of his hole to proclaim the d"eath of cinema" every two years or so my kneejerk reaction is usually "stfu"

what do you call cinephilia when it doesn't actually involve watching the movies you're talking about

'napoleon dynamite' isn't populist

Yeah, that's why I see VOTE FOR PEDRO tees on the street

I will watch Knocked Up when it hits DVD shortly. Given the track record of people who love it, I'll send the universal $11 cost of a NYC film ticket to my creditors instead, thanks.

great attitude.

As this thread proves, the real problem with cinema is that cinephilia refuses to fucking die.

YES

what do you call cinephilia when it doesn't actually involve watching the movies you're talking about

Every cinephile I know does this. We're not all working critics, after all.

Yeah, attitude? It's hardcore personal economics.

also stfu w/ "populist" forever and ever and ever

at this point i don't think a Hollywood youth-orientated comedy can ever appeal to me again. too late for Zoolander 2.

tonight hollywood weeps

they'll get over me, in time.

s1ocki, I have been writing a little about film for just over 8 months (for the first time since college) without benefit of a single free screening or DVD screener, so tell me who's supposed to subsidize my seeing all the 'important' films like KU.

Culturally discerning [sic?] 25-year-olds who would've seen and discussed every Godard film in the mid '60s now reserve their passion for Knocked Up

Are you ever going to let this go, Morbs? Like "cinephiles" didn't love Mazursky or Blier.

whatever dude, if you can't afford to see it, maybe hold back on criticizing it

i could care less if you ever see an apatow film but if you're going to talk shit about them i might take your opinions a little more seriously if you had a clue what you were talking about

As for the topic at hand: most critics find sentimentality irresistable (every Gore Vidal essay bemoaning the Death of the Novel to thread)

So ... the death of cinephilia = the price of tickets

That's not the only reason, but is a contributing factor to my being well over the cinephilia as gluttony thing.

it's not difficult to identify things about a film you either know you dislike or strongly suspect you will dislike esp. now you can read fairly detailed synopsis on wikipedia ;)

it's dead where it used to be alive and vice versa.(thank you asian cinema for keeping the light)
but generally speaking,there are less good movies per year compared to the past,imo.

All this talk about the Golden Age of Foreign Films is merely a bunch of critics fetishizing the act of going to a Bleeker Street theatre or whatever and having long arguments afterwards about Bergman's use of dwarfs in The Silence. These communities still exist and the discussion continues.

the thing is,Bergman was shown in smaller,less central places than nyc, and now,"art directors" like him are shown ONLY on cities like nyc.
there are less audience for that "art" movies.

Maybe we should stop thinking that the medium had a golden age, then. Mourn the lack of enthusiasm, or maybe its transition into something else. (Something very annoying.)

i think we should just keep talking ourselves in circles forever.

Knocked Up's postrelease prestige print ads featured a scintillating line about how marriage differs from Everybody Loves Raymond as an example of its Wilder-caliber screenwriting. I'll be pleasantly surprised if I like it, but I know the way to bet.

I've seen one episode of The Sopranos, let's talk about that now.

"Wilder-caliber screenwriting" often didn't even meet Wilder's standards.

i think we should just keep talking ourselves in circles forever.

Whatever keeps us from actually watching movies, right?

That "Everybody Loves Raymond" line was v. lame

I bet it'll be the clip for its Best Original Screenplay nom

Irony: I am going to see Knocked Up tonight for $2 at the awesome cheap theater near where I live. Well, no, I guess that's not really ironic at all.

ok i am not going to have this argument again, if your really think you don't actually have to watch movies to pass judgment on them, i dont think we have much to talk about

To be fair, he wasn't passing judgement on Knocked Up but an archetype that overlaps with a perceived fanbase for that film.

YES

food critics, Christ

Morbs contructs these phony binarities: if you love Apatow films, you're a meathead who will ignore a Tsai Ming-Liang release.