flmfreakcentral

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Piazza

have to say your review couldn't be more wrong on robin williams performance but that being said your entitled to your opinion just like i am. Thanks for the review!

Geoff H

Ugh... sorry man, this is totally going to come across as a threadcrap, but I couldn't help to cringe while reading that review. Seemed to me like the author was trying to throw in as much impressive phrases and decorative words as possible, and it seemed more than a little pretentious to me.
Yeah, sorry...

Josh Z

I second that opinion, Geoff.

flmfreakcentral

We get this all the time at FILM FREAK CENTRAL, dozens upon dozens of e-mails a week ordering us to "put away your thesaurus," etc. It's all so boring and anti-intellectual, and frankly Josh, I would think you'd be above this, as your own reviews betray an erudition. They are the only thing at DVD FILE that wasn't originally written in crayon and monkey sperm.

Have you considered that we are not poseurs, not trying to look smart, but, and I say this without irony or arrogance, actually are? It's so reactionary, levelling this complaint at us, so selfish, such a transparent unsheathing of your Achilles' Heels--they being an incapacity for bookish thought. Would you say the same thing to a literary critic, "Too many big words"? A food critic, "Just tell me if it tastes like chicken"? Because the movies are the democratic art, we are expected to condescend? I just don't get it, and apparently never will.

When I was fourteen, I read a review of MILLER'S CROSSING by Andrew Sarris in which he used the word "aesthetic." As this word was Greek to me, my options were as follows:

1. Write Andrew Sarris and tell him to dumb it down.
2. Look up "aesthetic" in the dictionary.
3. Quietly resent Andrew Sarris for the rest of my life and go on not knowing how to use "aesthetic" in a sentence.

Andrew Sarris, the man who brough the auteurist theory to America, imported it like a wine, was of a different era, I'll grant him. There's something about the Internet, you're just expected to cater to the LCD. But we will be an illiterate nation a few generations from now, especially if folks like yourself, Josh, pull a Benedict Arnold on those of us attempting, success notwithstanding, something scholarly--the cinema deserves it in the Ain't It Cool era, does it not?

Without alternatives, there are no alternatives, if you know what I mean.

Bill C
filmfreakcentral.net

flmfreakcentral

The Sarris review was not of MILLER'S CROSSING, but of DO THE RIGHT THING. I wish that wasn't the case, as I'd love to shave a few years off my life.

Sorry, obsessive about these things.

Bill C
filmfreakcentral.net