you know what?

reading the N+1 take on TDK makes me realize one important thing and something I emplore others to take into account:

Nikil Saval isn’t a film critic and this wasn’t flim criticism. If it was, my God, then that whole “Internet=Bad Writing" thing Armond White and Dave Kehr harp on about may as well be true.

This is a banal, rehashed by-the-numbers reaction piece that has been written far better and far earlier by the likes of Andrew O’Hehir, Michael Tully, David Edelstein, Keith Uhlich, David Denby, Stephanie Zacharek, Michael Sragow and Vadim.

To call Saval’s piece a “review" is to dumb down that process into the most general exercise in list writing since an eighth grade English class. To assume no one can possibly fathom the writer’s own “genius" and ability to view something that has been pointed out repeatedly is merely lazy. Saval’s criticism is bad, and may the world take note on that.

This is like getting a really atonal child to tell you about Star Wars,having it peppered with “And then…And then…And then…And then…And then Luke is the hero…And then the bad guy wears black, but we don’t know anything about him…And then…"

Now to get off my high horse and finish a review of Clone Wars.

n+1 versus the dark knight →

jimmyrabbitte:

raptoravatar:

(via thisrecording)

I don’t completeley agree with this takedown.  However, it certainly raises some interesting points about the film as pro-Dubya allegory.  I think the point that it misses, however, is that the film isn’t necessarily designed to be read as a work where the good guys win.  The good guys stem the tide of chaos (which their own good intentions helped set off) at the price of their own souls and the bad guys win a few converts.  The fundamental victory in the story is not that the joker is captured (How many of his recruits, I wonder, are standing down or haven’t hit the streets yet?).  The victory is that the citizens in the boats don’t blow each other up.  It speaks to the desire in the audience to believe that maybe we are better than this, maybe we do deserve heroes who aren’t sociopaths and who don’t rig the games they claim to play on our behalf.  The appeal of the Batman myth lies largeley in the fact that, underneath the armor and gadgets, he’s an ordinary human.  The thing that makes The Dark Knight great, then, is that it’s key victory is one where the ordinary humans, none of them even so much as named, refuse to kill each other.  The Joker and Batman deserve each other.    However, the possibility that I love the movie for leaving open is that the people in the boats might not deserve either one of them.

I’m not saying he fails to make good points. All I’m saying is that I enjoyed the film, and that his final two paragraphs remind me that film criticism is not only the pinnacle of the old adage of “those who can’t, teach,” and that you apparently have to be a joyless bastard to be a semi-professional analyst of the most possibly joyous art form.

or you could always be a film critic because you can find the minutae in any film, even something that was supposed to be a passed off comic flick like TDK.

i still dislike n+1 though.

“Which is to say, hi guys! This is my first Gawker post. I’ll be covering the media and ideas, which is to say, Nick Denton’s ideas about the media. I am open to all venture financing I can receive via PayPal.””
— Moe’s first post. In which she flaunts the single most broad and general topic ever seen by anyone. (Gawker)

I don't get the Olympics' coverage.

I’ve been watching this for two hours. It’s moved from cycling to sculling to beach volleyball.  And it will keep going for another five hours.

But still, I keep watching. I’m not sure if it is lazy guilt or pride or that weird loyalty thing I feel swell up in me when the Red Sox take on the Yankees.

Actually, that probably just comes from a history of picking bad teams and underdogs.

And did you know Maniac Cop 2 isn’t avaliable on DVD, but very much is on the Internet? I didn’t. I’m going back to sleep.