Baseball Toaster was unplugged on February 4, 2009.
By Joseph Cox
Everytime I watch a movie, I mull where in the grand hierarchy of cinema it belongs. This process is supposedly ongoing, but I often revisit an old favorite (say: American Beauty) and wonder what I was thinking when I liked it in the first place. Today, my top five favorite movies might be something like The Big Lebowski, The Royal Tenenbaums, Stevie, The New World and The Decalogue, but tomorrow only Lebowski and Tenenbaums would remain.
It isn't that I don't have any criteria to judge movies, but after film classes, theory books, hours reading film criticism and enough movie watching to make me permanently allergic to sunshine (read: pasty), I have too many yardsticks to judge a movie with. Should I worry about auteur theory (Altman!), genre subversion (The Host!), thematic complexity (Angels in America!) or just simple entertainment value (Monty Python!)? So during a movie I either over-intellectualize ("Was that the plot point? Can someone make a movie about Africa that doesn't star a white guy?") or completely non-intellectualize, and simply live in the moment. It is probably more important to think about the movie afterwards anyway, though I end up forgetting a lot of the best parts and taking notes would be the ultimate mood killer.
I would like to think that just playing it by ear would work. I probably shouldn't go through back issues of Cahiers du cinema before watching Rush Hour 3 and I shouldn't watch Abbas Kiarostami movies with a hangover, but I don't want to buy into the "subtle bigotry of lower expectations," because it is obvious is that there is a caste system in the evaluation of movies. Certain movies (comedies, horror films) are seen as inherently lowbrow, while hoity toity schlock seemingly gets a free pass to a higher plane (Finding Neverland). Sure, not every movie released in December is an Oscar contender, but, as Sasha Baron Cohen found out, nothing released to box office success during the dog days of summer is regarded as more than bread and circuses for the great unwashed. Why can't a movie be all things to all people?
So ultimately, what makes a movie good? At the very least, a good movie should illicit strong emotional reactions, while middlebrow (or worse) leave no impression whatsoever. True art is a search for something authentic and telling about the human experience, and as such it should resonate. No matter how slick and clever a movie is, if it never taps into real emotion then it won't have any staying power in the mind's eye. Everything else is negotiable, but that is the bedrock. At least for me. So what do you look for in a movie?
(Editor's response: The Shifty System)
Seriously, I enjoyed reading you post. I definitely need a movie to resonate to me for me to really enjoy it and recommend it to others. It needs to have a few "That's cool" moments where I find myself nodding my head because something really surprises me and/or is just perfectly crafted (e.g. when the wardon finally gazes at the poster in Tim Robbins' cell in Shawshank or the ending of Field of Dreams).
A movie, to be really great, also has to hold up. I remember really liking Forest Gump the first time I saw it and the second time getting little out of it. Yet I could watch Shawshank, The Sixth Sense, Pulp Fiction, Memento, The Usual Suspects, the original Manchurian Candidate again and always get enjoyment out of them.
One mark of a movie on my great list is I'll watch any part or the whole thing if it is being played on TV. I can watch Treasure of the Sierra Madre, or His Girl Friday or North by Northwest, etc. at any point and enjoy myself, no matter how cut up by commercials.
The response was: Forest Gump is a terrible movie, something akin to conservative propaganda and a much less interesting version of "Being There."
I found this old Harper's article of an email exchange between Judd Apatow and Mark Brazill. The language is a tad salty, but it is a pretty interesting read.
http://www.harpers.org/archive/2002/03/0079095
Now during Cool World I went into convulsions.
"Being There" is remarkable though.
which is why i loved the ending in A History of Violence. That ending was pretty damn emotional, very intense for me. People around me thought it was kind of boring, but I think that was my favorite movie the last few years....
for some reason I can also watch the Predator over and over again, no clever sub-plots, etc. i hope im not the only that feels this way about the original.
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