Film People! Explain yourselves!

Actually, I find that this board has an abundance of film snobs - Donnie Darko and Amelie getting a lot of hate especially.

I dunno. It just seems to me that a billion years of evolutions have finely honed us into efficient machines for liking Busted real good. Standing outside that is like, I dunno, living in trees or something.

your premise is flawed because people like busted because they're (apparently) good fun and blahblah - same as people like watching schlocky action fests, innit?

I'm not really a big film person, so I can't really relate to this, even though it happens several times a year. The level of hype around music or literature doesn't come close, especially pre-release, except in exceptional cases:

Harry Potter And The Order Of The Phoenix - the Be Here Now of books?

Like, one could be a film dick and only watch Kubrick, Murnau, Herzog, and Cassavetes (for example) just like one could be a rockist asshole and only listen to Rush and Yes (or Velvet Underground and Roxy Music or Dizzy and Wiliey, etc); but it's funner to give them all a shot without surrendering your own critical facilities to the scales of the hegemony of whatever subculture you're most closely affiliated with.

in a sense such films are disposable commodities just like a Busted single*. Some are good (Spiderman 2, "Thunderbirds Are Go!") and some you're disappointed by (insert your own movie/Busted examples here) but it's no biggie cos there'll a;ways be another one coming soon.

*I wasn't sure what point you were making with your ILM analogy, sorry. I'm not sure I'm a typical ILM poster any more tho'.

I guess what I meant with the ILM analogy is that stuff like Busted and Britney and, say, Legally Blonde/Spiderman I think of as being genre pieces where the genre is pop, whereas the atuff I'm talking aboutseems like standard genre stuff in non-pop genres, which ILM tends to to be way less keen on?

I haven't seen them, Dan - I probably will, and I'm sure I'll enjoy them. But I know nothing about film. I guess what I'm asking is: do mainstream-but-non-pop-genre films throw more of a bone to buffs than the equivalent in movies, books, etc?

I think that it is slocki that often says this, and I can tell you that he is genuinely excited about the prospect of seeing whatever movie has inspired him to type in all caps, but he knows when to call a spade a spade. Like with Sky Captain. Or The Aviator.

Somebody said this upthread but even the Iranian imports can be formulaic.

Or should I? Oh no.

but yeah i think it kinda is a keep up thing, and it's so hard to know what a film is going to be like (bittorrent aside) without actually going to see it.

but then again people go and see bands sometimes that they'd never seen before! and buy books just by the way it looks! and then put them on the shelf again!

i guess a film is good too because at least it tells a story (which seeing a gig most of the time doesn't - it's hard to be immersed in a show if you don't know the songs), and is over in 1.5-3 hours (rather than a book which can be 293489282 pages long)

I actually ration out the "snob" movies and the more popular stuff, so if I've been watching a Victor Sjostrom season at the PFA, I will deliberately gorge myself on the likes of Harold & Kumar or Mean Girls for a couple of days.

Guilty. As. Charged.

but otoh you might like films for certain aspects and find a lot about them shit -- so i like 'the bourne identity' despite a lot of lapses in basic things like plot, because the action is brilliantly and economically staged. but i won't tolerate that kind of mixed feeling about a pop song. there'll be another along in three minutes and... if they ain't cuttin then i put em on foot patrol.

and i love a film with a good hook

Not you too! What's up?

Hope it gets better. Why are you never on AIM anymore? I have actually started using it now!

A mixture of things is good, plus obscure Iranian films aren't often on in Ealing and I have to wait for my pal to tape them off BBC 4.