Film Buffs: STFU
I despise pretense. And surely the most pretentious, preening fools alive are film critics, and the sheep who worship them, film buffs. And these people are at their most ridiculous when they maintain against all evidence that some director or actor is a genius.
One case of this is M. Night Shyamalan. He gave us one good movie, The Sixth Sense, and critics and fans were heralding him as the next Hitchcock. Never mind that he has produced nothing but crap since: Unbearable Unbreakable, Sucks Signs, and The Frottage The Village. The Emperor has no clothes. Shyamalan is a one-hit wonder. No evidence at all of any genius. But he could put out crap movies for the next fifty years and these idiotic critics and buffs would still insist that he was some sort of genius.
Amazing.
David Cronenberg is another. He hasn’t put out one single film of any exceptional worth in his career. Not one. Yet, he’s another genius.
Amazing.
Cronenberg excreted A History of Violence this year, surely one of the worst movies I have ever seen. Every minute of this movie is derivative, it is almost disturbingly predicatble, there is no discernable point, it is choppy and annoying, yet critics and buffs loved it as some sort of work of genius. David Cronenberg is laughing all the way to the bank.
However, the award for the worst movie of the year, or at least the movie I hated the most, goes to Spielberg’s War of the Worlds. This is a different case than the above.
Schindler’s List was a celebration of heroism; War of the Worlds is a celebration of cowardice. Our “hero” is a coward from beginning to end. The only character who is heroic and wants to fight is portrayed as crazy. War of the Worlds is a vile, depicable film that puts vile, despicable behavior on a pedestal. The only good thing about the film is the casting: Tom Cruise is perfectly cast to play a coward (just as the only good thing about A History of Violence is that John Hurt gets killed.)
I am not so patiently awaiting the opening of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe this coming Friday. It would be nice to see a good movie for a change.