9 Notes
“Cloud Atlas (2012), directed by the Wachowskis and Tom Tykwer, is a thing of beauty, the likes of which I have not seen in American Cinema. While I regard Rian Johnson’s “Looper” as easily the best film of the year thus far, this film might be the best film of the decade. Nevertheless, considering how many people walked out of the screening within the first hour, I suspect that this film will successfully alienate or confuse most of its viewers, earning more appreciation in the years to come, long after most of us have expired. If you have the patience, it might take forty minutes to begin to understand it, and to subsequently immerse yourself into it. In that way, it also reminded me of Terrence Malick’s “The Tree of Life” (2011). It is that good. It is so good that I can tell you everything about this movie, and I will still have told you nothing.”
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So, yeah, these are exactly the kinds of things to say to me when you are trying to get me to see a film. Seriously, movies that people actively dislike enough to actually walk out of tend to correspond, with scarily accurate precision, to films that I fall in love with (Tree of Life being the most recent example, but it’s a pattern that goes back a long way for me). I tend to fall really super hard for films that manage to move professional critics, to the point where they almost give up trying to explain (for once!) why they loved it so much, and instead fall back on just being passionate about discussing it (reviews like this almost always contain lines about how not everyone will feel the same way about the film, how it will likely be far more appreciated in the decades to come, how the film takes work but also fully rewards it, and how telling you about the movie wouldn’t really tell you at all about the experience of the movie).
So does always falling for those kind of films make me pretentious or just obnoxious?
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mattyhoyouknow answered:
It’s what your brain likes, man!
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inwonderment likes this
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beautyabounds said:
Really super awesome.
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mattlowe likes this
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metapunker answered:
Sometimes it’s the movies that the reviewers hate which is the good one. There are plenty of examples but I don’t have any.
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condalmo likes this
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murmurandshout likes this
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bechase said:
I’m not directing this at you (as I suspect you already have done this) but instead at everyone talking about this movie: fuck off and read the book first, then take a peek at the movie. Books to film, ugh.
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whirl-on likes this
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sometimesagreatnotion posted this
