NoumenonPhenomenon

Can't wait to vote no for this one.

Is that something you can elaborate on? I really dislike this specific critique of films, and unless you yourself are philosophically literate I don't see how this even makes sense, There's a naive nihilistic worldview that can be very sophomoric, but that doesn't make the position of nihilism sophomoric as such. What about it's world view did you find sophomoric?

Favorite Movie in: Apocalypse Now! Least Favorite in: Animal House/Working Girl/There's Something About Mary Favorite Out: Inception. Apocalype Now is one of the movies that made me realize cinema is an amazing artform, I'll forever love it. Animal House and Mary are sort of lame comedies that are funny the first time and then are tedious on rewatches, and Working Girl is pretty mediocre. Inception surprised me on a rewatch, since I only saw it once when it came out and remember liking it, but Devin's arguments for it made me look at it with a new eye and I think it's a remarkably constructed and original speculative fiction story that utilizes elements that can only be done through cinema. Really striking film.

This is a yes for me. While recognizing that Amy is often incredibly insightful and a delightful podcast personality, I philosophically disagree with her about cinema as a whole. Over the course of this podcast I believe we've seen Amy make a case that the most, and often overriding, factor in what makes a movie great or not is it's characters, and how the movie serves to make their story interesting in a critical sense. So, when she derides a movie for empty style, she's often just complaining that she doesn't like what a story does with its characters. I think that this devalues the aesthetics of cinema, and turns it into just another storytelling vehicle. While storytelling is important, I do not believe cinema should, in any way, be reduced to merely another way to tell a story with characters in it. I believe Amy often engages in this sort of reductionist attitude, where the things she likes could easily be transposed into theater or prose. She seems to reify the notion of character in a story and elevate it above all else. It seems so many of her complaints are that either she didn't like the characters or that too many things happen in a movie that don't serve the character's story. Obviously there are things I reify or elevate in some sort of arbitrary sense, and I'm not necessarily faulting Amy for that, since I do not believe there are objective standards at play here. Just an observation about Amy's critical tendencies which I disagree with. As an aside, I do think Amy was incredibly condescending when she dismissively said that this movie makes people "feel" smart. It's single handedly saying that the movie isn't smart and that the viewers themselves probably aren't that smart either. I think this movie is smart, and the intellectual things it references aren't just cheap things to make people feel smart, it's an earnest attempt to be philosophical, and it succeeds. I wonder how much philosophy Amy is actually familiar with. I wonder that about a lot of reviewers, actually, but I feel like I'm rambling, so I'll shut up before I make more of an ass of myself.