Subjective opinions and personal preferences are sacred but you gotta recognize the credit and accept some facts.

I don’t like lord of the rings, but of course Jackson is a very good or great director and the trilogy is amazing.

I think the opinion of a producer, actor or critic is more reliable than a simple film enthusiast. In judging the quality of a product.

Whatever people like him or not; Nolan is a very good director, who is "polarizing" only with film snobs, due to his extreme popularity.

Even if he’s not the best director I just love inception and the dark knight too much, to not defend him :P

You can state facts, of course.

Nolan's films are well-received critically. Nolan's films are successful in the theater. Nolan's films are well-received by audiences.

Someone can still think he's a hack.

If everyone accepted "facts" because it's what most other people think, we'd still have a geocentric model of the solar system.

Vibing with someone who loves the films you love is a great part of being a movie fan, but trying to talk sense into people who don't like films you love is also a great part of being a movie fan.

I mean, 1/3 of the friendship I have with Wooley involves me trying to help him come around to the correct opinion of Haute Tension. :D

No, that's not how it works. Anyone, with some logic and intelligence know that it's his "problem" in that case.

I know about set pieces, cgi and can see that lord of the rings are great films and well made ones. They just don’t work for me, but that’s because I don’t like fantasy settings in general.

An opinion written behind a computer screen is not equal to an opinion written by an outsider or professional critic for a prestigious magazine.

I have talked with some that aren’t big fans of mcu and Nolan films and some of them atleast can recognize that they are fairly solid films on their own.

You can say someone is an hack when he’s Zack Snyder (all panned films and divisive with general audience).

The entire world wasn’t fooled about any trick. If both audience and critics loved the film, and it was well made and received multiple awards and praise then; you can’t say that Inception was a "terrible film".

at beta you can say that you didn’t like it. And that’s fine.

Just like i did with lotr trilogy :)

You can also argue that Jackson is a 6/10 director that gets entirely carried by the strength of the source material on LoTR, the cast and the production surrounding the project. I don't remember there being a particularly great piece of directing in the trilogy. the story is just a 12/10.

And let the record show that Nolan is bad at stuff. I wouldn't call him a great director at all. Inception is messy as hell, comedically unimaginative (A secret in a dream represented by an envelope in a safe? Genius!) He has a very primitive way of making movies. Overloading the information and having emotions simply by having actors emote them, and projecting them using the score. Nicolas Winding Refn, Katheryn Bigelow and Kiyoshi Kurosawa are folks I'd consider great directors. People who know how to array the elements of the medium to convey, rather than essentially making plays with camera cranes and editing.

Refn is an ok, style over substance director with duds into his resume. If that’s what you call great, like he’s got only one film worth mentioning or talking about (drive)... lol

I heavily disagree with you on Jackson and Nolan. So you can keep your only god forgives and ill keep my inception or Jackson’s work (I dig his first films)

And we don’t discuss it. Fine? :)

Re: Do cinephiles watch blockbuster films?
 

Style over substance is not a thing. Style is either the substance, or helps convey it. Refn offloads a lot of the emotional labor of the movie from the actors on to the technical aspects of his movies. He has a uniformly more focused way of constructing scenes than either Nolan or Jackson.

I'd consider Neon Demon, Valhalla Rising and Too Old To Die Young to be stronger than Drive as well.

But it's ok to call other directors hacks, just not one of your favourites?

We get it. You like Christopher Nolan films. Not everybody has to.

Poor Sookie. Her innocence has been irretrievably ruined. All this time, she thoughts cinephiles were movie lovers.

And to add to this (if you don't mind), there's no such thing as objective greatness, only general consensus.

Again, did most scientists thinking that the Earth was the center of the solar system make that a true thing? No. But it was a popular "critical" consensus from experts in that field.

Art exists at an intersection between technical practice and subjective experience (I know I've said this before). Different viewers may respond more to one end of that spectrum than the others, and different viewers may also have varying opinions about them. (Is Elizabeth Berkley's performance in Showgirls amazing and perfect or terrible?). This inevitably leads to an array of responses to different films.

I think that loving films just means engaging with them honestly. If someone's honest opinion is that a director is bad at what they do, you can certainly offer counterpoints to their criticisms, but I think it's not actually that compelling to say "Well most people love it, so you must be wrong."

No they dont. Being a critic doesn't suddenly embue somebody with insight. People should be judged on the quality of what they say about a film and not by some arbitrary job title. Most critics heads are full of cold farts.


Also, even if you choose not to refute critical consensus, you do know these change over time? Right? So, if the tide eventually turns against Nolan, should I expect you to start making endless threads about what a hack he is?

You win!


...the FanBoy award that is.

i have autism so i dont know much

I…..can’t tell if you’re joking?

no im not joking -.-

DePalma, Carpenter have fallen off and had plenty of panned films but that does cancel their great stuff? No.

So, in no way, Nolan can or will be described as an hack.

Also, I trust more about a professional film critic and those outsiders (producers, actors, directors) rather than a simple film enthusiast who wrote his opinion from a keyboard and not from a magazine or/and in an interview.

Feel free to not like him, but hate and disrespect is annoying. There should be some sense of fairness when judging something.

I never called any other director hack.

I’m sorry. I’m not making fun of you or anything. I just wasn’t sure if you were serious or not.

its okay im use to it. oh okay yeah i wasn't joking

That's an absurd question.

Yes, obviously.

I'm really surprised to see this thread have so many pages. I was totally expecting the OP to be a couple years old or so and the thread just got bumped.

Except that one time...

...about those two directors.

Re: Do cinephiles watch blockbuster films?
 

I am in no way surprised that someone whose top ten includes the likes of Bela Tarr, Andrei Tarkovsky, and Theo Angelopoulos is liable to view Christopher Nolan as being in the same league as Michael Bay or Zack Snyder.

"Professional" in the context of criticism is a meaningless adjective. In recent decades it's held even less weight, distilled down to just "someone who gets paid for it", full stop. It's not analogous to, say, a high school football player versus a professional NFL player — where "professional" actually implies a separation of skill level in the position. Nor does "professional critic" imply a type of artisanal approach to the craft.

The vast majority of professional film critics featured in popular circulations and the corporate blogosphere have no background in either film study or criticism — — neither of those are a requirement for the job. They largely come from journalism and digital communications programs, sometimes even dualing in business.

Professional film critic jobs are acquired and dictated by the person's ability to meet constant suffocating deadlines, cover the most recent productions/trending topics (to better generate revenue via ad-space and/or web traffic), and maintaining their masthead's rapport with industry reps through junkets and promo features. The content and critical merits average professional pop-journalist reviewer are, more often than not, afterthoughts (if they're seriously considered at all).

The professional critics who are able to successfully market themselves through a variety of publicity efforts (independent of their editors or otherwise) have a better chance to secure exclusive staff or column positions for popular outlets — even then, success generally depends on the person's PR savvy.

But increasingly since the turn of the century — even moreso after the Web 2.0 environment was normalized in particular — the idea/goal of professional movie critics (i.e., pop-journalists) achieving household-name status, or even being the dictating voice of their publication, has become quite rare.

However, there are many excellent film critics who self-publish while also contributing to commercial media outlets. There are also many excellent critics who largely just self-publish. Then there's the ocean of valuable criticism in scholarly/longform fields, in which a lot of great self-published critics (including some renowned, ex-"professional" commercial people) spend some of their time.

A good chunk of the greatest and most significant film critics of the 20th century started out as "simple film enthusiasts" writing their opinions in notebooks and publishing them with a small group of like-minded individuals.

I am one of those people who has written about film and theater and music in legit publications. Do you know what movie credentials I needed to get those jobs? Zero. Zilch. Nada. You do not know what you are talking about when you elevate the opinions of those who write for magazines. They aren't some magical breed of person different from basic film lovers. In fact, sometimes they aren't even film lovers and just got saddled with a job they are completely unqualified for.


You also keep stepping around acknowledging the fallacy in your argument. The one where critical consensus changes. It's not written in a tablet for the ages. No artist has immunity from being called out. None.


And this isn't even getting into the fact you are incapable of keeping your arguments straight. You claim it's wrong to call critically acclaimed movies bad. Which you have done in other threads. You claim you don't call other directors hacks, when you have. In this thread.


Don't be confused when others don't find what you say particularly convincing. And stop worrying about how you can't stop them from making your ears burn every time they say Nolan stinks.


People have different opinions about film than you. Opinions that they are capable of justifying with the thoughts in their head. Whatever they may be. So take it from a highly esteemed and published critic like myself to deal with it. Just accept some people don't like Nolan, and they are not wrong for doing so. After all, you're obigated to listen to people like me, since my words have apparently been turned into unalterable law by movie magazines.

Let's not forget that, this being the internet, Nolan -like anyone or anything else- can only be one of two things : the best ever or the worst ever. There is no such thing as a decent overrated director, or a work with great strengths and great weaknesses.

If this looks grey to you, you may need to adjust your monitor's contrast.

Good to see someone argue that, but not everyone here is extended the same courtesy, so no surprise Ezrangel won’t acknowledge it. It seems to be very fashionable here to explain to people why their opinion, on film and other issues, is “wrong”.

But Snyder and Bay are 100% hacks, based on their directing and critical reviews, lol.

I mean Bela Tarr etc, seems like snob stuff that probably would say that some blockbuster director like Nolan or Raimi is not his cup of tea?

I know my stuff about technical aspects, but still I would say that I watch films for fun most of the time.

The two directors I started with cinema were Nolan and raimi for their respective trilogies. So of course, I am heavily attached to either.

Call me an enthusiast.

I said personal opinions are sacred; but of course there are more knowledgeable and competent people when talking about films. It applies to almost all things in one real life.

Someone should have sair "I don’t like it" like I did with lord of the rings; because it’s just not... possible to argue that it’s a trilogy made of bad quality films.

I don't mean to sound too presumptuous here, but I think you might have some trouble differientiating between a good movie and a well directed movie. LoTR is a good trilogy, but you can argue that Jackson was merely not in the way of the production, and that's why The Hobbit was vastly worse; because he didn't have that same production. You can also dislike all of Bay and Snyder's movies, but recognize they have vision and know how to get it to the screen, though the scripts they work with, or what they do with their talents may not be everyone's cup of tea.

I don’t see much wrong with hobbits either the script was just overstuffed and they were boring and had cgi

But his directing is always good.

Re: Do cinephiles watch blockbuster films?
 

@Ezrangel
Is it possible for someone to really like some of Nolan's movies and also dislike other of his films...and still be considered a credible reviewer by you?

The Hobbit was bad because it was a four hour movie stretched to 9 and that's from the Studio.



They Shall Not Grow Old is a masterpiece
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IrabKK9Bhds

It’s not about Nolan but in general; how a reviewer talks and reviews something.

You can see who’s unbiased or more fair and who’s an hater. It’s easy.

The term "hack" alone means someone is an hater lol

Why are you guys still in here entertaining this child?

I think in many ways it’s natural not to be 100 per cent consistent in one’s opinions, and I’m not sure why that’s expected. It’s reasonable to aim not to be too self-contradictory, but people are not machines and opinions are impacted by emotions and context, and therefore change.

I love everything that Lynch does, but I find Eraserhead pretty revolting, does that mean I’m contradicting myself? I think it’s unreasonable to expect people’s opinions on different things to fall in a neat, ordered line and all tie in with each other.

I've got no issue with anyone arguing their tastes passionately. If Erzangel wants to fawn over Nolan , they should go for it. If they think Nolan is indisputably great, argue that. But he is stepping past that by telling others what they should argue. And has even criticized how people should defend movies (not with any of that snobby intelligence and knowledge, supposedly). That horse **** is meant to kill discussion, and that is why I'm not going to give much respect to where they are coming from.


I couldn't care less what people like or don't like. I personally have no issue with Nolan. And I will even be happy to listen to support of lots of directors I actively do not like (Eli Roth, James Wan). What matters to me is the quality of their defense. And deferring to critical consensus is a dreadful argument that Erzangel is peddling. It is intellectual death. It is clearly loaded with obvious issues, which Erzangel clearly must recognize because he has yet to acknowledge any of them. He keeps relying on critics to make his argument for him, because he actually doesn't even have one. And, in short, it is annoying.

I agree with you, but I feel a certain degree of frustration (which has nothing at all to do with this thread) in regards to my own views being referred to as “wrong” in many other threads, repeatedly. And I am 100 per cent with you in that one shouldn’t tell other people what to argue, but I thought I’d point out that happens a lot here and not all opinions are seen as “valid”. Not at all.

One definitely does one’s best to argue one’s point and provide evidence, but those of us here that have ever had anything to do with law (and I engage in litigation all day long) will know that language is a beastly thing, and defending one’s point can easily descend into arguing over definitions with no end in sight. All of which is a bit sad.

I guess I’ve become rather disillusioned with the idea of respectful dialogue where both sides are being heard.

That example is not contradictory. Liking Lynch does not imply you like everything he does. And, yes, no one is 100 percent pure from contradicting themself.


There are contradictions that are blatant hypocrisies though. Saying repeatedly it is wrong to ever hate a movie, days after creating a thread about how they hate Blue Velvet and everyone who likes it is lying to themselves because he hates it, is blatant hypocrisy. Then refusing to acknowledge it time and time again, shows someone is deliberately being disingenuous.


To call Michael Bay a hack, then a couple of posts later, claim he has never called anyone a hack, then get back to calling them hacks again within a couple more posts, is either transparent trolling, or someone who keeps absolutely no track of what they are even saying.
I'm pretty comfortable calling someone out who does this repeatedly. Especially when they keep insinuating others are stupid and obviously wrong if they don't agree with them. It's obnoxious. And annoying.

Michael Bay is clearly a hack.

I would never call any director a hack though.

But Snyder and Bay are 100% hacks, based on their directing and critical reviews, lol

Read the sacred reviews to see who is unbiased and fair versus just being a hater

Someone merely uttering the term "hack" means they're a hater, lol

HMMMM...

I mean, a competent director.

Of course, quality of a film is objective. And I have changed my opinion in Lynch since months; he’s great.

Mulholland drive is in my top 10.

Quality of a film is objective.

And I have changed my opinion on a filmmaker

https://youtu.be/ilcRS5eUpwk

Re: Do cinephiles watch blockbuster films?
 

Honestly guys, I think this discussion is just going to keep going around in circles, so I don't see a point in continuing with it. Ezrangel has already shown that they're completely unable to spot their blatant and unsubtle contradictions, regardless of how clearly they're pointed out, so I don't see this discussion going anywhere.

Lol I didn't notice that.

Good to see you guys are having fun.

https://i.imgur.com/0hQyd5L.gif

Provided to you by the one and only... Mr Minio!

I have just watched his films and you can clearly see that Lynch does have a dinstinct surreal style so instead of focusing on the plot, I enjoyed his films a lot more the second time.

What I mean with objective is that you can’t say any director who is good or great whatever is Lynch, Nolan, raimi, Jackson and say they are mediocre or hacks.

You can see the directing, techniques and praise they have gotten.

In the case of Snyder and bay. You can day they’re hacks based on critics and general consensus. That would be not hating

Hope this helps. The opinion of critics and outsiders is easily, easily some evidence.*

Feel free to disagree. But something isn’t considered great of amazing by the entire world because they’re "casuals" or "they don’t know anything" about films.

That’s what I mean.

Stop bringing your rational thinking around here. What am I supposed to do with that? Listen? Learn? Pffft! No thanks!

Maybe we could ask Ezrangel if he hates James Wan. If he does, that may resolve all our differences.

Please explain what specific elements in films by any of the directors you just named (either good or bad), how they use them, and what about their singular use makes that director good or bad.

I love a good rerun. I haven't seen this one in a while.

I do like James Wan films

Saw, Fast 7 and Conjuring are all great and enjoyable films that I have seen multiple times.

And last thing; I would end the discussion here. Not the biggest expert of technical aspects tbh (but I have seen multiple breakdowns and analyzed a few scenes from that directors).

Yeah, it's something alright. Easily, easily something. And something? Isn't nothing.


https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/pr...IB4bRCDOs0OBEw

:rolleyes:

We are not worthy

Re: Do cinephiles watch blockbuster films?
 

I’ll say this about Ezrangel: He’s consistently inconsistent.

Re: Do cinephiles watch blockbuster films?
 

For what it's worth, Michael Bay has two films in the Criterion Collection (twice as many as Nolan, lol).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pyx7YRU4trs

Nolan famously loves watching Bay films.

There is no record of Bay returning the compliment.

Exactly. I know what’s mise en scene, 180 degree rule, one take and can see if a film is directed well or not but I am not the biggest expert in telling someone why a scene is good 100% and one is bad

Nolan has one with Following btw.

Bay is also appreciated by Ridley Scott, James Cameron, Nolan and McQuarrie.

He is an hack. But he does have some recognizable things, called Bayhem.

Re: Do cinephiles watch blockbuster films?
 

As I recall, Nolan watched the 2017 version of Justice League and warned Snyder against ever watching it himself.

I have trouble thinking of Bay and Snyder as hacks because they have such recognisable style even if the individual movies as a whole aren't necessarily good, which is more than I can say for countless other directors.

.

He's got also more than James Cameron or Villenueve.

Re: Do cinephiles watch blockbuster films?
 

And countless other directors have more than either of them put together. It's like these kinds of "objective" criteria are always a little arbitrary.

In my opinion... there’s always a sense of objectivity.

For example: directors on the same level as Orson Welles and Kubrick.

I'd say: critical reviews, awards, and all-time (or decade) lists can give you a sense of how good a director is considered. Also general consensus is good to know that.

Now, whatever someone likes him or not; that’s a purely subjective thing and the personal favorite director list too.

"This is 10x better than X" or "this is garbage an hack" is hating, so I would always say, make constructive criticism.

When one affords Bay and Snyder the same narrative leeway they give to “art” directors that favor aesthetic, mood and style over plot and character, their qualities are undeniable.

Officially outing myself as an inconsistent person here, given our back and forth in the other thread, but this is truly very funny. Hat off.