I don't know how to hate films

*I* haven't but apparently they're not that bad.

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Look, I'm not judging you - after all, I'm posting here myself, but maybe, just maybe, if you spent less time here and more time watching films, maybe, and I stress, maybe your taste would be of some value. Just a thought, ya know.

The first one and a bit of the second one.

For a bizarrely deep examination of Human Centipede: https://www.dukeupress.edu/life-destroying-diagrams

(OK, my aside is over!)

Beautifully written, Minio. Remember that you have no obligation to criticize or display negativity; and expressing your thoughts and concerns about cinema should not necessarily come in the shape of exposing flaws. It is your own way not only to enjoy it but to communicate it, and if those flaws do not hold a significant weight in your mind, then do not go out of your way to hate or dislike. Keep enjoying everything you do and keep your mind occupied with the things that matter to you as a film fan.

The same would apply to the contrary; enjoying the act of tearing apart films and analyzing their flaws, or having that little satisfaction after watching something terrible and venting all the resulting frustration in pure verbose hatred, are all perfectly fine ways to display your relationship with cinema.

This made me think about my own development and relationship with film. I'm in a bit of an amateur critic mindset, due to being used to write more or less formally for a blog site. That in a way has made me go further on why I like or don't like something, which has many positive effects on me as I better order my thoughts, am better at diagnosing why I like something or perhaps not so much and can express my ideas in a more clear way, but it has also made writing about movies a bit of a colder and more distant experience than it was when I was younger. Sometimes I wish I was more visceral, but I think it somewhat comes as a consequence of starting to think -overthink, at times- about the structure of ideas and how to put them in writing that a bit of the spontaneous impulse is lost. Anyway, this is how I enjoy and express my love for movies now and it's been a long and always evolving way.

Yes it is. Last night I saw Godzilla X Kong, and the answer is that despite an entire army of animators and sound FX experts, indeed you CAN make a bad movie.

FX were rendered in painfully awful detail and acting was "top drawer", by comparison to a TV detergent commercial at least.

As for script writing, all you need to know is the title. That's pretty much it except for some cameos by other monsters.

None of that amounts to "worst things in life" (nobody I know died for this movie), but as a two hour exercise in cinematic entertainment, it's definitely awful.

I don't know that "hate" is the right word and since it was entirely digital, "film" doesn't even apply, but it definitely qualified for my speculation on whether I'd rather have spent those hours in my basement, having a couple more beers.

I will pat myself on my own back here, however, because I saw it in my neighborhood, non-corporate theater rather than driving out to The Mall cineplex. My local theater did fairly well last night.

Where did I say a bad movie couldn't be made? Was it in that quote when I say I've watched a million bad movies in my life?


But thanks for keeping up.

Sorry I let this sit for weeks. In the interim Minio replied to me in some other threads where he sort of took some of the ideas in this thread and brought them into that one. I deflected them there because they were only adjacent to the topic and seemed to fit better here. I'll reproduce that bit:

This is something that many our discussions end up getting into eventually, if we probe them enough: with Minio criticizing the idea of thinking about movies and advocating we focus more on feeling them.

I have two objections to this. The first is just axiomatic and therefore may not be that persuasive, but has to be said anyway. The second is more from a shared premise.

First: I don't think "feeling" a film is better than "thinking" it. It's another way of experiencing it, another way to derive something good or pleasurable from it. I have no trouble accepting the inverse, that someone like you might get more out of the aesthetic, the vibe, or other hazy things about the film unrelated to concrete things like plot or narrative, and I think you should be able to do the same in reverse. Preemptively, I'll say that I think you can be reasonably critical of someone who seems to only care about those things and seems unable to care about anything else, but not of someone who just prefers them or (more likely) just cares about them more than you do.

Second: I don't think the distinction between "feeling" films and "thinking" about them is a real one, or at least not a firm one. It's often said--and personal experience suggests to me this is definitely at least sometimes true--that we have feelings as a sort of early warning sign for intellectual conclusions. Something might move you in a way that is surprising, and you only later realize why. Your subconscious does the math before your consciousness. Maybe you value the mystical here, and deliberately avoid thinking about your feelings because you think finding their source would somehow diminish them. I don't think that way.

But whether we agree on that or not, the key point is that thinking and feeling are not two isolated categories. When something in a narrative surprises me, I still feel something. The surprise and delight in my mind is itself a feeling. The sense of exploration and possibility that I get from an exciting premise and a strong first act, where anything might happen after, is both a thought and a feeling at once. The distinction between the two is more pragmatic than it is literal, the same way terms like "short" or "tall" have no firm meaning but are necessary for communication

Now, maybe the above sounds like I'm intellectualizing ABOUT the intersection of thoughts and feelings, but the amusing thing is, I get an actual pure feeling from certain types of thoughts! It's this bubbly little thing in my stomach, and I only get it for certain kinds of things. At first, I mostly got it playing video games: specifically, the kinds with large open worlds, full of possibility and promise. I'd look out over a landscape and wonder what was over that hill in the distance and my stomach would tingle in this particular way that I never experienced in another context. Later, I noticed I had the same sensation when an exciting new idea occurred to me! Sometimes it was an idea for an essay, or a short story, and it was always something that felt like it could go in many different directions. The throughline, I decided, was that I was getting a physical sensation from a sudden rush of possibilities.

So, perhaps, at least in some cases, what you see as intellectualization is actually people who get emotional reactions from more things, or from different things, than you do. Because while I get pure intellectual gratification from the things I just described, I also find myself chasing that physical, emotional high for its own sake.

I can't say I find that very valuable, or moving. I know me fairly well, it's other people I need to know more about. There's a reason films have been called "empathy machines."

To me, there is a magic in recognizing yourself in a film not because the film is TRYING to reflect you, but because it HAPPENS to. Because when that happens, you are communicating in a common language with another mind across space and time. There's an old Lewis quote I think about a lot: "Friendship is born the moment one person says to another 'My God, you too? I thought I was the only one!" He also said "We read to know we are not alone," and you can replace "read" with any verb that describes experiencing an art form.

To me, the sense of intimacy I feel when I recognize something in a film that was NOT made for me, but nonetheless speaks directly to me, is tremendously valuable, and even life-affirming.

I think this is definitely true, and it's why people fight about it so much. Most other art forms have mostly become the purview of devotees, whereas films are still watched by lots of casual viewers and lots of devotees.

I do love the combo compliment/insult directed in both directions.

I think it might help to thing in terms of tradeoffs. Intellectualizing cinema can certainly rob people of pure feeling sometimes, but there are corresponding pleasures that compensate for that, and which will be missed by people doing their best to disregard narrative. It's difficult to call one better or worse, and more importantly, it's not clear people can really choose. I can't really stop myself from monitoring the events of a film and speculating about what might happen next, or why. It happens automatically. I'm sure it's made me enjoy some films less, but it's definitely helped me enjoy some more. It's just who I am, so I simply make the best of it.

Something related to the above I couldn't fit in gracefully: there's a joke from Demetri Martin (I think) that I really like: "I think the best part about being dumb is it makes magic better." Funny line, but also weirdly insightful: a child, or a stupid person, probably gets more enjoyment out of a magic show than an adult and/or intelligent person. So...is it good to be stupid, or ignorant? It's a complicated question, but I think most of us would lean towards "no." You can't feasibly choose to stay ignorant in order to enjoy those things more, anyway. The moment you choose that, the whole thing is doomed. Buckle up for yet another aphorism: "A man's mind, stretched by new ideas, may never return to its original dimensions."

It's similar to a discussion I've had with friends about drugs or alcohol: it makes things funnier, they insist. No, I say, it lowers your threshold for what you find funny. That may be worthwhile sometimes anyway, but it's not the same thing.

No worries, friend. Come to think of it, it's good you're not a no-life like some of us here.

I don't think I'm necessarily criticizing thinking about movies. Rather, I'm criticizing overthinking films. But damn, you might be right. It's been so long that I lost track of what I said earlier.

Fair enough, but my main concern is people who constantly think while watching a film, meaning they actively force themselves to think, lose some of the more gut-feeling, intuitive stuff about the film. I think that you can train yourself to do both simultaneously, but I also think that you cannot do both and not lose a little both of either. I think overthinking kills immersion and makes it harder to suspend your disbelief. Finally, I believe that film is a visual work of art. I'm not saying all films should be disparate from other forms of art - it's too late for that to become a thing. All I'm saying is that I see films as a much more image+sound kinda thing rather than a story kinda thing. These things aren't mutually exclusive, but some of my all-time favorites are films I don't really need to think about WHILE watching them. I get them intuitively without forcing myself to think. They get into my head on their own. I understand them without thinking. I may think a lot about them after watching them, but while watching them, I'm in another zone - I'm hypnotized.

I have many examples, but I'll give you just one, if only because my message is very long as it is already.

One thing I experience with Yoji Yamada like with no other director is that his films make me want to be a better person, to be more humble, more merciful, and to love people more. I see his characters as real people, far from perfect, and fallible, but still ones that deserve a second chance, love, and compassion. I never get such feelings from films made by any other director. And no, Yamada's films don't make me feel that way by schooling me, making me think a lot about them while watching or enforcing their messages bluntly and straightforwardly. They're well-crafted, full-on stories, but I always take their screenplays as myriads of beautiful blots of paint, one following the other, creating a splendid image. It's important to point out that the parts of the picture that are not filled with paint are just as important as those colored ones. Yamada likes to skip a part of the story or to keep some things hidden. He does that to make us wonder, or maybe because he thinks that some things are better left unsaid. Just like the dialogue-less finale of The Yellow Handkerchief, filmed from a respectable distance - a moment so beautiful, so sacrosanct, that it'd be a blasphemy to show it from a shorter distance. Other times, a character leaves us for a moment or two in our time, but we understand that much more time passed in the film world. This is a wonderful tool for a powerful denouement. Yamada uses this as early as in his early masterpiece The Lovable Tramp and then repeats that in A Distant Cry From Spring. But you know what? After watching a Yamada film I can remember the story, that is I can remember fabula. But years after watching them, when I usually can't remember ANYTHING about other films, I still remember syuzhet of Yamada films.

I think you can be critical of them, fair game, but I also think being critical of them might be missing the point. I used to be like that for a few years when I first got into film. But that was perhaps the most wonderful time for me because I truly felt like a child who discovered a new wonder and could experience it sans any rational reasoning. I watched films just to observe the camera movement and be in awe at the expertise with which the filmmaker/cinematographer employs long takes, dutch angles, and other visual weaponry. These days I constantly catch myself thinking when watching a film, which I think is detrimental to this child's wonder but is of course not without value as adult's cognition.

I unironically think that at least partly the reason I used to experience films like that was because I watched them with English subtitles and my English wasn't that good back then, which led me to understand only some of what is being said and infer the rest. And quoting Chris Marker, "What's the least understandable is the most pleasurable". I have friends who even watched Japanese, Swedish, or Italian films without any subtitles! If you can't understand how one could do that, you're definitely a thinker, not a feeler.

Before even reading the rest, I'm glad you added that second part of the sentence because I actually agree that this distinction can be very blurry. Passive thinking is definitely thinking, too!

Yes, I sometimes prefer not to think to keep the mystery going, but that first sentence is very apt! Yamada films make me cry intuitively. It's not that I have absolutely no idea why I'm crying. But I'm crying merely at a bloat of paint, a single thought or idea, not at the carefully constructed sequence of events I recreated in my mind.

I never experienced this. Is this like the butterflies when you're in love? I never had them even when I was.

Another "cool you mentioned it" thing. Sometimes when I'm watching a really great film, it gives me adjacent ideas for a screenplay/story of my own! However, saying story is probably going too far. A premise or a single scene is more like it. Still something you can build upon, though.

Nice. It works the other way for me. I usually don't care about thinking about movies that didn't do it for me emotionally.

I could go the opinionated cinephile route and quote Pedro Costa who said that this is exactly what you don't want from cinema and this is a tool of the awful commercial cinema. But I won't. Because I don't really believe that. And I'm farther and farther from agreeing with Costa on this, the more films I watch. Especially Yamada films, which are extremely relatable to me.

Interesting. Can you give examples?

The more you get to know me, the more you understand that I'm actually pretty open to self-criticism, if due. It's just that I like to pretend I'm not.

That's a good conclusion. I think it's mostly innate. Some people think too much for their own good, while others think too little for their own good.

Great post, very enjoyable to read and consider.

I won't pretend I don't do this sometimes.

All true, and also difficult to avoid. The mere act of writing reviews of posting here can create an anticipation of what we might say about a film that interferes with our ability to experience it while it's happening. It's possible this is a trivial thing for other people, but it's very hard for suppress this. I fidget, both physically and mentally.

Maybe that's the way to think about this stuff: we all have only some control over how our minds naturally work (and most of our control lies in the past and is calcified by decades of habit), so we're left to take what enjoyment we can in the way our minds will best allow us to.

Yeah, I dunno, I go back and forth on this. It's obvious to me that what's special about cinema is that it's made up of so many other art forms, but I don't feel comfortable thinking of any one of those forms as being more fundamental to it than another. Narrative also exists in writing, as you say, but by that same token I wonder if "fast, continuous photography" is meaningfully different from still photography. I do sort of intuitively agree with the feeling that it's about the sound and visuals more, but I think that might just be the nature of images: we just naturally process them quicker by their very nature. Narrative requires depth and complexity that are not as readily perceived. This makes them seem less fundamental, it's true, but it also makes them feel "higher" because they require more of us.

It's a good point, there's no better way to brand a story onto someone's mind than to emotionally invest them in its conclusion. And I'll concede that this only works the one way, I'm not sure even a really fascinating and engaging narrative makes you feel more, exactly. This would not persuade me to think or feel differently overall, but I would accept that as a reasonable argument for why feeling is a prerequisite for narrative and not the other way around.

The camera movement stuff is interesting, because to me it sounds like it has the downsides of intellectualization: noticing the camera movement, identifying a dutch angle, rather than just experiencing the feeling a dutch angle is meant to give you. There is a degree, then, to which becoming a cinephile essentially slowly ruins your available to watch a film only for itself. Your growing knowledge of, and experience with, more film, can render it more and more difficult to get swept away.

This reminds me of a concert I went to years ago. My wife went to see Bill Conti, the famous film composer. He conducted some of his scores in front of a live orchestra, and of course inbetween he'd banter and tell charming little anecdotes. The one that stuck with me was something he said about the ineffable quality of music. Specifically, he said that with some music (paraphrasing) "you cry and you don't know why. You hear it, and you cry."

There's a long-standing idea, in literature and predated even then by religion, that music is the purest form of creation. The angels are said to have sung the world into existence, and you'll find this in the creation narratives of both Tolkien's [u]Silmarillion[/i] and Lewis' Narnia. And, of course, the etymology of the word "music" itself.

I think it might be similar, but for me it's always felt different from every other feeling I've had. It was tremendously gratifying to experience the feeling from an idea, full of possibility, and connect it back to the sense of possibility exploring a digital world, and conclude that it was possibility itself that I found so enjoyable.

It's actually very similar to laughter: what makes something funny, and why people laugh, is a famously difficult and debated question. But the best definition I ever heard, which works to explain a lot of very different types of humor, is that it's a "sudden rush of recognition." A lot of jokes work this way, in the sense that the punchline recontextualizes the setup somehow, so your brain rushes to catch up and reevaluate the setup in light of the new information. It also explains why we laugh at absurdity or characters behaving ridiculously, as our minds rush to quantify all the social mores that a person is failing to observe. This became particularly compelling to me when I once, while reading a theological argument, laughed out loud at a particular point.

Similarly, the feeling I get from exploration/new ideas is, I think, my mind being flooded by more possibilities than it can keep up with. It's like I get the mental pleasure of laughter without the physical act of laughing.

My best guess is that this is because I like thinking about things, about anticipating things, about considering things fully and being as prepared as I can, so being completely overloaded and unable to do all that is sort of pleasurable, in the same way someone might like to drink because it allows them to discard their inhibitions. I get drunk on possibility.

Another thing that probably interferes with enjoying something in the moment, though! Most people seem to agree that creativity is really just absorbing a lot of other creation and then reconfiguring it somehow (nothing new under the sun/"Everything Is A Remix"), so it's interesting to think that in order to create most effectively you actually need to sacrifice your ability to experience these things fully. This is sort of sad and sort of beautiful.

I'll try to think of some, though nothing specific is coming to mind just now. My memory is more general: it's when someone superficially different from myself has found their way to the same conclusion, sometimes even by very different means.

To think the same despite vastly different circumstances suggests that there is a real thing that exists outside of either of us that we are both connected by and/or tapping into, which makes me feel connected to them.

I dig. I think, not to get too commentary-about-commentary, the little dustups come from people constraining themselves in terms of criticism even after seeing you are not constraining yourself that way. So it feels unfair to them, because you're willing to criticize them in ways they are not allowing themselves to respond to in kind.

Yeah, the part I struggle with is the agency part, especially over time. I tend to think we have plenty of agency, but I think it's very slow, very iterative, very habitual. I think my tendency to overanalyze things is probably fairly innate, but also something I have actively encouraged for a long time. There's maybe no version of me that just doesn't do this, but there's a version of me that works to counterbalance it instead and is moderately different by middle-age as a result. Dunno.

I rarely see a movie I don't like, but it's mainly because I do some reading before we go. Sometimes I make mistakes.....Godzilla X Kong was definitely THAT.