MST3K: Anti-cinema?

__________________
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.

Thank you.

Also I literally keep coming into this thread to respond (hopefully fairly briefly for once) to your post, but my distractable brain keeps taking the bait in a bunch of, at this point, useless posts.


Do better, crumbs, do better.

No rush, and fine if you never get around to it. I think/hope we've established we're of similar minds about the importance of approaching films with an open-mind, and about the dangers of overly curating what one watches, even if we differ a little on degree.

Re: "cinephile." I agree very much that the term is probably hurting discussion more than helping it. There have been a couple of times where it felt like a response was not entirely weighing the pros and cons of something, but instead was working backwards from "what would a cinephile do?" Which is a problem for a few reasons, one being that there is no set definition for the term, so "cinephile" often ends up defaulting to the extreme.

Put another way: sometimes it feels like the arguments are less about finding a good and workable real-world balance, and instead are concerned only with never being outflanked by someone who is more-cinephile-than-thou.

Actually, back to the original topic, is someone, doesn't have to be crumbsroom, who can make a persuasive argument as to why I would NOT like MST3K.

I've paid my cinematic dues. I've seen Citizen Kane, the Godfather movies, Shawshank, The Dark Knight, Schindler, the LOTR movies and love most of them. Going back, I've done the whole canon of Bergman and Fellini.

My contention is that, everybody needs some junk in their life to provide counterpoint to Citizen Kane. They may not know it, but they do; the more they resist, in all likelihood, the more they NEED some junk. Life is easier with some junk. If you're a foodie, it's fast food or MSG laden Chinese food in little goldfish containers.

If I ever get to the point where I can NOT enjoy an old episode of MST3K or it's local equivalent, The Ghost Host, please get me some meds. I won't be watching in my treehouse....it will be in my well equipped home theater, the one with the big sound system. The Ghost Host sounds good there, since the button that simulates surround sound does a good job with wolf howls.

skizzerflake is irredeemable

I think in nearly every instance, each person can be the best judge in regards to what their movie diet should consist of.

Also, anyone who pooh-poohs simple entertainment has probably never watched Sullivan's Travels - or just didn't understand the message of the movie.

Skiz needs no redemption and would not accept it if it were offered. His movie tastes are hell-bound, but he gets some bonus points for liking dogs since most of them are better than us. They're definitely better than Citizen Kane.

Sturges was an auteur.

Loved Sullivan's Travels...a lin to my review:

https://www.movieforums.com/reviews/...s_travels.html

All the more reason to listen to him!

Is that from Epidemic?

yes

So let me get this straight... One is actually required?

__________________
"It's what people know about themselves inside that makes 'em afraid." - Clint Eastwood as The Stranger, High Plains Drifter (1973)

Yep. For sure. I had a period in life when I thought that my taste in movies, TV, food, clothing, etc was definitive since, after all, it was ME and I'm smarter than most people.

Somehow, neither life nor movies stayed that simple. Some reasonably intelligent people liked things that I disapproved of, not just the luddites and not-too-smart people.

So....the question of whether Orson Welles was the greatest or whether he was a self-important windbag that pulled a lot of wool over a lot of eyes, gets resolved how? I do not have the answer to this. I could ask the same question about other film geniuses but like any art form, people only get to be "right" by being "experts" and they mainly get to be experts based on other experts in a field of endeavor where there's nothing that can be determined by any objective means. Ergo.....Orson Welles is great because I say he is.

That's how you get to the cynical conclusion that the only thing that counts is the box-office.

Like there isn't all sorts of writing that pretty clearly articulates the reasoning behind why people claim Welles is a genius.


Aren't smart people generally aware of the existence of books?

Yeah, but it does take you to that old expression that opinions are like a**holes....everybody has one and they all stink.

I don't write books but I'm reasonably smart, have seen a lot of movies (I do mean a LOT) and repeatedly thought that Welles' are "pretty good", but I didn't feel like my world had shifted. Putting the accolades in a book doesn't make them any more right than any other means of expression.

There's just too much reverence about all that for me. Lots of people have made good movies, but a few get into the sanctified world of the greats. In recent years, it's been due to placement on a web site with uncertain credibility. Here's one among many.

https://screencraft.org/blog/the-20-...s-of-all-time/

This takes us back to the MST3K topic. Can a film maker be great by doing a great job at making deliberately weak, cheesy movies. Just what do we do with Roger Corman, a guy who made lots of movies, knew his craft, knew his audience, had a budget and made a profit? I think I do recall reading and apocryphal quote that "this ain't Citizen Kane you know" or something like that. Movies are full of some combination of art, craft and practicality. The House of Usher or Attack of the Crab Monsters worked well, delivered what an audience needed and embarrassed nobody. This guy did it hundreds of times. That's Art too.

I think the thing with Welles is that he may have been a bit too sophisticated for the audiences of his time. It may not have been immediately clear to the average moviegoer of the early 40s what was so great about Citizen Kane - or even why they should give two bits for a chance to watch it.

But it isn't just Citizen Kane - movies as beloved today as It's a Wonderful Life also did horribly in theaters when they were first released.

The bottom line, to a certain extent, is that sometimes perspectives shift with time.

Maybe there are recent movies that are horribly overlooked right now, but which decades from now will be regarded as masterpieces.

I try to keep an open mind with pretty much everything I watch. There's always a chance there was something during my first viewing that made miss out on some aspect of a movie that in hindsight deserved greater attention.

Take Heaven's Gate - I didn't think much of it the first time I watched it, and I still don't think much about it after having revisited it over the weekend. I did notice that it seemed to look considerably brighter than I remembered it - and when I tried to find out why, I found out that Cimino had wanted it to look brighter and more colorful when the film was rescanned for the 2012 Criterion reissue. But on the whole, I think the historical events depicted in the movie deserved a more thoughtful and precise approach to really do them justice.

That's just an example of a movie that literally looks different today, because the look of the movie was altered by the director (who was, perhaps, reacting a bit to the criticism that the movie received during its original theatrical release).

But aside from that one, it's hard to think of many examples where directors have meddled with their own work based on a critical backlash and come up with something that's definitely more audience-friendly... More often than not, it's far more common for a studio to take a director's cut and tamper with it to try to make it easier for the viewer to understand. It has happened with movies like The Magnificent Ambersons and even Terry Gilliam's Brazil.

The best we can do, at the end of the day, is work with whatever the director manages to get released to the public and work from there.