![\"donkey\"](\"http:\/\/smugfilm.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/03\/donkey.png\")
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\nJohn,<\/p>\n
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\nJohn,<\/p>\n
I’ve been interested in movies for as long as I can remember.\u00a0 The story I tell is that Jurassic Park<\/a> started it all.\u00a0 It certainly didn’t hurt, but movies had definitely been on my mind for way longer than that.\u00a0 And my parents and grandparents were both movie buffs, so when the AFI released their ill-conceived 100 Best Movies of the First 100 Years of Movies<\/a>, it was the talk of our family for an entire Thanksgiving dinner.\u00a0 I was ten or twelve at the time.\u00a0 By the time I was fifteen, I had seen 92 of the movies listed. When I was in my teens, I was put upon, and felt disconnected from the social scene in my junior high school.\u00a0 My response was to start reading Stanley Kubrick and Martin Scorsese books.\u00a0 For a certain sect of nerds, intellectualism becomes a form of armor against a world that doesn’t understand them.\u00a0 I lived this for at least five years.\u00a0 I know exactly how it feels to beat my intellectual chest and prove how much better I am than everyone else by being ‘more aware’.\u00a0 \u2018You guys might have girlfriends, but have you seen A Clockwork Orange<\/a>!?\u2019<\/p>\n But truly liking something has nothing to do with what anybody else ever said about it, from your best friend to Roger Ebert.\u00a0 I love Signs<\/a>.\u00a0 It’s the best movie ever made.\u00a0 I say it that way, instead of saying it’s my favorite movie of all time, because it is <\/i>the best movie ever made, and it wouldn’t be my favorite if it wasn’t.\u00a0 The point here is that me saying Signs is the best movie ever made has exactly as much value as anyone saying Citizen Kane<\/a> or Raging Bull is.\u00a0 There is literally no difference.\u00a0 Citizen Kane’s goodness has not been measured in a lab; it has been agreed upon by a very small portion of a population.\u00a0 I’m tickled that Roger Ebert likes Signs.\u00a0 I’m tickled when anybody<\/i> likes Signs (I’ll jump at any opportunity to be able to say “he has more strike outs than any two players” and have people know what I\u2019m talking about).\u00a0 But ultimately, their opinion of it means nothing to me.\u00a0 It doesn’t make me like Signs any more or less.<\/p>\n Speaking in absolutes about movies (or art in general) is not only okay, it should be expected.\u00a0 Not speaking in absolutes makes no sense.\u00a0 Roger Ebert never says, ‘to me, I think Martin Scorsese is one of the best living filmmakers.’\u00a0 If he did, he’d be boring.\u00a0 He states his opinion as fact because it’s so painfully obvious that it is only a mere opinion.\u00a0 That’s all it ever could be.<\/p>\n My favorite movies are all the best movies ever made.\u00a0 What does the historical relevance of Hitchcock have to do with how good or bad his movies are?\u00a0 The answer is nothing.\u00a0 Psycho<\/a> is a decent movie.\u00a0 It’s not better than Tremors<\/a> in any way, regardless of its influence, legacy, etcetera.\u00a0 I could get into the myriad technical and aesthetic reasons why Tremors is better than Psycho, but it’s not important.\u00a0 It’s not the point.<\/p>\n The point is that if your favorite movies are not the movies you consider to be the best movies ever made, then I don’t understand you at all.\u00a0 What reason would anybody ever have to like something based on what other people think, its historical relevance, or really any other reason than just fucking liking it?<\/p>\n If someone really thinks Citizen Kane and Casablanca<\/a> are the best movies ever made, that’s great! I’m excited to hear about it.\u00a0 But it doesn’t make me like them any more or less. The fact that any of this needs to be explained is a little comical to me.\u00a0 But apparently, when you say \u2018I don’t like movies from the twenties and thirties\u2019 people are like ‘whoa whoa wait wait, you must not like movies!\u00a0 What about Buster Keaton, he’s a genius, blah blah blah\u2019.\u00a0 Well, okay, but what’s your point?\u00a0 I’ve seen it, I get it, some of it’s kinda neat, but it’s not as good as Clueless<\/a>.\u00a0 For many obvious reasons.<\/p>\n People often get confused about entertainment and art.\u00a0 Art is<\/i> entertainment.\u00a0 It’s only<\/i> entertainment.\u00a0 Art does not cure cancer or pay your phone bill. It moves you to laughter and tears.\u00a0 It inspires, evokes and touches.\u00a0 It’s a beautiful thing. But it’s entertainment<\/i>.\u00a0 Many things can be entertaining: a clever joke, a well-written line, a color, a camera movement, etcetera, into infinity.\u00a0 What I find entertaining is well-constructed art that effects me deeply.\u00a0 Wet Hot American Summer<\/a> does that a lot better than The Godfather<\/a>.\u00a0 The reason being that Wet Hot American Summer is way more artistically advanced.\u00a0 Adding the politically correct caveat of “to me” would be boring and unnecessary.\u00a0 Of course<\/i> it’s my opinion. how could it not be? It’s not an argument.\u00a0 It’s not an argument because it would be a fool\u2019s venture to try to convince you to like Wet Hot American Summer.\u00a0 You liking it is your decision.\u00a0 And that’s beautiful.<\/p>\n My original piece was a hyperbolic, reductive essay full of jocular half-truths.\u00a0 Obviously.\u00a0 How anyone missed that is beyond me.\u00a0 As someone who loves movies, I certainly love all movies from any era.\u00a0 I even love that kooky movie Empire<\/a>.\u00a0 You filmed the Empire State Building for nine hours? I’m down!<\/p>\n I have seen thousands and thousands of movies, and I like about 100 of them.\u00a0 I love about 50 of those, and about 25 are beyond sacred.\u00a0 The rest are just kind of okay.\u00a0 Movies aren’t that good.\u00a0 And as a movie lover, that’s interesting to me.\u00a0 My vision of a great movie is extremely narrow.\u00a0 Not because I’m bitter, cynical, jaded, or closed-minded, but because I have a very specific idea of what a movie \u2018is\u2019.\u00a0 And it’s an important idea to me.\u00a0 It’s an idea that I study and deconstruct every time I watch a movie, and especially<\/i> every time I turn a movie off after five minutes.<\/p>\n My narrow idea of what a movie is was born out of my obsessive movie watching (movies from every era, genre, and country).\u00a0 Because, again, the more movies you watch the worse they get and the more spectacular a diamond in the rough becomes.\u00a0 Entire decades become trivial when the styles of the time run together.\u00a0 Michael Bay is no different than the action directors that preceded him.\u00a0 Deconstructing each one individually would certainly be an interesting and fun endeavor, but doing it in one essay would be nearly impossible.\u00a0 Especially if that’s not what the essay is about.\u00a0 Some of you out there basically admitted \u2018I saw that you insulted Raging Bull and I knew nothing else you said mattered\u2019.\u00a0 I appreciate you telling everyone that you’re simply biased.\u00a0 It’s a strange bias, sure, but it’s a lot more concise than a bunch of nonsense about me being angry or stupid for not liking some movie from the 40\u2019s.<\/p>\n John, here’s the first paragraph from your rebuttal<\/a>:<\/p>\n There\u2019s a film writer I like named Marya Gates who once tackled the idea that \u201cold movies\u201d aren\u2019t worthwhile. In a <\/i>short video overview<\/i><\/a> of film history from inception to the present day, she concluded that \u201cif you don\u2019t love all of it, I don\u2019t understand how you can watch any of it.\u201d<\/i><\/p>\n My question to you is, when, in The Idea of What a Movie Is<\/a>, did I ever say I don’t love all of it?\u00a0 All I said was that I don’t like most of it.\u00a0 Because most of it sucks.<\/i> But I love movies, and I love the ever-changing idea, throughout history, of what a movie is.\u00a0 And the goal of my essay was to discuss that.\u00a0 You and your cohorts appear to have overlooked the entire point, and meat, of my essay, simply because you were offended that someone could have the audacity to not like something that you all have deemed important.<\/p>\n There’s not much to comment on in your rebuttal.\u00a0 It’s mostly just a bunch of ”I like old movies, that makes me cooler!” and ”You MUST be a stupid and\/or angry because you don’t like old movies!”.\u00a0 It’s such a nonsensical stance that I can’t really speak on it.<\/p>\n But to answer your question: Why do I write about movies?\u00a0 I suspect I write about them for the same reason anyone does. I like them.\u00a0 I like the idea of them.\u00a0 Why do you?<\/p>\n – Greg<\/p>\n P.S. Donkey Kong IS the best game ever made. You<\/i> Suck!<\/p>\n P.P.S.\u00a0 To bring things all back to the first paragraph, the following is a correction to the AFI list of best movies ever made.\u00a0 I’m only listing twelve (not counting sequels) because there’s only about 50 worthy of listing anyway.\u00a0 These are the most artistically advanced movies ever made.\u00a0 They are better than The Godfather, Casablanca, Citizen Kane, Raging Bull and every movie made before 1975.<\/p>\n Signs<\/a> John,<\/p>\n I’ve been interested in movies for as long as I can remember.\u00a0 The story I tell is that Jurassic Park<\/a> started it all.\u00a0 It certainly didn’t hurt, but movies had definitely been on my mind for way longer than that.\u00a0 And my parents and grandparents were both movie buffs, so when the AFI released their ill-conceived 100 Best Movies of the First 100 Years of Movies<\/a>, it was the talk of our family for an entire Thanksgiving dinner.\u00a0 I was ten or twelve at the time.\u00a0 By the time I was fifteen, I had seen 92 of the movies listed.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[25,17],"tags":[834,832,810,843,840,842,582,838,750,566,455,847,841,688,399,37,685,576,95,66,846,564,844,837,567,716,835,332,104,185,836,409,833,686,845,579,839],"class_list":["post-1526","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-allposts","category-gregsessays","tag-a-clockwork-orange","tag-a-rebuttal-to-the-idea-of-what-a-movie-is","tag-alfred-hitchcock","tag-american-movie","tag-andy-warhol","tag-andy-warhol-empire","tag-back-to-the-future","tag-buster-keaton","tag-casablanca","tag-citizen-kane","tag-clueless","tag-comedian","tag-empire","tag-field-of-dreams","tag-ghostbusters","tag-greg-deliso","tag-idea-of-what-a-movie-is","tag-indiana-jones","tag-john-damico","tag-jurassic-park","tag-king-of-kong","tag-martin-scorsese","tag-paradise-lost","tag-psycho","tag-raging-bull","tag-raising-arizona","tag-roger-ebert","tag-signs","tag-smug-film-2","tag-smugfilm","tag-stanley-kubrick","tag-the-burbs","tag-the-godfather","tag-the-idea-of-what-a-movie-is","tag-the-king-of-kong","tag-tremors","tag-wet-hot-american-summer"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/smugfilm.com\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1526","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/smugfilm.com\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/smugfilm.com\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/smugfilm.com\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/smugfilm.com\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1526"}],"version-history":[{"count":19,"href":"https:\/\/smugfilm.com\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1526\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1647,"href":"https:\/\/smugfilm.com\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1526\/revisions\/1647"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/smugfilm.com\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1526"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/smugfilm.com\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1526"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/smugfilm.com\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1526"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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\nThere’s no such thing as a good movie or a bad movie.\u00a0 There are only movies.\u00a0 \u2018Good\u2019 and \u2018bad\u2019, \u2018best\u2019 and \u2018worst\u2019, are just subjective values imposed by people.\u00a0 Because of this, adding \u2018to me\u2019 at the end of every sentence about what you think of a movie is wholly unnecessary.\u00a0 \u2018Raging Bull<\/a> is a bad movie to me\u2019.<\/i>\u00a0 See what I mean?\u00a0 It’s redundant, because ‘Raging Bull is a bad movie’ is already an opinion. It\u2019s not an argument, fact, or really anything of any importance.\u00a0 It’s just a thought and a feeling, written down.<\/p>\n
\nAmerican Movie<\/a>
\nRaising Arizona<\/a>
\nBack to the Future<\/a> (1, 2)
\nParadise Lost<\/a> (1, 2)
\nThe King of Kong<\/a>
\nField of Dreams<\/a>
\nThe ‘Burbs<\/a>
\nIndiana Jones<\/a> (1, 2, 3)
\nComedian<\/a>
\nTremors<\/a>
\nGhostbusters<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<\/p>\n