Jul 24
Something I want to get off my chest
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I honestly don’t know if this is encouraging or not, but I think you should read it. It’s rather interesting, you can read it in bites or you can just sit down and spend an hour or so reading all of it. And after reading it, I think it’s time that I come clean about a couple of things.
I have horrible taste in music and movies.
I enjoy Little Nicky, Zebrahead, Jerry Bruckheimer and even occasionally listen to Limp Bizkit. I have been known to listen to Aqua and smile at the same time.
Yes, I know it’s a frightening thing to face head-on, but the honest-to-God truth (I hope) is that one need not be a film student or a music critic to enjoy modern music and film. Yes, I know that a lot of it is premanufactured and canned. Yes, I know that it’s shallow. And I do admit that I do like listening to less-mainstream stuff like Radiohead and watching less-mainstream movies like Run Lola Run but you’re not going to catch me looking for indie artists or independent cinema. I do discover new stuff thanks to the folks at Something Awful (I would’ve never seen David Lynch movies, Pi or Ghost World without them.)
But the widely-held opinion is that American movies are largely cinematic tripe, and the music industry here is completely without talent. I don’t believe either one of these are true, unless you’re a total art fag, high-and-mighty film student type or automatic American-basher.
I guess that makes at the best stupid, and at the worst a total hypocrite.
But this leads to the second thing I need to clear up. Those of you that know me know that I will rant for hours about the RIAA, MPAA, corporate control and governments that roll over for money. Well, here’s the rub: I am a consumer of nearly all of the above. I probably have 100 DVD’s, a whole rack of audio CD’s, a box of videotapes and two Windows machines.
So why doesn’t this make me a hypocrite? Well, in a lot of ways it probably does. But the honest truth is there is a lot of good stuff that comes from American cinema. Of course, ideally all of this would be self-filtering. Director A would create a movie, it would be released, people would watch it and tell friends. But unfortunately, in our capatalistic society, this isn’t the way it is. Movies are selected solely by their ability to draw viewers, and very occasionally a film will slip in under Hollywood’s radar and become a genuine blockbuster (Blair Witch) or a director will garner enough clout to let them do whatever they want (David Lynch, Kevin Smith, et. al.)
Does this mean we need to throw out cinema altogether? No. Bruckheimer movies are entertaining. Windows is a good operating system. Does this mean that pretty much every major corporation in the world should be completely restructured? Yes. Does that mean that I might not get to see any more Jerry Bruckheimer movies? Maybe, but I doubt it. I don’t believe that a movie with a $50 million advertising budget can’t be enjoyable, but I do believe that if it was really good it wouldn’t have needed the $50 million in the first place.
And now that I’ve gotten that out of the way, I do believe I’ll go watch Bad Company. Bite me.