I haven't seen I Am Number Four so unfortunately I can't comment on that.
Also, I agree that "all art is subjective" seems like the common-sense response to the problem, yet that response suggests questions like these:
Q: Can a really 'good' film produce an unenyoyable viewing experience?
Q: Can a really 'bad' film result in a very enjoyable viewing experience?
Clearly 'yes'. If someone were to tie me to a chair and burn my feet with cigarettes while showing A Clockwork Orange then I'm pretty sure I'd hobble away giving that particular viewing a rating of less than 10%, whereas I usually rate viewings of this film above 90% Similarly, if I were shot full of morphine and put in front of Rocky 3, I'm sure I'd drift off giving the experience a 90% when I usually cannot watch 'Rocky' films.
However, in both cases I'm really rating the experience imposed on me rather than the film. In both cases, the film is essentially incidental to the pain or pleasure being imposed.
The problem is that - all things being as equal as possible in human affairs - why do so many well-educated (in film, literature and generally) people tend to rate Apocalypse Now and Team America way above Birdemic: Shock and Terror?
At one time I would've suggested that all social sciences were drivel and, if you agreed, we'd be done. Now I'm not so sure, as I've seen some very smart people wrestle with really hard problems in (empirical) economics, the theory of voting, social choice theory, public choice theory and so on, which all involve messy human evaluations of whether one politician or consumer product is preferable to another, and - if so - by what factor or margin.
These are the kinds of questions being investigated in the field of 'empirical aesthetics'. Workers in this relatively new field don't seem to have a lot to show for their efforts, as far as my lay-understanding can tell, but I have an intuition that there may be a truly objective measure of the 'quality' of art works that roughly fits with current opinions. (Obviously I'm excluding - say - Andy Warhol's work, because it's pretty clear that the price of his prints and paintings has been manipulated by a cabal of investors that own the majority of his output. Still, I think some of Warhol's work is 'good' - just not $10 million 'good'.)
Of course, 'my intuition' isn't much of an argument and I could be horribly wrong, but I'd like to keep my mind open for now.
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razorcutgarlic
13 years ago
Holy *beep*, i can barely wrap my mind around that response.
I think that someone's enjoyment of a film is based on a wide variety of factors, including but not limited to:
1.How many films they have seen in thier life, and what kind of films they watch.
2. How old they are and what kind of experiences they have had with the time they have been alive.
3. Where and how they view the actual movie.
When I compare this film to other westerns I have watched, it's one of the worst.
This movie also delves into spirituality, and based on my own spiritual beliefs, it's a bunch of new age *beep*
I'm curious what westerns you like more then this and what westerns you like less then this, as well as your own religous beliefs and how they influenced your opinion of the film.
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Simon-140
13 years ago
Right, we may be getting somewhere, because I'm not really a big fan of Westerns; in part, I liked this film because of the way it departed from the usual "Western script" towards the end.
Off the top of my head, my favourite westerns are as follows.
- "The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford"
- "The Proposition" (an Australian Western)
- and "A Touch of Evil" and "El Topo" if either qualify.
As for my own spiritual beliefs, I'm a bog-standard atheist-materialist leavened with a bit of humanism. All spirituality seems equally improbable to me, but I do find it interesting.
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razorcutgarlic
13 years ago
This is one of the longest discussions I've had about a movie I didn't like and only saw once. Its been several weeks since i saw it, and can't even remember much about it.
One of the things I remember not liking were the extended sequences of his "trips" that looked like really bad graphics a kid made on his computer.
I like all the westerns you mentioned (haven't seen el topo). I've recently watched a series of Asian "westerns" that are sort of strange crazy takes on the genre that I think Renegade was trying to do.
Have you seen any of these:
The Good the Bad and the Weird
The Warrior's Way
Sukiyaki Western Django
I found these to be much better attempts at recreating the genre, and much more enjoyable film watching experiences.
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Simon-140
13 years ago
It's funny that the computer graphics polarise viewers so much.
Do you see "eyelid movies"? If I close my eyes for about 30 seconds I start to see coloured, semi-geometrical patterns that look like the pictures produced by the iTunes visualiser and if I listen to a piece of the right sort of music in the dark, I see full colour films; usually they start with a geometric appearance and then become more photorealistic. From talking to people, I know some people see these things and other people tend not to.
(I have wondered whether I have a mild form of synaesthesia. Two of my maternal aunts have true synaesthesia and one relies of the 'colour' of sounds to hit the right notes on her violin; that aunt has Absolute Pitch, which is unusual and useful.)
Back to the film. Despite the distressing lack of colour, I thought the graphics at the end of "Blueberry" were convincingly like some "eyelid movies" I've seen and like some hallucinations that I've had on LSD. The quality didn't bother me, because my own brain often does no better. If my brain is like a kid's computer running graphics software, I guess that's a bit of a let-down, but it doesn't make the film inaccurate.
I haven't seen any of the new westerns that you've mentioned, but I certainly plan to track them down!
P.S. I agree that the factors 1-3 that you mentioned in a previous post are important for the enjoyment of a film, but I wonder whether simply being human is a sufficient common basis for broad agreement about which films and artworks are 'good' and which are 'bad.'
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razorcutgarlic
13 years ago
Interesting. When I was a kid I could watch "eyelid movies", but they never became photorealistic, just shapes. Never done LSD, closest thing for me has been shrooms and salvia. Im not really a fan of hallucinogens, but I can see how this would affect your enjoyment of the film.
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