Face it, this is a movie that at best needed 30 minutes edited

The suggestions for a brutal clock-watching edit-suite hatchet-job were bad enough, but now IMDB commenters are instructing Charlie Kaufman on how to properly write a screenplay ... hang onto your hats people, because we are now well and truly through the looking glass on this one!

What is worse - the arrogance or the selfishness?

The arrogance, that if someone happens to encounter a film they don't really like, then the film must clearly be defective. I guess the thought process is, *I* didn't much care for it, hence it must be broken, send it back to be repaired.

Or is it the selfishness; me, me, me ... to snatch away and mutilate something, irrespective that many others clearly love it, they don't count, they all disappear when I close my eyes, the prime concern must only ever be my narrow satisfactions.

Either way, whatever it is, it's an utterly unappealing line of argument, and should not be encouraged.


Look.

It's fine to not like everything, in fact that's actually kinda the whole point: y'know, the diversity.
The trick is to appreciate the existence of that spectrum, to strive to be not quite so totalitarian in matters of simple taste.

"Yeah, but I'm entitled to my opinion", who said you weren't, but having an opinion is not the same thing as saying all opinions deserve to be loudly broadcast.

These boards are littered to overflowing with empty threads shouting about how much they hated a boring/pretentious/worthless film ... as if there is any utlity or use that can be made of such facile pointless commentary for commentary sake.

Most every film will eventually find someone out there to love it ... all films deserve that chance to find their own distinct and unique audience, and those audiences deserve sufficient respect to be allowed the opportunity to discover, and connect with, and fall in love with all sorts of different-shaped films.

On what grounds should I, or anyone else who sat spellbound by this film, have been deprived of that experience, in order to vaguely satisfy those others that insist it should be chopped to a multiplex friendlier runtime, or had the wings torn off it's dizzying, mesmerizing narrative structure, in order to better fit some tired-out three act convention.


What is genuinely eye-opening about the reviews, the comments, the critics; that they will spend so much time loudly and over-earnestly bemoaning the inadequate state of contemporary cinema, the poverty of ideas, and paucity of imagination, yet when presented with "the type of film" that they have been saying they want more of, how furiously they fall-over themselves to guilelessly tear it apart for it's crime of having an aspiration to be a slightly different piece of work.


The great films, the great art, only ever reflect and refract what you put into them, they are a framework, a scaffold for you to hang your own ideas and impressions, they are a catalyst for those emotional and intellectual reactions, they are not the fuel.
... If you didn't make that connection, if the film was tuned to a different wavelength, then you may very well have got nothing in return ... it happens, it's the way it goes some time, it's not a problem ... but it is a huge problem, a huge mistake, to go from that 'missed response' to claiming that the film is faulty.

The film worked - I saw it spin it's delicate magic in front of my own eyes, I have seen other people talk of their love for it, it clearly does have an inherent capacity to work. If you or others didn't find it thus, that's OK ... but we'd really, really, be grateful if you left the film we adore alone, not smear it, abuse it, or to not insist on having it butchered and destroyed in order to "fix it".

Thankyou.