interesting reviews


The five IMDb member reviews of this movie (so far) are some of the most interesting I've seen in a long time. I haven't seen the movie yet, so I won't comment on what they say about it, but if the movie is half as interesting as the reviews are it will be worth watching.

It's unusual to find intelligent comments from reviewers who take opposite positions on a movie; both those who attack this movie and those who defend it have valid points and in most cases present them effectively; but based just on these five reviews, I think fedor8 from Serbia makes his case most effectively. Even when he responds to the other reviewers who challenge him, he does not attack them personally as some of them do him, which makes his position stronger in my mind.

The specious argument by ynoel-2 from Spain that people only object to what they secretly enjoy – which if true would make it impossible for anyone ever to object to anything perverted or corrupt – and thereby saying that fedor8 is actually a pedophile or he wouldn't object to this movie, is an especially cowardly personal attack. Frankly, I'm surprised it hasn't been removed by IMDb administrators for that reason.

Although he says that what fedor8 wrote had "little to do with a review", it is ynoel-2's own review that really is not a review at all but a response to fedor8's review. I learned nothing at all about the movie from ynoel-2's review; I learned a lot from fedor8's review, although I do not expect to react to the movie in the same way he did.

But ynoel-2's review is worth reading for other reasons. His comment that fedor8's position "is so absurd as to suggest the author had a North American education" made me laugh out loud. Everything I ever learned I learned in North America, and I have never lived anywhere else; but I suspect I'm more liberal with regard to sex (and everything else) than many in Europe who think of all Americans as dimwitted bigots.

So although I expect to like this movie, for more or less the same reasons most other reviewers did, I admire fedor8's review the most of those published so far. I like a person who expresses his opinions with intelligence, clarity, passion and personal integrity, even when I disagree with the opinions he expresses.

reply

I don't know why they're duking it out in the review section as opposed to the message boards though.

It is a "North American" tendency (although I would restrict it to the US) to conflate all kinds of things with pedophilia. That doesn't mean people that do that are all crypto-pedophiles, but many of them ARE unnaturally obsessed with the topic.

The truth is most teenagers in France and in North America are sexually active, and some of them sometimes get involved with older adults. I don't approve of middle-age people taking sexual advantage of teenagers, and I don't think the French really do either. These kind of amour fou sexual relationships between young people and older people are a common subject of French cinema. But people running around shooting each other is a common subject in America. Does that mean all Americans are homicidal maniacs itching to gun someone down? Too much is made of the supposed "sexual perversion" in French cinema

reply