Taking back a good word
Jun. 11th, 2007 07:17 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sumeriaThe conundrum lies in liking best those movies that are totally uninhibited and those that are most controlled. At the same time. But I don't think this is -necessarilly- a contridiction.
Example: Pirates of the Carribean (the first one) Second example: Oceans 11. Setting the second movie in each trilogy(?) aside, both are wildly self-indulgant and without inhibition. Neither has any 'meaning', or 'depth', just sheer over-the-top 'look what I can do!'. But both are extraordinarilly tightly plotted, tightly controlled. As is particularly obvious if one looks at the third movie in each trilogy(?).
(I ignore the second movies in these cases because both of them, in my opinion, have trouble related to being just badly done.) At the World's End and Thirteen are both good, enjoyable movies. Neither is holding anything back, just as their predecessors did not. But neither is as good, and both feature a degree of simple flailing about, wild sequences of scenes not exactly sure what their purpose in the movie is supposed to be.
I think this goes back to something I may have mentioned earlier, though, which is that I -to an extent- like a certain degree of artifice. I enjoy seeing the brushstrokes in a painting. (By which I mean that I prefer a painting to a photograph, in general, not that I prefer impressionists. I don't.) But then, I also think the word 'artifice' has suffered some degredation. It gets equated with 'artificial' and thence with 'fake' and thence with 'cheap'. Also, 'mass produced'.
I use the word in the sense of 'with art', 'with craft'. Feanor was an artificer, Morgoth was a machinist. (This Silmarillion analogy is probably meaningless to more or less everybody. Oh well.)
Example: Pirates of the Carribean (the first one) Second example: Oceans 11. Setting the second movie in each trilogy(?) aside, both are wildly self-indulgant and without inhibition. Neither has any 'meaning', or 'depth', just sheer over-the-top 'look what I can do!'. But both are extraordinarilly tightly plotted, tightly controlled. As is particularly obvious if one looks at the third movie in each trilogy(?).
(I ignore the second movies in these cases because both of them, in my opinion, have trouble related to being just badly done.) At the World's End and Thirteen are both good, enjoyable movies. Neither is holding anything back, just as their predecessors did not. But neither is as good, and both feature a degree of simple flailing about, wild sequences of scenes not exactly sure what their purpose in the movie is supposed to be.
I think this goes back to something I may have mentioned earlier, though, which is that I -to an extent- like a certain degree of artifice. I enjoy seeing the brushstrokes in a painting. (By which I mean that I prefer a painting to a photograph, in general, not that I prefer impressionists. I don't.) But then, I also think the word 'artifice' has suffered some degredation. It gets equated with 'artificial' and thence with 'fake' and thence with 'cheap'. Also, 'mass produced'.
I use the word in the sense of 'with art', 'with craft'. Feanor was an artificer, Morgoth was a machinist. (This Silmarillion analogy is probably meaningless to more or less everybody. Oh well.)