United Artist Movie House. Detroit, MI
“As an experiment, let’s exist in a universe where our generation of filmmakers is enough to fill out the movie canon. Let the film school prigs, art house snobs, and the better half of film critics publishing today slavishly catalogue the classics and engage in numbing debates over who did it first and who did it better. [...]
Let’s be untethered from history, ignore the tug of the familiar, and resolve that any movie made before, say, 1986 has received its due respect and move on. Movies, as a medium, are too lively and populist to wait for historic consensus. History does not inform the value of a film; you need never see a stylized Godard flick or Cary Grant comedy to understand the enthralling power of Fargo or Independence Day. Movies are a mass art and everyone should have opinions on them regardless of if they’ve seen The Deer Hunter or not. We are a generation weaned on television and movies, we were moviesgoers [sic] before we were citizens, it’s too long to wait until the purists die off to talk about the accomplishments and missteps of Paul Thomas Anderson in a serious way. So let’s plow our cart over the bones of the dead and take stock of our new frontier.”
– Natasha Vargas-Cooper, introducing GQ‘s new column “Canon Fodder” (Sept 22, 2011)
(For a response to this “experiment,” see Kim Voynar’s “Calling Bullsh*t on Willful Ignorance and Stupidity” over at Movie City News.)
Related posts:
I'm following
Instagrams
Professor of film and Shakespeare. Advocate of social media. Lover of popular culture,