Here are some things that irk me about/in Cafe Society. Obviously none of these are all that major and earth shattering, because how could they possibly be?, but sometimes one just wants to rant:
-No one cares that you’ve never watched a single episode of Buffy, or that you have never watched a single episode of American Idol. Not watching something that lots of people like doesn’t make you special and unique and interesting.
-Stop ranting about “Reality TV”. Yes, lots of it is stupid. But lots of everything is stupid. I’d tend to agree that Reality TV has a higher proportion of schlock than some other genres, but it also has some generally respected gems like Top Chef. You’re free not to like Top Chef, of course, or to start a thread explaining why Top Chef sucks, but dismissing the entire genre as if it’s all the same just makes you look stupid.
-Just because you didn’t like work X, and believe that its creators ought to have made different creative choices, doesn’t mean that the director/producer of work X didn’t get it, or was motivated solely by greed, or had never read the source material. For instance, I absolutely guarantee Peter Jackson and his collaborators had a deep love and knowledge of Lord of the Rings. They had reasons for elves showing up at Helm’s Deep. You might not agree with those reasons, but it’s because they didn’t “get it” or didn’t “care” or had no respect for the source material. Also, Steven Spielberg is a thoughtful person who certainly read and thought about War of the Worlds even if the movie he made out of it isn’t what you would have preferred. And while George Lucas made a real hash out of the Star Wars prequels in an number of different ways, it’s hard for me to see how the root problem was that he was greedy and was just motivated by money. (The trump argument there being that if he was just greedy, why on earth did he wait so long to make more movies in the absolute richest most blockbuster-guaranteed franchise in movie history?)
-It’s true that people in movies/TV shows often find unusually good parking spots, and many other similar things. Why? Because tv writers/producers have no idea how the world works? No, because they’re trying to tell a story, and part of the story does NOT involve people spending 15 minutes looking for parking spaces. (Which isn’t to say there isn’t an interesting discussion to be had listing such shorthands and cliches… but that discussion has already been had a million times, and it has a tendency to infect other, similar, discussions and turn them into the nth iteration of the same rehashing.)
-There are very very few actors who always play the same type of role in the same type of movie. There are lots of actors who USUALLY do, but very few who ALWAYS do. So having a whole spiel about how you don’t like Adam Sandler movies just means that it is you who is going to miss out on something like Punch Drunk Love or Funny People. Not that I guarantee you will or should like them, of course, but lumping them in with Ace Ventura and Mr Deeds is just plain ignorant.
-No, Joss Whedon fans are not all rabid partisans who will bite your head off if you dare to criticize their holy master. (There’s a fallacy at work here which I’ve discussed frequently in the context of politics, where there are lots of people who hold position X, and a small number who hold position X rabidly and beyond reason, and people conflate the two and start to act as if there are lots of people who hold position X rabidly and beyond reason.)
-Titanic is a very well made and entertaining movie. Really. It is. Back when it was just a movie that came out and before it was capital-T-Titanic, it got amazingly good reviews and everyone who I talked to who saw it liked it. It also has very good acting, in general (how many Oscar nominations have Leo and Kate gotten?) and the screenplay (as distinct from the dialog) is first rate.
