# Unaccountably Acclaimed (by Critics, mostly)
**URL:** https://boards.straightdope.com/t/unaccountably-acclaimed-by-critics-mostly/416691
**Category:** Cafe Society
**Created:** [August 23, 2007, 9:28pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/unaccountably-acclaimed-by-critics-mostly/416691 "2007-08-23T21:28:37Z")
**Posts on this page:** 2
**Page:** 4
### Author:  [@Gadarene](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Gadarene)
#### Post date: [August 27, 2007, 5:37pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/unaccountably-acclaimed-by-critics-mostly/416691/61 "2007-08-27T17:37:25Z")
You folk who don’t like _The Wire_ hurt my soul. I don’t even want to ask what kind of TV you prefer in its stead.
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### Author:  [@Stranger\_On\_A\_Train](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Stranger_On_A_Train)
#### Post date: [August 28, 2007, 2:50am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/unaccountably-acclaimed-by-critics-mostly/416691/62 "2007-08-28T02:50:51Z")
[QUOTE=Iggins]
_About Schmidt_ comes to mind. Boring and pointless… I just didn’t get why the movie was made at all.
[/QUOTE]
The films of Alexander Payne and Jim Taylor are definitely an acquired taste; I wouldn’t call them boring and pointless, but they definitely don’t follow a traditional narrative structure or conflict/resolution model, and they don’t fit neatly into a definable subcategory of comedy or drama. Their films are less an inclusive story than a slice of life of some dull-normal moderately dysfunctional individual who meets with some kind of life crisis and makes the sort of fumbling mistakes that dysfunctional, socially disconnected people make, which for my taste is better than the idiotic, contrived mistakes that most characters in stock comedies/dramas make, and certainly better than the bizarre, stalkerish, borderline criminal manner in which characters in romantic comedies comport themselves. At any rate, _About Schmidt_ was sustantially better than its source material.
Stranger
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