| One of the most
annoying traits of film critics is to chastise a film
for being broad and vague by themselves being broad and
vague in their analysis. Too often, the Filmsnobs
included, critics rely on our default banter like "the
narrative falters," or "not great cinema but
a good popcorn flick," or declaring a "tour-de-force
performance," which always confuses me into thinking
that Lance Armstrong has decided to take up a career in
the movies. (We try to avoid this as much as possible.
JimmyO gives a good example in the first paragraph of
his Rat Race review
in which he describes the difference between Old Zucker
and New Zucker comedy.) Sometimes you'll even get a critic
to pronounce from upon high that the stone-tableted "show-not-tell"
rule has been breached, which all of us learned is a no-no
from our middle school English textbooks. So here
at Filmsnobs we've decided to practice what we preach:
Instead of babbling some convoluted manifesto on how we
"judge" films, we're going to annotate lists
of our personal top one-hundred most influential movies.
We figure this will paint a finer portrait of our approach
to the art of film criticism, and by exposing our movie
souls, perhaps earn a little trust from our readers, who
we ask to trust us every Monday when we post a new review.
Like Robin Williams asking Robert
Sean Leonard and Ethan Hawke to rip the pages from their text books, let's just dismiss
with the Poetics and get to it. Our approach is more organic than Dr. J.
Evan Pritchard's sliding measure of understanding poetry, so rip out the introduction and
head to the candlelit cave to read the Filmsnobs' personal, annotated lists of our top
one-hundred most influential movies.
Shimes' List
JimmyO's List |
