By Michael Atkinson
We've been trained nowadays to believe that if a mainstream movie is not a monstrous, definitive, top-heavy, eye-blasting, eardrum-bruising mega-event, it's not worth seeing. Gone are the cultural aesthetics of the double bill (in which no one film was so commanding that it couldn't stand to be immediately followed by another), the moviegoing habit (when diversion, charm and story were all moviegoers wanted, every weekend) and the notion of a film's nature, like a person's, being valued for modesty, lightweight pulpiness, empathic thrills in the moment and the pleasant company of beautiful and confident movie stars. Stuck in the summertime hell of superhero crapola and CGI migraines, it's not hard from where I stand (which is, frankly, still a state of bedevilment about how the typically abbreviated and overwrought non-storyness of "The Dark Knight" has so many educated viewers bamboozled) to find relief in the forgotten matinee...
We've been trained nowadays to believe that if a mainstream movie is not a monstrous, definitive, top-heavy, eye-blasting, eardrum-bruising mega-event, it's not worth seeing. Gone are the cultural aesthetics of the double bill (in which no one film was so commanding that it couldn't stand to be immediately followed by another), the moviegoing habit (when diversion, charm and story were all moviegoers wanted, every weekend) and the notion of a film's nature, like a person's, being valued for modesty, lightweight pulpiness, empathic thrills in the moment and the pleasant company of beautiful and confident movie stars. Stuck in the summertime hell of superhero crapola and CGI migraines, it's not hard from where I stand (which is, frankly, still a state of bedevilment about how the typically abbreviated and overwrought non-storyness of "The Dark Knight" has so many educated viewers bamboozled) to find relief in the forgotten matinee...
- 8/12/2008
- by Michael Atkinson
- ifc.com
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