Your personal aesthetic

I am a huge music fan, and this has much influence on the way I watch movies. Throughout the first century of cinema, the roots of the movies could be traced directly back to literature and theater. However, I think the best art form to base the creation of a film on would be music. You don’t need brains to appreciate good music, just a soul. I like films that give us a direct emotional experience, the way music does. Also, if you were to examine most films in the way they relate to music, I think you’d find that most alternative cinema would be derived from classical music. This beautiful, without a doubt, but there are different types of beauty, and I am interested in films that defy standard construction and move to the rhythms of jazz and rock & roll (I’m thinking Sergio Leone, John Cassavetes, the French New Wave, Seijun Suzuki, Jem Cohen).

Anyway, that’s me, watching movies.

i agree with some of what you say, but for me a film that "shakes me to my core, and has me looking at the world in a different light" is only enriched by contemplation, conversation, and debate. great films don't end when the lights go up.

noah berlatsky's kill bill review was baffling to me - perhaps i misread it but it seemed to me that the white boy/film school digs were red herrings - last time i checked the cinema wasn't saturated with filmmakers probing what it means to be human (even within the limited parameters that white boy/film school implies). and he's right that it's not saturated with talented satirists either. everybody's busier trying to be tarantino.

My aesthetic for film is pretty similar to mine for novels; it's the tolerance for ambiguity that I find appealing. All the guns that hang on the wall DON'T go off in the third act. I guess there are great films that just slam home a pretty unambiguous message--the very early sound pic "I am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang" certainly does that. But since I agree with the message of "Fugitive," and can't see how anyone with a heart would disagree with it, I suppose I have to make a case for the universalizing of experience that great films can communicate.

Seems to me that film can do satire better than novels, these days--I'm thinking of "Election," for example. And film can do allegory better too, I suppose you can call "Groundhog Day," and the first "Matrix" film, allegorical?

I like films noir an awful lot, they give you the funky old world, thrills, and a moral lesson all in one, and the morality is successfully submerged in the details much the same way as it is in novels like "Lolita."

So I guess great films, in my opinion, don't hit you over the head with their moral lessons, but they're there. As in Lang's "Scarlet Street," often cited as "too cold." Hard to deny that Joan Bennett is mighty tempting, and equally hard to deny that a sensible, observant person (and isn't art supposed to help us be more observant, curious, critical?) would never succumb to the temptation in the first place? Great movies give you the option to succumb.

very well put, spectator bird; i agree completely. i think if people took more time to think deeply and contemplate on things (especially art) we wouldn't have some of the social & political issues that we have now, which are basically cause by a passive public who doesn't care enough to vote or look deeply at the issues ahead of time if they do vote. i'm certainly not the first person to express this view, but I think there's an enormous correlation between passive, escapist entertainment & passive, escapist people.

ouch!!!!!!