Why Are People So Dumb About Movies?

Try an experiment. Next time you're with a group of three or four friends, bring up the subject of movies. Throw down the gauntlet in any way you'd like: mention a director, a title, a scene, a piece of music. Unless you're a very lucky person, the discussion which follows will be a mixture of almost complete ignorance and almost complete knowingness about the form.

Movies are wonderfully democratic. And it is their very openness and the easy access we now have to a century of movie history via DVD, streaming, cable and torrents which makes the narrowness of most movie discussions so frustrating. During what can be argued as a Golden Age for world cinema -- an era dominated by giants such as the Dardenne Brothers, Stanley Kwan, Pedro Costa, Abbas Kiarostami, Takeshi Kitano, Olivier Assayas, Terence Davies, Hou hsiao-hsien, Charles Burnett, Jia Zhang-ke -- why are so many movie discussions stuck in the rut of deciding whether the Coen boys are better than Spike Lee, Ron Howard better than M. Knight Shyamalan, Fincher over Tarantino?

Mainstream US media, of course. Yes that ever present malignancy not only destroys healthy politics and all moral complexities in general, but movie culture as well. Just as one must work hard every day to retain a full and correct view of life, in the face of non-stop corporate defacing of life, so one must work hard at not losing one's film sense (or fiction sense, art sense, jazz sense). One must work it, like a muscle or a curve ball or a right-cross. How? By watching. For every Clint Eastwood western inflicted on one's soul, one must clean it out with an Anthony Mann or a Raoul Walsh or (there goes Clint) Rio Bravo. And reading. Not reading screenplays, God knows. But reading the beauty of critics such as James Harvey, Chris Fujiwara, Catherine Russell, Raymond Carney, Robin Wood, James Naremore, and Joan Mellen.