act on instinct said:
Broom Kid you sort of prove my point when you dismiss one filmmaker over another, just swap the names.
Broom Kid said:
I see what he’s trying to do, and I understand why he’s trying to do it. I just think he’s not doing a very good job of communicating it.
this basically sums up my TLJ feelings, and why I made the comparison to begin with, both are using characters that have die hard fans who say the filmmaker broke the “rules” i.e. Batman doesn’t kill/Superman wouldn’t do this, and so on. But depending on which camp you’re in, one is heresy and the other is just fans mad they didn’t get what they wanted.
This doesn’t really make any sense. I’m not dismissing him, I’m assessing him. My assessment is that as a storyteller and a filmmaker, he’s ultimately very thin and surface, and he doesn’t have much more to offer as a filmmaker than anything he’s done beyond that surface decision. If my assessment is a dismissal, and dismissal is bad, why are you then directly comparing it to what you’re also doing? Either dismissal is bad, and neither you and I should be doing it, or you only consider it “dismissal” when you disagree with the assessment.
“Depending on which camp you’re in” gets to the other point I was making, which is that a lot of this discussion is about the discussion itself, and the grievance to be found once you spend enough time in there. What you’re finding fault with right now isn’t so much that I might disagree with you, or that others don’t share your opinion, it’s that you think it’s unfair that you’re being judged to be in “the wrong camp” because of that disagreement. At that point, nobody’s talking about the movie anymore at all. They’re talking about themselves, and their grievance at being misunderstood and “dismissed” (there’s that word again).
I don’t really understand why it matters what “camp” you’re in at all. It doesn’t actually affect you, and anyone who IS willing to cut you off and/or dismiss you based on nothing more than their perception of your camp and not your actual ideas that you’ve supported with your own thoughts is someone who has shown themselves to be not worth the concern anyway.
As an aside: Simply having the intent to do something isn’t enough, when it comes to storytelling. The execution counts so much more than the intent does. With your Snyder example, his intentions are made very, very clear, and there’s no real mistaking them once you see them. The problem I’ve had with basically everything he’s done since “300” is that his execution never improves, and in many cases has gotten worse over time.
If a movie is to be judged based on how well it’s trying to do what it wants to do, I find his films lacking not because he wants to do something I wouldn’t do, but because he ultimately doesn’t do it well enough to take me on his journey with him. He CAN do this, and he’s done it before (Both “Dawn of the Dead” and “300” are really good examples, and to a lesser extent, so is “Sucker Punch.”) but he doesn’t do it very consistently, and when he messes up, it’s very noticeable.
That, however, isn’t a judgment of you, or your character, or your person. It just means I don’t like the guy’s movies as much as you do. That doesn’t put you in a camp, nor does it invalidate your opinions.
