MovieManifesto

A few months ago, my friend Brent sent me the following email: “Is Robin Hood worth watching for a guy who doesn’t go to many movies?” It was his last phrase that forced me to remind myself of a simple fact: Not everyone is obsessed with movies. Not everyone sees over 100 movies per year. Not everyone considers movies to be among the five most important things in his life, along with his family, his softball team, his PlayStation 3, and Kyle Singler.

So when people ask me whether or not I recommend a certain film, I need to recognize that many people demand excellence from movies in a way that I don’t. Don’t get me wrong, I have high standards for movies – it’s just that, because they’re my preferred method of existence, I can feel satisfied after watching a perfectly decent one as opposed to a truly great one. But if I’m going to recommend a film to someone like Brent – someone who simply doesn’t watch that many movies – then it needs to pass a certain threshold. Read More

When we were growing up, my sister refused to watch foreign movies. I can’t recall her precise rationale for this, although given how childish we both were at the time, I’m not sure our reasoning processes could have been deemed to have anything resembling a “rationale”. I think she complained about having to read the subtitles, which didn’t make much sense given that she was perfectly literate. Regardless, whenever my father suggested watching a foreign movie, he was met with extreme disdain, not to mention occasional wailing.

Nowadays, armed with the power of a Netflix account, my sister probably watches 5-6 foreign movies each month. This victory over her earlier cinematic xenophobia can largely be attributed simply to growing up, but I’ll tentatively argue that it’s symptomatic of our country’s maturation toward foreign movies as a whole. Over the past decade, films like Amelie, City of God, and Pan’s Labyrinth have gained prominence not just abroad but within American cultural circles (all three earned major nominations at the Oscars, not just for Best Foreign Language Film). As a national collective, our moviegoing tastes have ever-so-gradually expanded, and subtitled pictures lack the stigma they once possessed. Read More