“ The problem with bad (read: typical) Hollywood movies is not that they’re empty but that they’re cynically or at least ineptly false and manipulative. It’s like the difference between good and bad recreational sex. There’s nothing wrong with having sex strictly for fun, but at minimum, you should be good at it, and, more important, you shouldn’t mislead your partner about what your purposes are, or else it might not just be “empty” but evil (like David Fincher). That would be known as fucking someone over. The worst Hollywood movies are the ones that aren’t honestly inviting us in for a shared good time (thrills perhaps) but are sleazily pretending to, i.e., telling us how smart and sexy we are while they’re actually picking our pockets.
January 27, 2010
