...with people who say shit like "oh Persona is my favorite movie" (or Passion of Joan of Arc, or Au hasard Balthazar or however you spell it because I can't be bothered to look it up). Especially if these people are younger than I am. Like, on IMDb there's a sixteen-year-old girl with the following as her top 10 movies ever:
1. Taxi Driver
2. Apocolypse Now
3. The Third Man
4. The 400 Blows
5. Aguirre, the Wrath of God
6. Tokyo Story (!)
7. On the Waterfront
8. Chinatown
9. Sunset Boulevard
10. Persona
also on her top 100 list: Solaris (the '72 version), Scenes from a Marriage, The Nights of Cabiria, The Bicycle Thief, The Passion of Joan of Arc, Andrei Rubelev, Fitzcarraldo, The Battle of Algiers, All Quiet on the Western Front, Koyaanisqatsi (this was the one that REALLY pissed me off), Hiroshima Mon Amour, and Battleship Potemkin, among others
Seriously? Yeah, film is meant to enlighten us and be intelligent and all that. I'm not saying it's not. But my God, it's meant to entertain us too. Quite frankly, I'd rather watch Mean Girls again than any Bergman (save maybe Smiles of a Summer Night but even there, the pacing drags). Is Mean Girls a better movie than The Seventh Seal, or Scenes from a Marriage, or Cries and Whispers? Of course not. But I still enjoy it more.
of course, occasionally we get the film that combines great insight/excellent filmmaking with a great time (thank you, any Quentin Tarantino movie...though I guess the "great insight" thing doesn't apply there), and that's the best of both worlds, but these are pathetically rare, especially, and it's sad for me to say this, in all the "classics" we're all supposed to see. What to do, what to do.
