The Art of Watching Without Watching

There are a multitude of reasons why Sight and Sound's The Greatest Films of All Time list sucked harder than the cabin pressure in Auric Goldfinger's plane. Accepting nominations made by a film critic who hadn't even watched Enter the Dragon (1973) until its fiftieth anniversary, and taking them remotely seriously, has got to be a major one.

Your host wouldn't have Enter the Dragon on his list either, but is still a fan regardless; copping an uncut bootleg during the BBFC regime era, and even owning the classic OST by Lalo Schifrin. The question is: how could any professional film critic have a movie blindspot as massive as the one that's associated with turning Bruce Lee into a global superstar and still be respected?

This example really does give validity to Paul Schrader's claims in an IndieWire interview that the poll was rigged by "not actual film critics", regardless of it coming off like unapologetic film snobbery. Additionally, in that very same piece, he loosely blamed the current state of film criticism on Quentin Tarantino's attitude and opinions being constantly regurgitated by the masses. As much as I enjoy QT's thoughts on film rather than his own recent material, he did piss off Shannon Lee, Bruce's daughter, and ended up doubling down on his negative portrayal of the martial arts legend in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019). Might not be on a critic's payroll, but even I know that indulgent, meandering mess was greatly inferior to Enter the Dragon. Shame on any film critic thinking otherwise.

No One Knows Who They Were or What They Were Doing

Before Twitter and Reddit ruined the internet, there were online forums. It was the wild west of opinions, and despite the trolling, it was also a welcome time where fellow people from all over the globe could discuss the arts openly.

 

It's only a matter of time when the plug is finally pulled on another abandoned site I once used to frequent, and with the preservation of the past heading in the direction of the futuristic library in Rollerball (1975), here are some film related opinions that are far more entertaining than anything Robbie Collin or Anna Bogutskaya ever wrote.

 

Photobucket and TinyPic are effectively dead and Imgur won't let me upload some of these treasures as they're in some weird file format, so I felt obliged to archive them here on this forgotten corner of the internet.

 

Et voilà!

Millennia from now, mankind's cyber-archaeologist descendants from Tau Ceti’s sixteenth planet will attempt to decrypt the very purpose of these image files in a similar vain to us pondering over Stonehenge today.

Every Cloud Has a Silver Surfer

Well done, everyone! We fired a shot across the bow of pretentious film snobbery when Fun City Editions' release of Jim McBride's Breathless (1983) went completely out of stock (limited and standard editions) in just a few days.

Hopefully, this occurence is a sign that Godard's preponderous status as a deity amongst film critics and the like, might be beginning to erode away. The possibility of his legacy being a forgotten memory whilst I'm still alive, would have me dancing like Richard Gere during Breathless' final moments.

Sadly, I gave F.C.E's release of Breathless a miss on account of spending way too much on other films recently. Therefore, I won't berate any of the blind-buying idiots who copped the film and shared pics of it on their badly made beds for social media kudos points. The enemy of my enemy and all that.

Breathless (Fun City Editions trailer)

Jim McBride, 1983