the bad reviews

I've just gone through and read all the reviews posted here. Most were laudatory, but there were a few in which the authors seemed to be fighting to justify their own sense of perceived artistic inferiority for failing to enjoy the film. I guess reading how other people were going head over heels about how great this movie is just made them that much more defensive about their now questionable taste. This is kind of the exact opposite of the stuck up film connoisseur feeling indignant over a Hollywood blockbuster being rated higher than a Godard "piece" by the popular mob.

I think there's no need for these people to get upset, or feel like they have something to prove, and call this movie a boring piece of crap and people who enjoyed it pretentious bastards. But I can see how anyone going into this movie expecting some form of exposition-conflict-climax-denouement narrative would be disappointed. We kind of have these tacit standards for what movies should be ingrained into us, but I think it's important to see that movies can be so much more than just an extension of literature or theater. For example, people don't seem to care if music videos have no coherent plot, because the formal aspects of the music, which we're much more accustomed to, helps us understand the reasoning behind the accompanying images. The technology of film and video, this ability to fully control and sequence visual perceptions, gives us a chance to look at things that we can never find in the natural environment. We shouldn't let the conventions of traditional mediums deter us in that exploration.