Week 7

Throughout the blog I’ve been more ‘reflective’ about the films than I have about my own process of reviewing; so whether or not I’ve been reflectively chronicling my progress as assigned, is anyone’s guess. Don’t know don’t care.


This time round, I was the most confident since starting out, having established some idea of what a review sets out to do; which is to say, I have personally defined ‘the review’ for myself, and in so doing think I could tackle any feature, no matter how foreign or lurid. Films are stories by people, and no obscure stylistic flourish can shroud a story’s relevance; so long as one has the patience to sift through the sights and sounds and find threads of the universal. As mentioned in earlier blog entries, negative reviews have repeatedly complained most fervently about ‘accessibility’. To what? Well, to these universal threads by which any story has relative significance. Is it perhaps idealistic to speculate there’s universality in every story? I don’t think so.  How else would empathy be possible, outside the theatre where the lives of others are as deserving of consideration and appreciation as our own, simply because they are.


So, as mentioned my definition of the review is almost fully formed, and it has everything to do with identifying the universality within each story. These threads may be widely accommodating, but are still subject to the specific colouring of their storyteller’s, their biases and artistic choices which occasionally problematize their accessibility. This reviewer however is humbly of the opinion that the line between a ‘good’ and ‘bad’ film is intractably fuzzy; your experience of a film is mostly relative to your expectation, and your expectation relative to a nucleus of factors, including your life experiences by which identification with the offered threads is possible. If a viewer lacks experiences by which he or she would otherwise resonate with a depicted place/person/circumstance, then there’s a response scale polarized as ‘don’t know-don’t care’, or ‘don’t know-wanna know’; potentially catalytic intrigue or instant/indifferent dismissal.


This said, films like Tiny Furniture put me in the latter category; I’m unfamiliar with this world, that of snooty-privileged artisans posing as bohemian victors of struggle, and am whetted for more. As mentioned in my review, Dunham could have produced a sharper film had she stuck to satire; but in retrospect, I think more of Aura. Her concerns about her present and choking fears for her future seem less whiny as I reluctantly pass the half-way mark of my own studies. Am I doomed to a similarly lavish post-study period of rutted languor, fated to a bloody succession of neurotic sexual encounters until some distant, mythologized arrival point of ‘adjustment’?


So be it.