Only a handful of people were in attendance for last night’s world premiere of blogger/filmmaker Sujewa Ekanayake’s new documentary Indie Film Blogger Road Trip at NYC’s Anthology Film Archives. Apparently most fans and writers of blogs had better things to do, such as read and write posts on the internet. Because really, what is the point of watching a film about writers about films? The only thing more unnecessary and inwardly spiraling — obviously I’m guilty of it here — is blogging about a film about bloggers about film.
Even with the film blogosphere’s reputation for insularity Ekanayake’s doc has no purpose, because its subject matter and content are already well documented on blogs. And anything new that might be discussed, any new questions that might be raised would also be more appropriately written about on the web. The film’s largest offense, though, is that it doesn’t even seem to have an intended purpose. It does not actually attempt to offer anything new to the discourse on film blogging. Nor does it have any sort of cohesive thesis regarding any preexisting discourse. The doc is simply a series of long, mostly uncut interviews with film bloggers. It’s not even necessarily a sufficient profile of the film blog community, in a “Meet the Bloggers” kind of way.
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Remember when the San Francisco Chronicle’s Mick LaSalle admitted that he hadn’t seen a bunch of movies that most would consider classic, and then he watched them and dismissed many (including Young Frankenstein and 2001) with lazy capsule “reviews” that, if not published in a major newspaper, would have been indistinguishable from IMDb message board missives?
It’s happened again. Apropos of … absolutely nothing, LA Times “Oscar expert” Tom O’Neill has made an announcement: he doesn’t like F.W. Murnau’s Sunrise!!! Yeah, that Sunrise, the 1927 film that’s considered by many to be the pinacle of achievement of pre-sound cinema. Dismissing the film as the sentimental favorite of “hipsters” and “Oscar Nazis,”––and if such a thing exists, isn’t O’Neill, like, Mein Fuhrer?–– O’Neill then lays down his critical law:
Sunrise is paper-thin, hilariously schmaltzy. All three primary characters are cartoonish clichés and their performances 3-inch slices of honeyed ham…What corn pone! Smothered in Cheez Whiz!
Of course, the hipsters and Oscar Nazi’s weren’t going to take this one lying down. Highlights from the eviscerations of O’Neill, and thoughts on What It All Means, after the jump.
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