(Originally published on Letterboxd)

You know, I think I liked this site a lot more when I liked movies a lot less.

I think the joy I derived from perusing reviews on here was sort of akin to the pleasure I’d receive from reading Roger Ebert's critiques when I was younger; a pure style-over-substance situation.

Say what you will about Ebert or his opinions, I find it undeniable that the man was a master wordsmith. In my eyes, he only ever really wrote about two films; one of which was perfect, and the other which was trash.

Every time he described a ‘bad’ movie, he was describing the same film. The cleverness, to me, was in his ability to never repeat himself-- the way he could say the same thing a million times without ever once using the same words.

He was, quite obviously to me, very much an artist in his own right.

And reading his reviews in the Sunday paper was probably the first time it occurred to me that reviewing could be considered an art form unto itself; detached from whatever it was describing. I think that was largely the mindset I took to this site; I tried to consider and appreciate the construction of reviews even if they expressed sentiments which were diametrically opposed to my own views.

'Movies are art' I figured.

And:

'It's okay for people to have differing opinions about art'

And:

'I don't need everyone to always agree with me-- particularly when it comes to art.'

I actually used to get a kind of perverse joy from hitting 'like' on reviews which expressed opinions diametrically opposed to my own. I convinced myself that in some small way, by supporting such expressions, I was overcoming some terrible, ignorant aspects of my own personage; the parts of myself that crave validation and fear dissension.

But more and more now I feel like Bresson in a movie theater.

I remember an anecdote I heard in film school about the French film director Robert Bresson; it alleged that whenever the man went out to see any movie that wasn't of his own creation, he'd inevitably find himself sitting in the theater, shaking his head, muttering in disapproving astonishment:

"How can they do this? How can they make movies in this way?"

At first, this story made me feel a great deal of respect for Bresson. I thought:

'Here is a man who has made of film a doctrine so holy he cannot stand to see it profaned. What passion!' And for a long time afterwards, I aspired to construct my own 'doctrine' which I felt would help guide my future filmic endeavors.

But somewhere along the line, I realized just how much less enjoyment I’d been getting by watching films in such a way. And I almost began to... pity the man?

Which is a crazy, self-aggrandizing thing to say, I fully recognize. Bresson made some of the greatest films of all time and I write unreasonably long reviews on a dead social media site; I kinda doubt he needs my pity. But that being said I can't help but feel that his approach to filmmaking might have limited his ability to appreciate things outside of his methodology.

To possess such rigid and restrictive ideas in regards to what constitutes ‘proper’ filmmaking so much so that you can't enjoy anything that breaks your 'rules' seems honestly kind of close-minded and shit.

Which is why, for the past few months, I've devoted considerable energy into trying to appreciate all art I've come into contact with, regardless of my personal taste or opinions on the piece; regardless of whether or not its aesthetic qualities happened to align with my own personal preferences.

I've tried to curb what I view as my naturally combative, contrarian, confrontational nature so that it'll work for me rather than against. Instead of feeling like I'm always either attacking the fans or critics of any particular property, I now attack my subject directly.

Anytime I turn on a particularly painful feature, I think to myself:

'This movie doesn't want me to enjoy it.'

And then I think:

'Well it can go fuck itself then; I'll enjoy it even more now out of spite.'

And as soon as I make that decision-- as soon as I refocus my energy from angst and anger and irritation into actively pursuing appreciation-- I typically end up having a much better time.

Which is how I've found myself (quite unintentionally) sitting beside Bresson once more, shaking my head as I scroll down my letterboxd feed muttering to myself:

"How can they do this? How can they write reviews in this way?"

Anyone who I detect is not operating under the same 'enlightened' approach as me can send my blood into a boil with only a few disparaging words. I read negative, nit-picky, pissy reviews from people that I legitimately admire, and instead of focusing on the way they're expressing these opinions, I'm beside myself with anger for what I perceive as their ignorance; their small-mindedness; their inability to appreciate anything that is not preferable to them.

I've become a real life version of that age old joke wherein a man claims the only people he’s intolerant towards are 'the intolerant.'

Now, I realize that the solution to my problem is fairly obvious; I need to apply the mindset I take into films when reading reviews. I need to push myself to find things in them that I like, and in doing so, I know that I'll be able to reclaim my lost love for them.

And I'm trying. I'm trying real hard.

But it isn't easy.

Recently, someone I follow on this site (who's a much better, more concise writer than me, I should add) said of a film:

"Good god man, they just let anybody make a movie these days."

Now, putting aside the undertones of elitism and gate-keeping inherent in this kind of sentiment, the part that bothers me most about it is the way it casually infers that 'just anybody' shouldn't be allowed to 'make' movies.

This, I feel, is tantamount to preventing progress or growth within any chosen field. By refusing to recognize anything new, you're blinding yourself to future possibilities, choosing instead to revel in the stagnancy of familiar comforts. By deriding new voices in any medium, you are encouraging only those who have already been talking to keep doing so.

You are accepting stasis and sedation over innovation. You are trading your soul for sameness and safety.

By saying:

"Good god man, they just let anybody make a movie these days."

You are also saying:

"Only certain people should be allowed to make movies. Only certain voices deserve to be heard."

Which is exactly the kind of mindset that results in a film like Dune (2021).

(Oh yeah, this is a review of Dune by the way)

Movies, particularly American movies, have not, in my opinion, ever been quite the same since the 2008 release of Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight.

Since then, anyone trying to operate within our cultural framework for what constitutes an 'epic' movie has been incentivized to include languid landscape shots, grating color grading, a Hans Zimmer (or Hans Zimmer-adjacent) score, and dull, lifeless, emotionless characters.

Things that are, when taken in isolation, totally fine (and cool) aesthetic choices.

I mean, c'mon-- I've mentioned Bresson twice already in this review, do you really think I don't enjoy non-emotive performances?

Or landscape shots?

Or loud, droning music for that matter? I do. I have like five Swans albums on vinyl.

But I would be lying if I said I wasn't somewhat tired of seeing these elements paired together every time a new 'tent-pole' picture comes out.

I remember when I was in 11th grade, and my English teacher took our entire class out to see 2015's Macbeth after we'd read it in class. I remember, sitting in the movie theater, awash in orange, thinking to myself:

'Well, I guess this is just what movies are gonna be like from now on.'

And truthfully, I don't think I was entirely wrong. I felt the exact same thing when watching Dune (2021).

While struggling to write this review for the past week, I’ve tried to get a better understanding of the picture from watching a few interviews with the cast and crew. Eventually, I stumbled upon a clip of Timothee Chalamet saying something that genuinely kind of encapsulated everything I was trying to write.

He said, of seeing Villeneuve's Arrival:

"Arrival blew me away when I saw it; I felt like I had never seen something strike that tone. I don't know, it felt like seeing a Christopher Nolan movie for the first time."

And therein kind of lies my point:

American audiences contradictorily want experiences that feel both new whilst remaining eminently recognizable; they want something that 'strikes' a new 'tone' so long as that 'tone' feels exactly like a Christopher Nolan film.

Now, I know I've said previously on this site that Villeneuve makes "Smart-looking movies for dumb people."

I would like now to apologize for this statement. I was a lot angrier back then (a few months ago) and didn't care so much about insulting someone's intelligence if they just so happened to disagree with me.

I am sorry.

What I meant to say was:

“Dennis Villeneuve makes Christopher Nolan movies for people who think they've outgrown Christopher Nolan movies.”

He is Lactaid for people who can no longer stomach the rich, full-bodied cream which comprises Christopher Nolan's filmography.

He is the product of a system addicted to regurgitation.

He is what you get when you say things like:

"Good god man, they just let anybody make a movie these days."

Villeneuve is simultaneously both the director we, as a culture, want, and the one we most deserve.

We deserve milquetoast movies.

We deserve Marvel and their roller-coaster fare.

We deserve Dune (2021).

And yet, it would be wrong of me to suggest that this kind of call-and-response audience-industry relationship is anything new. In the same way American audiences tend to be risk-averse with their patronage, studios and producers and financiers of films have always been fairly risk-averse in regards to their investments.

But sometimes--

Sometimes--

Strangeness seeps in through the cracks, irregardless.

Bad decisions get made; odd choices somewhere along the production line result in unexpected outcomes, transforming what otherwise would have just been another homogenous piece of media into something decidedly more off-beat.

David Lynch gets hired to write and direct 1984's Dune.

It is hard for me to imagine the mind of the executive who decided David Lynch of all people-- a man who, in 1980, had only made one feature film that you could describe as following a 'chronological narrative structure'-- was the right man to be tasked with telling the most complicated, intentionally-convoluted story ever conceived.

It's a choice so batshit, so obviously insane, that I can't think of a crazier decision before or since (excluding of course Disney's choice to temporarily hand over the keys to the Star Wars franchise to the guy who made The Brothers Bloom and a live-action Cowboy-Bebop adaptation starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt).

The result was, undeniably, a compromised work. Yet, it still shone with images and ideas that were inarguably unconventional for its time.

Where Villeneuve tried to ground the source material, Lynch opted to make it even stranger, and I think that's largely the right approach when it comes to adaptation:

To play off the energy of the original and build upon it.

There will never again be a sequence in a mainstream Hollywood movie quite like the space-folding scene from David Lynch's Dune. Nobody else has the guts to represent interstellar space travel as a series of light-beam queefs exploding from the butthole-mouth of a floating space-slug.

No one.

And, while I can appreciate Villeneuve’s more restrained vision, I can't help but feel the whole thing reeks to high heaven of the same type of audacity which emboldened Zack Snyder to change the ending of Watchmen from involving intergalactic space-squids to involving nuclear bombs under the assumption that, to leave it as originally written, would have just been 'too ridiculous' for modern audiences to accept.

Which feels to me, on some level, like the director admitting that they're actually sort of embarrassed by their source material (or at least aspects of it).

By contrast, Lynch's approach seems more like a celebration of the source material. His film is unambiguously about eugenics, genocide, and jihadism, where as Villenueve's seems generally uncomfortable even broaching these topics.

Where David added wires and warts and prosthetic noses to make the world even weirder, Denis added bagpipes and oil-paper umbrellas in the hopes of diluting the aspects of Frank Herbert's world building that he found to be 'problematic.'

Which isn't to say one approach is better than the other; just that Lynch's approach is the one which makes me truly want to pick up and start reading the books.

(Oh yeah-- I probably should have mentioned earlier that I've never, in fact, 'read' Dune)

So, here you have my dilemma:

I'm frustrated by Bresson's intolerance for any cinema which did not fit his rigorous criteria. I'm frustrated by my own intolerance for other people's opinions. And I'm frustrated by films like Dune (2021) because I think they're a product of intolerant audiences.

And yet I can't reject it, because this too, would be intolerance.

So instead, I have to search within it to find something, anything, that I can appreciate.

And I have.

The first time I sat down to watch Nicolas Roeg's Don't look Now I remember being extremely underwhelmed by it. So underwhelmed, in fact, that right as the credits began to roll I immediately started it over once more and turned on the director's commentary.

Sure enough, I had been missing something:

The footsteps.

Roeg talked, for a majority of the runtime, about the memory he had of walking through Venice as a young man. He remembered, even all these years later, the way his foot-falls had echoed across the streets and waterways of Venice. It was an echo, he asserted, which was unique to that particular city. Nowhere else in the world, he claimed, did your footsteps sound exactly as they did in Venice on a cold night.

Listening to Roeg explain that, for him, the film was primarily about that particular echoing sound, was perhaps one of the first times it occurred to me that the best movies (if not the best art in general) were all about just one thing.

And I suspect that for Villeneuve’s Dune, that one thing was a sense of scale.

While Dune 1984 may have felt larger in scope, Dune 2021 feels indisputably larger in scale.

Continually while watching, I couldn't help but feel dwarfed by the enormity of what I was seeing on screen, in the same way I imagine people must have felt seeing Star Wars in 1977 or King Kong in 1933.

It may not be quite as 'beyond' my imagination as Lynch's film boasted, but it certainly is 'bigger' than my imagination, and for that-- and that alone-- I really do have to give Villeneuve credit.

He's made something so massive and ambitious that I find myself in begrudging awe of his creation. I find myself feeling something I'd never previously imagined possible--

Actual, real respect for Denis Villeneuve.