Archive for December 3rd, 2009

The following are some of the questions that were submitted to the Movie-Thoughts inbox and answered by site administrator Clifford Bugle. If you have questions of your own that you’d like answered, or comments about our site or a movie-related topic, please submit them via the Contact page. Thanks for the questions, and keep them coming!

Q: Exactly what are you trying to accomplish with your reviews? I notice they’re strangely written.

A: Excellent question. Our reviews of movies here at Movie-Thoughts are deliberately written in a passive voice because we do not hold our own opinions in very high regard. Many people have noted that this is very odd to them and contradictory of what they thought was the main purpose of such reviews. This is indeed true, and we here are proud of that fact. Our goal at this website is not to convince anyone of anything other than to try and think harder and better about the movies they watch. Our reviews are our way of carrying out this practice. Each review makes an argument or articulates a viewpoint as best it can in order to provide an example of one way of looking at and/or interpreting the film in question. The hope is that doing so gets the wheels turning in your heads and works as a jumping off point so that you all can conjure and better articulate your own opinions about the movies you see. The only intentionally subjective element to our reviews is the rating system (1-10), which is meant to provide a gauge on the author’s personal tastes merely in order to satisfy curiosities. Again, we don’t aim to affront others’ opinions by glorifying our own.

Q: You guys got a lot of stuff goin on here. So what kinda site is this supposed to be really?

A: As we say on the “About” page of this website, what we try to be is a place that tries to give respective attention and thought to various movie topics, ranging from the retro to the contemporary, and the theoretical to the concrete. But if I understand your question right, I’ll assume you’re referring to the various types of columns we write under. Well, again we try to keep our range fairly wide. Our “Deep Thoughts” column is exactly what its title suggests; where we delve as deep as we feel necessary into a particular movie topic – which usually involves an argument – and try to come to a rational conclusion based on a long string of rational thinking. Conversely, our “What if…” column is just a place where our authors can just have fun and use their imaginations. The point of every column, though, is to stimulate your brain and introduce you to different ideas related to movies (if only seemingly indirectly related).

Q: I’ve given your blog a pretty good look and it seems like you like horror movies a lot. Just wonderin cuz your about page says you give everything equal thought.

A: I can see how you made such a deduction, based on our listings of “Deep Thoughts” topics, reviews, news articles, and “Double Feature” pieces, but in all honesty its mostly coincidence. The various “Deep Thoughts” essays dealing with horror movies were written by me (Clifford) during my time at NYU, and were written for some sort of class assignment at the time. I did take one class on modern horror (1960-present) but overall I simply found there to be many connections to be made between the topics of my various classes and aspects of the horror genre. I personally am a big fan of horror movies, so I wont lie about that, but as far as Movie-Thoughts having an inordinate amount of horror-related content is as of this time purely coincidental. You will find that our content at this site will continue to spread over many genres and movie topics.

Q: I like the “Critics to Watch” section. I think it’s a really good idea. But here’s an idea for you. Why don’t you guys start listing the bad critics to avoid too?

A: As a matter of fact, we here at Movie-Thoughts had already devised a column for just such a purpose called the “Critic Doghouse.” We wouldn’t go so far as to say “Don’t ever pay attention to these critics,” but it will be an ongoing list of critic which we find to perform practices that we stand against, i.e. critics that aim to spread only their opinions and not knowledge. We also would frown upon critics who refuse to demonstrate any level of knowledge about the medium of film other than what could be considered common knowledge. We feel that these people are not of high enough caliber to merit the attention of those who seek to be informed about movies in addition to enjoying leisurely prose. It is a completely subjective column, and so to an extent it is hypocritical for us to have it, but nevertheless we feel you will find it interesting because of our detailed reasoning behind listing each critic that we mention. Also, we encourage our readers to contest with us and our decisions on who we put in the Critic Doghouse and who we leave out, so speak up!

Keep sending in questions, because we enjoy answering them. And continue to enjoy the movies!