Who cares if you’re out of it? This constant pressure to keep up, to adopt the latest and most fashionable attitudes toward cinema (or to anything else for that matter) is pretty unpleasant. It doesn’t feel all that different from the pressure we get from Big Media to stay on the cutting edge of consumable crap. And there’s something a little bullying about their “get on the bus or get run over” language.
—Jon Hastings, “Blog Chat: Film Buffs”
That’s probably the most succinct rejection of the vogue for the newestyoungesthippestlatest in critical circles I’ve seen in a long time. The funny thing is that what Jon’s responding to, a portion of that dialogue between Matt Zoller Seitz and Keith Uhlich on the Year in Cinema I linked to a few days ago in which the pair go after critics who turn their noses up at television series or at movies shot on digital video or videotape, isn’t something I even object to–of course you shouldn’t write off entire swaths of a particular artform on the grounds that they’re d