Matt Zoller Seitz posted this message on Facebook yesterday. Can you imagine the frailty, the utter whimsicality and thoughtlessness of a relationship that goes south over differing opinions about Brooklyn, for God’s sake? It’s not that strong of a film. It’s tender and plain and affecting, but it doesn’t connect with strong values or ethics, not really. It’s mainly an early ’50s social-mood piece. I wouldn’t blink if a girlfriend told me she didn’t like it. Nor would I break up with her if she ordered take-out pizza for dinner and forgot about the red onions, despite my having requested this. Not worth the sweat.
If, however, a girlfriend were to review my list of the 160 all-time greatest American films (which I posted on 7.24.15) and announce that she doesn’t like, say, 40% or 50% of them, then we’d have a problem. She can dislike some of them…fine. It’s okay if she’s not a fan of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre…fine. or Out of the Past, Raging Bull, Who’ll Stop The Rain. Too cynical, too rough-and-tumble, too male-ish. But she can’t say there’s not a lot to worship about Paths of Glory, Zero Dark Thirty, Blow-Up, On The Waterfront, Shane, Notorious, Au Hasard Balthazar or Groundhog Day.
Women can be astonishing in their pre-conceived attitudes about certain films. An actress I got to know a couple of years ago had never seen Paths of Glory, and she didn’t want to because she didn’t want to see, she said, “a war film about guys getting shot and blown up.” She’d never read a single damn word about Stanley Kubrick‘s anti-war masterpiece. (That in itself was a huge problem.) I had to use all the usual erudite arguments plus all the charm and cajoling I could muster to get her to watch it with me. She finally got it, of course, but without me in her life she never would have. She would have pushed it away until her dying day.
Women can be completely strange about movies. They just want to see what they want to see.