In a comment thread about Friday’s “They Call Us Dweebs For A Reason” piece, I wrote the following: “I have the ability to read festival reviews plus I’ve developed highly sophisticated sensors (i.e., insect antennae) that can spot movies aimed at film snobs a mile away — highly intelligent films with a highly refined or uncompromised aesthetic factor that seem to be coupled with a lack of interest in providing any semblance of an emotionally engaging current or, failing that, at least an attempt to meet the viewer halfway. We all know what dweeb cinema is and we all know what dweeb-elites look and talk and dress like. (A picture is worth a thousand words but I can tell you I’ve never seen a dweeb wearing my idea of cool shoes…not once, not ever.) They’re a breed apart, a club, a cloistered semi-secret order with their own way of being and relating, a fraternity that insists that applicants prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that they are fundamentally opposed to the concept of commonly-defined movie pleasure. That said, I wouldn’t want to live in a world without film snobs because their influence delivers a much-needed cultural counter-balance to philistine-idiot popcorn movies. All hail Son of Saul, Carol, Anomalisa and the cinema of Christian Petzold.”

“The Film Snob’s stance is one of proprietary knowingness — the pleasure he takes in movies derives not only from the sensory experience of watching them, but also from knowing more about them than you do, and from zealously guarding this knowledge from the cheesy, Julia Roberts-loving masses, who have no right whatsoever to be fluent in the works of Samuel (White Dog) Fuller and Andrei (the original Solaris) Tarkovsky. The Film Snob fairly revels, in fact, in the notion that The Public Is Stupid and Ineducable, which is what sets him apart from the more benevolent film buff, the effervescent, Scorsese-style enthusiast who delights in introducing novitiates to The Bicycle Thief and Powell-Pressburger movies.” — from “The Film Snob’s Dictionary.”

The lyrics to Michael O’Donoghue‘s “I Love To Be Unhappy”:

“I love to be unhappy,
I live to be in pain.
When days are golden sunshine,
I’m always looking for the rain.

“I love to have a headache,
I’m happy with a cold.
I’m looking for a problem —
Why wait until I’m old?

“They say that no one’s happy
With anything they’ve got.
And just when things seem wonderful
You think of how it’s not.

“And so when fortune’s smiling
On the ladder to success,
If you set your mind to thinking,
You can really make your life a mess.

“I always send my steak back,
My life is overdone.
I have to be quite careful
That I don’t have any fun.

“And even when I’m tapping,
Happy hoofing to the beat,
I know I’ll get thick ankles
And ugly muscles in my feet.”