Why bother about anything, ever?

It boils down to personal interest. I take art seriously; from that, I find arguments such as "films are entertainment as much as they are art", or "a work of art is popular therefore some people find it good", either banal or meaningless, which they are, because 'entertaining' is not a binary opposite to 'artistic' ('art' isn't something to be endured!) and because a work of art's popularity tells us nothing about the work of art other than the simple and relative fact that it's popular, which has absolutely no objective weight whatsoever. So when I say I feel 'obliged to speak out', I'm saying I feel as if I ought to speak out, as somebody who takes an active interest in these sorts of things.

Blah. Nobody and everybody is 'the greatest director ever'.

I disagree here. A 'greatest director ever' poll has no concrete antithesis other than 'here are a list of alternatives who are more worthy'; and there's probably a poll like that made every week, so who cares? Those kinds of things are actually conceived so that that kind of meaningless (if not uninteresting) debate can take place. That's what they're there for.

In the case of Christopher Nolan and Inception, for though, I'm addressing very specific issues that are at stake at a very specific time and place.

So your analogy doesn't quite hold up.


This analogy is curious too.

If Michael Bay's Armageddon was being praised by professional critics as a film to be reckoned with on the same level as a Hitchcock film, then I would feel obliged to give it more attention than it would otherwise deserve.

But in truth, nobody is; there is no critical hype surrounding Michael Bay in the way there is critical hype surrounding Christopher Nolan.

And so bitching about the fact Michael Bay's films are taken too seriously by people would be a 'waste of time and energy on an irrelevant tangent', because it'd actually be a straw man argument, fighting against something nobody has actually said.

But with Christopher Nolan....

Haha, yeah, everything is everything and therefore nothing is nothing and we're all just playing out a meaningless existence to a universal rhythm in an ultimately indifferent because finite cosmos.

OH NO!

There's always going to be a 'bigger problem' than the one you're addressing.

But then we come back to personal interests and what we actively invest ourselves in whilst here on this mortal earth. And I'm interested in art, in films in particular; and as a social being with some consciousness as to my own 'social being-ness', I'm also by extension interested - as anybody with a serious interest in anything ought to be - in the social, political, historical forces at work in and around such art, which is why in order to fully understand and give proper critical attention to something such as Inception, you've got to also look at the baggage that comes with it.