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Message: <blockquote data-quote="fusangite" data-source="post: 1282974" data-attributes="member: 7240">Somehow people have got the ridiculous idea that for a movie to be great, it must be equally appealing to everyone. What a load of crap. Movies that get awards are often movies that are deliberately inaccessible to those who don't have a particular cultural or literary background. And we're fine with that; a movie can be a "great movie" even if it makes itself deliberately unappealing to a majority of the population. So what if LOTR appeals more to men than to women? I don't understand why anyone feels the need to argue about it. It seems like a self-evident truth. There are all kinds of movies that are unappealing to me that I can credit as good or great films. In my view, in order to reach for greatness, most movies have to sharpen and hone their message and symbol system in a way that deliberately selects a certain kind of audience. Frankly, I would have been happier with LOTR if it had been even more skewed towards the male geek demographic by following the books more closely. Teflon Billy is right when he says that a bunch of annecdotal evidence that some women liked the movie in no way contradicts the contention of the article's author. The author is not stating that every single woman on the face of the earth will be uninterested in fantasy war movies but that most women will be less interested than men. It's a sound observation. The sad thing is that in today's society, while columns like the one that started this thread can be published in the New York Times, there is precious little room for a column by me explaining why Mona Lisa Smile is sexist and, for me, as boring as whale excrement.</blockquote>

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