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Message: <blockquote data-quote="SynapsisSynopsis" data-source="post: 1309228" data-attributes="member: 15553">If you're going to qualify the protasis you should qualify the apodosis as well: If a film fails to entertain me, it is a failure to entertain me, i.e. tautologically.  If it fails to entertain you, then yes, it fails to entertain you, but to jump from its failing to entertain you to its failing wholesale is to make the unspoken assertion that it only exists inasmuch as it entertains you.  A film fails if it is a failure, and a film fails to entertain me if it is a failure to entertain me, but you'll have to do a lot more arguing to establish a connection between failing and failing to entertain.I think you're more guilty of the disjunction between popular and artistic success than LightPhoenix.  Art does not exist for your or my mere entertainment.  It has to be heavier and thicker than that.  Entertainment is popular success; artistic success lies elsewhere.  I'm assuming, for example, that you aren't entertained by Finnegans Wake (I certainly am not), and hope that you can see how shaky that would be as grounds for calling it a failure.  I think I am more disturbed than entertained by great art.  It doesn't give me the giggles or the urge to say 'cool' or make me cry--every angel is terrifying.That's a bit troublesome now isn't it?  I mean, with film and its second-rate critical appartus emphasizing things like auteur theory and Lacan, perhaps that's fine, but, at least where books and poems are concerned, the idea of the "teller" has been under intense scrutiny since the mid to late 18th century.  I do not subscribe to your 'entertaining me = success' theorem--it's a bit egocentric for my taste--but supposing someone did, you could just as well attribute artistic failure to the culture that produces artists as to the artists themselves.  It has been some time since anyone has had a clear idea just what an 'author' is.Here's where I won't make any friends.  I can't stand LotR.  Movies--have seen them--, books--have read them--, none of it.  In fact I have a general distaste for stock fantasy and stock sci-fi from Forgotten Realms to Dragonlance to Farscape to, well, let's just say a lot of the things that are sacred cows to most of the people on these boards.  Yet there is that thread toward the top of the forum about Tolkien's failings, of which assuredly there are many, (not that he is without his charms), where reapersaurus is continually beaten with 'most read books other than the Bible' and similarly goofy statistics.  I bet if you counted up every person that has ever read Homer in the last 2800 odd years, it would exceed LotR, but that is not my point.So am I free to proclaim with absolute legitimacy that because LotR fails to entertain me, it's a complete, utter, devastating failure?  I am guessing a big no is on the way.  I have more than once heard someone say LotR are the greatest books ever written, and more than once have burst out laughing; I cringe when people call them great movies.  That's just taste.  I concede that we live in an era of relativism, where people are happy to give up arguments of quality in favor of the 'everything is subjective' line, but that doesn't mean it's true.  I recall a thread in general some months ago where one poster antagonistically tossed off something like "Oh lord, save us from the moral relativists."  Well, I'd like to be saved from the literary relativists as well.  There are reasons Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Goethe are so widely read, which have nothing whatever to do with their entertainment value (plenty of people find them boring), at least not in any gut-response sort of way.Writing well, writing a twist that nobody can guess, and entertaining your audience have nothing necessarily to do with each other.  I could write a twist that would be impossible for you to guess; that impossibility could as easily be a function of how badly it is written as how well, and anything in-between.  If you insist on a well-told story being an entertaining story you may, but it is not at all clear that what constitutes artistic success has anything to do with telling stories at all, let alone telling them well.They've also survived through luck.  Euripides is a more interesting example, since he hardly ever won and was the most lampooned of the great 3.  I understand your point about frame of reference--in hermeneutics the popular term is horizons or horizons of expectation--but to say that the only reason the great works of the past are less popular today than they once were is because they can no longer be properly understood is a bit of a stretch.  Shakespeare is read, seen and appreciated more now than he ever was in his lifetime or probably any period after, and that is not an uncommon scenario by any means.That is one approach, but not the only one.  Some critics would advocate the opposite.  I would think, given your emphasis on subjectivity, that you would incline more toward the 'it is significant only in how it relates to us now' camp.Yet ultimately, such horizons are unavailable.  We all know what happens when you go chasing after a horizon: you come to the spot where it had been, only to find that it has since moved on.Additionally, there are more layers than a simple 'frame of reference' suggests.  It is more like a reel of frames of reference, and really (bad pun?) those frames are the film, and there's no going back from them.  Their meaning is contained entirely in what they are, and the discursive unity, if you believe in such a thing, that made that articulation, reel, frame possible is never again available.  It's something like a language: nothing you can pin down.  Of course one of the first things we often forget when starting down these roads of thought is that there's really no such thing.And it's entirely possible for this to be the case when viewing or listening to a work produced in our own time.  Perhaps you are simply misaligned and so cannot appreciate Spears or NSync.If you want to play the subjectivity card, you should at least accept the consequences, which are, at the least, that you are forbidden from making categorical judgments about anything and so that, essentially, good and bad cease to exist and relations between things take over.Movies that generally suck  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f600.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":D" title="Big grin    :D"  data-smilie="8"data-shortname=":D" />.  A lot of Shakespeare's stories were already stolen; it isn't the stories, in themselves, that make the writing great.If you want to make a living writing, I can certainly sympathize with you having the views you do and taking the approach you do.  But from a critical standpoint I think it is the wrong approach--at the same time, if you are a great writer, it will make no difference.  You will simply write good books that happen to be popular books, too.  There's certainly nothing wrong with being popular, only with using popularity to justify critical judgments.We get along capitally on that one.  I also agree with your assessment of the weak way the twist in The Sixth Sense was wrought, which goes to my previous statement that a twist that cannot be predicted and good writing have nothing necessarily to do with one another.  I've entertained similar thoughts about Fight Club as well.</blockquote>

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