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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Snarf Zagyg" data-source="post: 9392647" data-attributes="member: 7023840">.... okay. This cannot be left unremarked upon.There's a story I use. I was eating at a Japanese restaurant on a date; at another table was a boisterous group of younger individuals. At one point, one of the individuals who was loudly trying to impress the rest of the table about his knowledge of Japanese cuisine (which seemed to go a little further than the California roll, but not as far as sashimi or udon) started talking about how much he loved sushi and Japanese food, and how much better it was than the terribly pretentious food at other places.At that point, he said, "What have the French ever done for world cuisine, anyway?" Not with irony, either.That's become kind of an joke with people I know moving forward- the idea that people get so enthusiastic about something that they don't realize the things they still don't know.I think that food (like most tastes) has both a subjective and an objective component, but we tend to confuse the two things. For example, a dish can be made well or poorly, the ingredients can be fresh or off, the price is what it is and so on.It's the same with film. A person can like, or dislike, Wes Anderson, or P.T. Anderson, or Kubrick, or Tarantino. Heck, a person can watch Citizen Kane and say, "Eh, I don't get the fuss. What has Orson Welles ever done for cinema, anyway?"And that's fine! But I have to draw the line when people say that they aren't good filmmakers. They may not be to your taste, but there is a reason that they are so important. Tarantino's movies are amazing in many ways, and I could write (OH I CAN WRITE!) about the dialogue, the music, the cinematography, the playful homage, the deeper themes, and the postmodern use of low and high culture. I can wax eloquently about how some of it is so smart, and some of it is so dumb that it actually circles back to being smart. But in the end, if it's not for you, it's not for you. That doesn't mean that it's not important, and that Tarantino is not one of the best and most important directors of our lifetime.</blockquote>

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