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Popularity breeds contempt

Vin Diesel and Paul Walker in The Fast and the Furious
  • Posted at 6:19pm
  • 09 May 2008
  • by AndrewCollins-RT

Since one of my favourite ever films, The Poseidon Adventure, falls well outside the critically accepted canon, I’m used to the idea of the guilty pleasure. A high-wire 1970s disaster movie designed for its popular appeal, whose dialogue has been derided as "waterlogged" and its characters "cardboard", it'll never trouble Citizen Kane, The Godfather or Bicycle Thieves in any critic's Top Ten.

But do you know what? I'd sit down and watch it right now if it was on – while I'd really have to be in the right mood for, say, confirmed classic La Règle du Jeu.

This, it seems, is the mark of a guilty pleasure: a film you sincerely love but which you might not bring up over a latte and biscotti in the foyer of an arthouse cinema.

Titles that fall into this category are often simply slushy and melodramatic, such as the Barbra Streisand/Robert Redford romance The Way We Were, in which their relationship is tested across the decades.

For years, Douglas Sirk's 1950s melodramas, such as All That Heaven Allows, were deemed mundane, and only in the 70s did some men with goatee beards reassess them. Now it’s positively cool to say you love Sirk.

This, I think, illustrates the underlying sexism of a lot of male critics, where films aimed at women are seen to be artistically unworthy. (Why else would a sneering term like "chick flick" achieve a sort of kitsch legitimacy?)

Mind you, boys' films can be just as easily dismissed: think of something fundamentally action-based, like The Fast and the Furious, in which the racing of hot-rods is pretty much the whole point of the movie, and sniffy reviews won't be far behind.

I say it's time to come out of the cinematic closet. Fling back the curtains! Stop feeling embarrassed about your favourite weepie/musical/melodrama/action adventure/talking dog movie! Celebrate cinema in all its diverse forms! And hands off our misty, watercoloured memories!

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