Not Dumb Movies

Zoe Williams says, 'This tesselates with the political point...' I know the feeling, you fall in love with a word and you just have to use it. I think I'm still supposed to get 'maieutic' into The Sunday Times as a result of a ten-year-old bet. Somehow, the opportunity never arises and, anyway, I don't like the word any more. Leaving that aside, Williams goes along with the offendee I heard on Today. Women are badly portrayed in movies etc. As I said, so are men, only worse. But Williams goes further and says movies are not for adults so we should give up on them. Her evidence is the list of the top grossing movies of this century. But surely this is like giving up on literature because of Jeffrey Archer. I've just watched Steve McQueen's Hunger and rewatched Joanna Hogg's Unrelated on DVD - pretty grown-up films and both better than Slumdog Millionaire by a very wide margin. Of course, they were barely distributed. But, if people had gone to see them in large numbers, they would have been. Furthermore, the net quality of current films and the financing of grown-up cinema of the future would have been improved. In other words, giving up on cinema because of a few dumb blockbusters is a mechanism for ensuring you are right about the dumbing down of films and for putting serious movie makers out of business. It's a kind of circular tesselation.