The Movie Blog: Uncut Podcast - June 1st 2009

As with what a poster above said, John’s “theory” of subjectivity can be applied to any art form. Kind of ironic that a few items later after the “Film is subjective!” alert we are told that Up! is “the best movie of the past three years”. From what I can see, the use of reminding people that film is subjective serves the purpose of making people admit that they are not always right about everything. But that’s not to say that everything is always completely subjective. If everything was subjective, then why listen to anyone’s opinion about anything? Why listen to anyone’s movie review if everything is subjective? Maybe because some people are better than others at giving a review? Well-not so fast-isn’t it SUBJECTIVE to suggest that anyone is “better” than anyone else at giving a movie review? The whole subjectivity issue is actually part of a larger debate about relativity that has been going on for many decades. At heart, though it may be totalitarian for one person to insist that they are always right about everything, it is just as much a form of intellectual terrorism to insist that everything is subjective and thus no one can possibly be correct about anything. Also, FACTS are not subjective. If a certain documentary filmmaker includes false facts in his documentary, then the documentary is misleading, and that is not a “subjective” call to deem something factually incorrect. But I understand we’re talking about art here, and aesthetics in general are much more subjective. I believe there’s a phrase “There’s no accounting for taste.”

To another above poster, I think it’s quite obvious that the tagline of “the home of correct movie opinions” is a joke.