Ontopic, please, iamus.
Ach, sorry man.
It's just that this thread's attitude, and it's presence in FTV+T irks me a bit. I probably wouldn't mind as much if it was in Convo, whether I agreed with it or not. Here it just seems to me to spell out the worse aspects of Barbelith's decline and cheapens the place a bit.
I personally don't have a problem with the Dark Knight thread, and I don't think the embarrassing detour the previous one took should necessarily have spelled its doom. Hype is increasingly becoming part of the Event Movie experience, as valid in its own way as the movie itself. The buildup is part of the thing. When people get a little overexcited and unchecked, it means that they're being moved in one way or the other. It means that something's grabbing their attention and taking them places. That's a cool thing worth documenting. I feel Barbelith would be better served incorporating that peculiarly internet phenomenon and doing it's own thing with it, instead of mocking it to pretend that, y'know, "We don't actually do that stuff".
We do.
While I think it's a fair criticism that movies often get a thread pile-on during the pre-release and then get dropped when they actually come out, it's hardly a foregone conclusion. Batman Begins was hyped to high fuck and there was plenty of discussion post-release too. In my mind, there's an equal chance that getting people embarrassed about talking the movie up would be just as damaging to getting any actual discourse going when the thing's out.
If we don't gush this shit in the run-up, how do we know what the rest of our community's feelings on it are? Or how excited they feel? It's the foreplay. It's what gets the conversation going when the time's right for it.
If there's any problem here, it's not Barbelith's. It's the promotional machine for the film which these days, shaped by pressures of what the internet actually is and does, rolls a lot earlier and far more cleverly. To me, that's not a problem. It's just a thing that's happened. I think Barbelith would pass into the twilight a lot more gracefully if it tried to accept that and run with it, instead of complaining like a crotchety old thing who's picking fights 'cause it's just shamed itself.
Personally, I'd like to see this Convo'd. That's just my opinion though. |
