This is one of those dumb things people say where the expected response is “Oh, he found some flaws in the well-regarded movie. He must really know what he’s talking about!” The speaker can fold his arms and nod his head in self-congratulation while his audience is scared into silence. When met instead with a response of “…like what?” a person can be thrown for a real loop sometimes.
It’s because thinking about a movie as “flawed” is way too rigid a rubric to be applied to subjective things. Some will identify a confusing ending from a Coen brothers movie as one of its few flaws, as if they had only known their ending was confusing they would have changed it. If only Johnny Nobody had been a consultant on the film! He would have set them straight!
Things people often identify as “flaws” are deliberate choices made by the filmmakers meant to achieve a specific end. If they don’t work, they’re not “flaws,” they’re expressive chances they took to try to get a point across. These chances flop all the time in movies but they go unnoticed because there are other things going on to distract our attention. There are scenes in movies that I’m sure didn’t express everything a director wanted to express, but still were interested and got a sizeable amount of their ideas across, and this is hailed as a success. But is this not a flawed result? It’s an arbitrary term usually used as a conversation stopper because nothing makes people less interested in hearing more from someone than general vagueness.
Continue reading on the next page…
