I’m gonna derail the thread away from his degeneracy a bit and articulate in a long autistic rant why I don’t think Adam is a good film critic because I think I have a different perspective to most people on here.
My initial problems with Adam is just how sophomoric he is about film. The best example is when he rightfully got bullied for saying Citizen Kane invented cinematic grammar, which is bizarre because as a user of r/TrueFilm he should be familiar with the meme of Birth or a Nation inventing the language in 1915 (which isn’t accurate but whatever). Most of his knowledge of film is limited to the past 15 years and that bites him in the ass all the time. I really fucking hate when he shits on silent films for having “bad acting” without considering that the cultural preconception of acting back then came from theater and realism doesn’t equate to quality, which is a very common critique from him. Recently he briefly covered Crimes of the Future and he bitched about it’s minimalist futuristic setting, which is fucking retarded. If he watched any of of Cronenberg’s earlier films, or even his son’s recent films like Possessor he would know that’s an obvious stylistic choice. But instead he thinks it’s a flaw in the film when it’s clearly just one of Cronenberg’s sensibilities, which leads to the bigger issue I have with him.
I was reading a review for the film Caché and the author said something that made me think of Adam, which was “film as a craft vs film an an art”. This is really relevance because Adam has said multiple times that Haneke is his favorite director and I can really see why. Personally, I’m not a huge fan but I’ve only seen a handful, the best I’ve seen from him is The Seventh Continent because it’s the only one I’ve seen that made me feel something lol. I blame Haneke for this huge trend in Western European cinema of really cold, bloodless technique and it’s very much in line with Adam’s sensibilities as a critic because he very much sees cinema as a “craft”.
His idea of what makes a good film is based on his narrow conception of technical execution. If you watch his Top 25 videos half of them are talking-head documentaries and his justification for their inclusion is how they convey information, which is like the bare expectation you should have for a documentary like that. His number 1 film of 2022 is like some fucking Netflix Kenny G documentary. In the past ten years there’s plenty of really great observational and poetic documentaries by filmmakers like Wang Bing but he sees the medium of documentary as purely a means of education rather than making artistic statements.
I stopped watching his podcast when they made the episode about Saló because he kept bitching about the fucking gore effects at the end. That’s really not the point of the ending at all, the effects are secondary to what is being conveyed. But he doesn’t seem to get that all and should stick to reviewing goyslop where there isn’t anything else being conveyed to begin with outside of the literal text.
He gets a lot of shit for the wrong reasons. Most of the criticism he receives is because he hates capeshit, or they misinterpret his autism as being “nitpicky” or “contrarian” when it isn’t . It’s really frustrating because he has shown he does get that to an extent. He loves The Holy Mountain and Hausu which should be surprising. The Holy Mountain isn’t that great from a filmmaking level, the acting isn’t great, it’s lighting is pretty flat, it’s very thematically transparent and not really profound, it’s structure and pacing is really weird, but it’s great because of its ambition and sheer creativity and absurdity. He does get it but he doesn’t apply that to anything else for some reason, it’s really fucking annoying. Again he should stick to shitting on bad Disney remakes because that’s what he’s good at, not talking about experimental or art house film because he doesn’t know what he’s talking about.
Incoming puzzle pieces.
