CHECK OUT HULK’S FIRST ARTICLE OVER AT BADASS DIGEST!
http://www.badassdigest.com/2011/11/03/film-crit-hulk-smash-never-hate-a-movie
HULK THANK!
“NEVER HATE A MOVIE” OR: HOW QUENTIN TARANTINO GOT HULK TO STOP WORRYING AND LOVE THE BOMBS
Published
FILM CRIT HULK! HULK BLOG! 
Congratulations on your new home, Hulk!
HULK THANK!
Excellent article! I was linked to this blog last week by The Game Overthinker to read your “Arkham City” article, and immediately had to bookmark it!
Anywho, this reminds me of a similar epiphany I had a few weeks ago watching American Horror story with my girlfriend. While she loves it, I hadn’t liked the first episode at all, but i wasn’t quite sure why. When it came time for us to watch episode 2 together, I noticed that actually, my problem was that I was BORED within minutes of it starting, and soon I found myself spending the whole episode dissecting it, trying to figure out why it wasn’t holding my interest. I actually had a very fun time figuring out why every single character annoyed me and why I wasn’t engaged.
Go figure, when the episode ended and my GF asked if I liked it better, I had a really hard time explaining my answer to her, and your article basically explains why. It IS a lot more fun to analyze what does and doesn’t work in a movie than simply what is “AWESOME” or “SUCKS”.
Great read, looking forward to future articles!!!
I just recently started reading you here. This was such a great article. I’ll definitely be coming back. That Tarantino anecdote is AWESOME! 😉
I loved your discussion of polarized opinions that we see so often (or that’s how I interpreted it), which is something that drives me crazy. There’s so many aspects to this, but I think the most important lesson from your article is there’s always something to learn from everything and everyone. There’s nothing/nobody so awful/stupid we can’t learn anything from it/them.
DEFINITELY. IT’S NOT LIKE WE JUST HAVE TO GIVE EVERYTHING A PASS OR LOVE EVERYTHING NO QUESTIONS ASKED. IT’S JUST WE SHOULD NEVER INTERNALIZE THESE THINGS TO THE POINT OF BLIND LOVE OR HATE. THERE’S ALWAYS SOMETHING MORE INTERESTING TO EXPLORE.
YEAH, HULK SEES HIM AT THE NEW BEVERLY (THE THEATER HE OWNS OUT HERE IN L.A.) AND EVERYONE ONCE IN AWHILE HULK THINKS ABOUT MENTIONING IT AND SAYING HOW MUCH IMPACT IT HAD ON HULK, BUT WE’LL SEE.
CHEERS!
Dear Hulk.
I think that this particular column should be required reading for anyone who wishes to engage in criticism of any kind (film, political, social, etc) on the internet. Your kind of thoughtful and engaging grandiloquence is a welcome antidote to much of the tripe which spews from the mouths of the internet’s many and varied denizens. But I particularly like the distilled message of waiting to pass judgement that you took from your conversation with QT, which is the problem that I have with most of what gets written these days online. It’s as if you need to have an opinion before you even have time to think about anything. Also, I appreciate your detailed, Proust-like recording of a meaningful incident in your intellectual and emotional development which also causes me to pause in my heretofore unyielding annoyance at Quention Tarantino for wasting my time with most of his movies since Pulp Fiction (favorite QT scipt ever? True Romance). I guess I have a lot to learn too.
Anyway, like the man says, Your ideas are
intriguing to me, and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
best
MSC
HULK THANK!
AND IT FUNNY. HULK THOUGHT BASTERDS WAS QT’S BEST FILM YET (GOING BACK TO PULP). BUT IT PRECISELY THIS KIND OF DICHOTOMY THAT MAKE A CONVERSATION INTERESTING. STARTING AT TWO POINTS THEN FINDING EACH OTHERS PERSPECTIVE (AND EVEN GETTING TO CLARIFY YOUR OWN). FOR INSTANCE THE REASON HULK NOT CRAZY ABOUT TRUE ROMANCE? IT FEEL TOO MUCH LIKE TARANTINO WRITING FANTASY FOR HIS COMIC-BOOK LOVING SELF. FOR SOME THAT PART OF THE CHARM, FOR HULK IT HIM GETTING OUT HIS SELF-INVOLVING FANTASIES EARLY SO HE COULD MOVE ON TO MORE ORGANIC WORK. BUT LIE EVERYTHING, IT ABOUT WHAT YOU VALUE / LIKE IN A STORY. THE KEY JUST NEVER TO “HATE” WHAT YOU DON’T VALUE.
I didn’t love IB, but I grew up with WWII history buffs-bordering-on-fanatics, so deviations from history detracted from my enjoyment. Watching Eli Roth prancing around with a baseball bat screaming “Teddy Williams goes Yahhhhhd” in an aggressively mediocre Boston accent (full disclosure: I grew up in Arlington MA) really bothered me on multiple levels. Certainly the scenes with Christophe Wald made the movie worth watching in any case.
Also, eiher your blog clock is off, or you are somewhere in England. Which is it?
WORDPRESS IS ENGLISH BLOG. HULK YET TO RESET?
I thought the following quote from Quentin Tarantino should be posted here as a nice coda on Tarantino’s advice to HULK.
“After I saw Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me at Cannes, David Lynch had disappeared so far up his own ass that I have no desire to see another David Lynch movie until I hear something different. And you know, I loved him. I loved him.” — Quentin Tarantino
HULK STILL ADORES LYNCH. THOUGH WE’LL SEE IF HE KEEPS GOING IN THE INLAND EMPIRE DIRECTION.
Hulk wrote about Tony Scott today and adapted Hulk’s mantra via Tarantino: “Never Hate A Movie”. However in Hulk’s responses to comments and even in Tarantino’s original explanation, the wording of the mantra bugs this reader. The argument itself is sound, but the mantra gives me much pause.
The mantra’s phrasing seems imprecise, particularly given Hulk’s penchant toward specificity in one’s vernacular. By all means, let’s hate a movie. By all means, let’s hate a director. However, let us never dismiss a movie or its director because of our hatred. Let’s never give up on a movie or a director.
Let us hate, but let us acknowledge that our personal hatred clouds our critical judgment, and let us endeavor to fight through the haze. If we can clear it, hopefully we find less hatred but possibly we find a fuller, clearer hatred that focuses on the actually offensive parts, rather than the possibly passable whole.
We can hate a movie but still consider it, its virtues, and its shortcomings. It’s only dangerous when we assume that it all comes up short. Let’s avoid the fallacy of composition because of our hatred.
Given a medium as loaded to gills with moral turpitude as film (male gaze, objectification, desensitization, etc.), it becomes questionable bordering on immoral to not hate specific films, specific directors, specific movements. That hatred need not impair our appreciation/depreciation of a film or a body of work. It requires acknowledgement and an honest attempt at surmounting it.
Can we any sooner suggest to never hate a movie as to never love one? Many of the negative results of hating a movie have a contrapositive in loving one (blindness toward suspect themes, actions, ontologies, etc.) In fact, there is probably a corollary between Hulk’s tangible details and the creeping vagueness of so many reviews. (“I like it so its cinematography must be good! I felt it so its editing is fantastic!”)
This is baseline stuff of empathy. The same could be said of many individuals (polticians, competitors, former lovers, et al.) and many organizations (political parties, religious groups, et al.) We’re not wrong to hate; we’re wrong to devalue. We need to recognize our hatred as our deficit, not their credit.