"Nowadays everyone must love (or at least pretend to love) pleasures that were supposedly once disdained or taken for granted: dive bars, street food, trashy films. But knowing, sophisticated attempts to replicate those things often traffic in their own kind of snobbery, confusing condescension with authenticity. Movies like “The American,” “Drive” and now “Haywire” offer strained pulp, neither as dumb as we want them to be nor as smart as they think they are, and not, in the end, all that much fun."
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A. O. Scott is making some good connections here. (via elisabethdonnelly)
I….don’t know? The thing is, work like Drive and The American are really imitating French revisions of American pulp stories (Godard, Melville), sometimes even imitations of those films (Michael Mann, for one), so for me it feels less like condescension and more like a story run through 3 or 4 different languages in Babelfish. I personally have a weakness for elaborate exercises in style that are springboarded off “trashy” aesthetics, but I’m not really sure what to do with it a lot of time.
(Source: The New York Times, via katherinestasaph)
