Seriously Unserious

There’s this weird tension in my taste. I don’t want movies to feel important, but I want the artist to treat the unimportant subject very seriously.

Look, I just want movies to be relatable, okay? Which means they can’t be self-important and grand. The characters should be as foolish and silly and insignificant as I am.

But at the same time, I want movies to be deeply considered. I want to feel the filmmaker’s love for her work. I want to feel I’m in good hands. Please don’t waste my time with something you hardly cared about and hastily threw together.

So I want an unserious movie, and I want you to make it well. Take the making of it seriously without making it serious.

Jerry Seinfeld said it well: “To waste this much time on something this stupid… that felt good to me.”

Or as Jemaine Clement put it to Taika Waititi, “the world needs stupid shit.”

But this doesn’t mean I want every movie to be a farce. Lawrence of Arabia pulls off an epic by relentlessly mocking the main character, a man who feels his life is and must be an epic.

It’s about being relatable. And amazing. But common. But excellent.