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Is Classism Alive And Well At The Box Office?

Richard Nixon introduced the phrase “the silent majority” into the popular lexicon, referring to those people who weren’t out protesting or stirring up a storm, but quietly and strongly sanctioning his actions. Since then the term has become almost synonymous with “middle America” or the “the big red middle”, the clear indication that liberalism and activism were traditionally associated with the coasts of the country – specifically concentrated around Washington, New York and California. Whenever loud and vocal protests arise in these regions, expect the more conservative politicians to speak about the silent majority of decent middle-class folks in “flyover country” who don’t make big deals of things and vote with their feet. These are the people, these politicians will tell you, who save their public political expressions for the election day. And so, it would seem, this central part of the country has voted on The Social Network. And silence was certainly there in spades.

The Silent Majority turned down The Social Network's Friend Request...

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Is Film Criticism Ever Objective? Can Disliking a Film Ever Be Wrong?

Toy Story 3 seems to be pretty much universally loved. I say ‘pretty much’, because there are currently two negative reviews on-line about it. To put that in context, that’s two negative reviews out of nearly one-hundred-and-fifty on Rotten Tomatoes. As always happens with this sort of thing – reviewers expressing a ridiculously unpopular opinions – this has prompted a bit of a reaction on-line:

They rail against anyone who likes it, happily sitting alone on their bitter, hate-filled island. An island of wrong. Hundreds of film critics have proclaimed their love for Toy Story over the course of three movies and the two baldies who hate it can’t really tell us why. Most of the time film is subjective. This time it’s not.

So, is film criticism ever objective? Can an opinion ever be wrong?

Can you believe the Buzz about this film?

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White and Wrong: Contrarian (Anti-Popularist) Film Critics

I was away in Florida when the whole Armond White thing broke last month. For those out of the loop, users of film review aggregation site Rotten Tomatoes decided that they’d had enough of White’s contrary approach to film reviews after he ‘ruined’ the perfect Tomatometer for District 9 – and generated quite the reaction on the site. With District 9 being released in the UK and Ireland this week, it seems almost the perfect time to revisit the discussion, with the benefit of hindsight. Plus, film criticism is one of those topics that I take a great deal of recreational interest in.

Somehow I doubt we'll ever see eye-to-eye...

Somehow I doubt we'll ever see eye-to-eye...

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