The most pretentious thing you've ever read

[LaGoosh]

Film criticism is more na

[Mr. Seven]

I love the Barthes mention.

[Big Jock Knew]

I can never see the name Barthes without laughing. Our Media Studies teacher in 6th year was a complete alcoholic and paid virtually no attention to anything. We just watched films all the time. In one of the lessons he actually taught something, he wrote the names of Todorov, Levi-Strauss, Barthes and Propp on the blackboard. Propp was amended to "Poof" by some other class and stayed there for the next six months.

 

School

[rubbafish]

I bloody love Paul Morley, I have to say, because he's so ridiculously pretentious that he just exudes inadvertent comedy.

 

A small piece of uninteresting Gladstone Small trivia, seeing as though the site was brought up - I briefly wrote for Drowned In Sound back in 2000.

 

I wrote for the site for 6 years from the inception at the launch gig at the Water Rats with Exhibit A and Twist up until just after the Kaiser Chiefs CD single. Was fun times. Did see one of my fave puns on the message boards: 'YOURBANDNAMEIS:PRETENTIOUS'

 

As for most pretentious article I have read, Alex Shane's most important thing you will ever read in your life surely has to make this short list... 'There's Only One Perry Groves' coming a close second.

[Devon Malcolm]

I wrote on it for about 6 days - a review of a New Order single and Throw Momma From The Train in their brief dalliance with reviewing films and then packed it in. I found it a complete nightmare trying to get in touch with any of the editors about what work they wanted. Couldn't organise a piss-up in a brewery.

[rubbafish]

I wrote on it for about 6 days - a review of a New Order single and Throw Momma From The Train in their brief dalliance with reviewing films and then packed it in. I found it a complete nightmare trying to get in touch with any of the editors about what work they wanted. Couldn't organise a piss-up in a brewery.

 

Each editor, different views. Were you in the happy days of Colin Roberts being Chief Ed by any chance or the early days of Sean + other people?

[Devon Malcolm]

I wrote on it for about 6 days - a review of a New Order single and Throw Momma From The Train in their brief dalliance with reviewing films and then packed it in. I found it a complete nightmare trying to get in touch with any of the editors about what work they wanted. Couldn't organise a piss-up in a brewery.

 

Each editor, different views. Were you in the happy days of Colin Roberts being Chief Ed by any chance or the early days of Sean + other people?

 

I think it was Sean. I don't remember a great deal about it, but articles were basically claimed via an email group mailing list. It was an absolute farce.

[Up Chuck]

Did see one of my fave puns on the message boards: 'YOURBANDNAMEIS:PRETENTIOUS'

 

That is great, but let it not detract from remembering that Yourcodenameis:Milo were fucking ace.

[Maverick]

 

Might be abit controversial but this was sold to me as some kind of amazing life changing rite of passage book (not that I expected it to be) it was utter shite.

[Pinc]

Don't be daft.

 

You want a pretentious novel? Have a flick through 'Kill Your Friends' by John Niven.

 

 

I'm about 100 pages in on the recommendation of a friend and I'm not sure I've ever disliked a book more. I don't want to go into some contrived 'rant' as I'd then be falling prey to the same loathsome indulgences which fuel this nasty little shit of a book, but it's a thoroughly unimaginative attempt to say something that a million people haven't said before. The protagonist is an A&R working for a mid-size London record label on the cusp of the decline of Britpop. It's set in 1997, and initially I was willing to give it the benefit of the doubt - maybe it seemed so thoroughly trite because of Seinfeld Syndrome or something. But it came out in 2009. I laughed out loud when I found that out.

 

Here's a particularly turgid excerpt, try to imagine the dialogue coming out of Max Beesley's mouth in a trailer for a new series of Mad Dogs. It's the literary equivalent.

 

Trellick looks at me and realises exactly what I am thinking. 'You know what they say, young Steven. It's not dog-eat-dog around here...' He drains his glass.

 

'I know,' I say, finishing the aphorism for him, 'it's dog-gang-rapes-dog-then-tortures-him-for-five-days-before-burying-him-alive-and-taking-out-every-motherfucker-the-dog-has-ever-known.'

[Mr. Seven]

Rolls right off the tongue, that.

[Devon Malcolm]

This is ridiculous - even more so when this pillock is getting upset about a TRAILER. He's so, so wrong about Tarantino as well:-

 

If you're a film enthusiast like me, and if you don't live under a rock, you've likely seen the trailer posted below for auteur savant Quentin Tarantino's new film, Django Unchained, due to be released this coming Christmas. All the standard QT tropes seem present from what I can see: great soundtrack ("The Payback" by James Brown!); quirky dialogue ("Get it? The D is silent. That shit kray it's so funny."); mirthful experiments with cinematic violence (cf. the blood spray on the cotton field); and a vapid, nihilistic engagement with real human experience that sends this movie-watcher into paroxysms of annoyance.

 

Having already erased the horror of the Holocaust with the preposterous revenge fantasy of Inglorious Basterds, Tarantino, it seems, has decided to offer a prequel of sorts, negating the reality of American slavery by running it through the meat-grinder of his imagination and peppering it with a little spice from the various cult movie genres he adores. My annoyance, of course, is that Q's flippant approach to the real trauma of collective history dovetails too neatly with the ignorance of the uninformed half-wits who revere him as a great auteur. (Two words for that dullard army, by the way: Federico Fellini.) An anecdotal example of the Tarantino acolytes I excoriate here-- A friend told me that after witnessing the bombastic conclusion of IB in a theater at the time of its release, he heard a teenager behind him cry out, earnestly, "I didn't know that's how the war ended." Yikes.

 

One time, years ago, when I was teaching Frederick Douglass's famous slave narrative of 1845 in an African American literature course, a student of mine remarked that he liked Douglass because "he was such a pimp." (I think it's especially worth noting that the student was white, and offered the comment with an enthusiastic faux-gangsta swagger that I suppose he thought seemed relevant to the material.) While I encouraged his admiration for Douglass, I spent some time in class talking about how the word "pimp" evoked a pretty limited range for black male heroism, and was likely dictated by the strictures of an uneasy popular culture that frequently situates its black men within the recognizable confines of, well, pimpdom. Tarantino, then, seems to want to narrate his version of American slavery through the lens of that same popular culture, with--I need to say it--the same level of nuance as a 20 year old white undergrad making his initial way through the thorny path of American racial discourse.

 

Now, if Tarantino fails off to offer anything remotely resembling the reality of American slavery in the 19th century, I guess it's out of pure boneheadedness and not for lack of trying. The film's African American star, Jamie Foxx, has been quoted as saying that QT tried to prepare him for the emotional intensity of the role by advising, "I'm worried that you can't get to that slave." Tarantino, ever sensitive to the dehumanizing horror of the slave experience, insisted that Foxx work hard to step away from the egotism of 21st century celebrity life. But lest you think Tarantino is too sensitive to the plight of the black slave, note too, how he also blathered on at Comic-Con last month about how he sees his creation Django as the distant ancestor of John Shaft, the protagonist of one of the ur-texts of the 1970s blaxploitation genre. Lesson: even when QT is trying to be sensitive to the reality of African American collective history, he can't shake the framing lens of the films that groomed his relationship to black America--namely, those starring Richard Roundtree and Pam Grier. (Also worth noting here that while I imagine many will perceive Tarantino's naming of his protagonist Django as an homage to the title character of a 1966 spaghetti Western starring Franco Nero, I can't help but think that it's also a sly nod to the outlaw played by Sid Haig in the 1972 Pam Grier exploitation vehicle, The Big Bird Cage.)

 

Finally, to draw this minor jeremiad to a close, I can't help wonder if in some perverse way, Tarantino didn't really just intend to make an action-film adaptation of The Narrative of Frederick Douglass. Django, like Douglass, is physically violent when his humanity is most threatened (as with Douglass's famous altercation with the slave-breaker Covey in his narrative); Django, like Douglass, is literate, despite the common prohibition against teaching slaves to read (the silent-D joke is evidence of this); Django, like Douglass, depends on authentication from white men to secure his freedom in white supremacist America (though Douglass's chief authenticator, the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison was not so adept with a pistol as the character played by Christoph Waltz here.)

 

Viewing the film in this way, as a loose adaptation, makes me want to try to predict what future projects Tarantino might take on. An anime version of Rahna Reiko Rizzuto's Hiroshima in the Morning perhaps? Steven Galloway's The Cellist of Sarajevo as a horror collaboration with Eli Roth: the Bosnian genocide as gleeful, isn't-Eastern-Europe-spooky? Hostel-like splatterfest?

 

The mind boggles.

 

http://michaelborshuk.blogspot.co.uk/2012/...re-quentin.html

[Up Chuck]

I'd think Quentin Tarrantino's closest friends were twats if they referred to him as "Q".

[Chest Rockwell]

Don't be daft.

 

You want a pretentious novel? Have a flick through 'Kill Your Friends' by John Niven.

 

 

I'm about 100 pages in on the recommendation of a friend and I'm not sure I've ever disliked a book more. I don't want to go into some contrived 'rant' as I'd then be falling prey to the same loathsome indulgences which fuel this nasty little shit of a book, but it's a thoroughly unimaginative attempt to say something that a million people haven't said before. The protagonist is an A&R working for a mid-size London record label on the cusp of the decline of Britpop. It's set in 1997, and initially I was willing to give it the benefit of the doubt - maybe it seemed so thoroughly trite because of Seinfeld Syndrome or something. But it came out in 2009. I laughed out loud when I found that out.

 

Here's a particularly turgid excerpt, try to imagine the dialogue coming out of Max Beesley's mouth in a trailer for a new series of Mad Dogs. It's the literary equivalent.

 

Trellick looks at me and realises exactly what I am thinking. 'You know what they say, young Steven. It's not dog-eat-dog around here...' He drains his glass.

 

'I know,' I say, finishing the aphorism for him, 'it's dog-gang-rapes-dog-then-tortures-him-for-five-days-before-burying-him-alive-and-taking-out-every-motherfucker-the-dog-has-ever-known.'

 

 

I read this when it was sold to me as a "British American Psycho". It falls way far short of that, obviously, but I did laugh when reading it... I didn't think it was terrible, but I wouldn't be running out and recommending it to people.

 

Did it really only come out in 2009? Wow. I also assumed it was older from reading it.

[Devon Malcolm]

This isn't especially pretentious but I don't know where else to put this. It's from my Letterboxd friends list and it's really pissed me off. I couldn't hit the 'unfollow' button fast enough. That'll show him!

 

It's about Vertigo, by the way.

 

The best movie ever according to the 2012 Sight & Sound Poll as chosen by 846 critics. What a load of dog shit. 846 mostly pretentious wankers.

 

A guy confuses a fear of height's with a fetish for melodramatic women with huge eyebrows and makes a tent in his pants. A pretty boring adventure with piss poor acting and a dreadful score that sounds like a bee sting.

 

To declare this film as the best film ever made? "It is folly" to quote Sean Bean from Lord of the Rings. It wouldn't even make my top 500, literally! Old films are mostly shit. The film world has come a long way. Modern films have surpassed them in so many ways. Superior content, cinematography, sound, acting quality and so on. Old films entirely rely on story and for that reason I liked The Manchurian Candidate despite the appalling acting but the story in this isn't even good?

 

"The Best Film Ever" is pure nostalgia, pretention and it's simply wrong! The Emperor's new clothes. Grow some pubes you snobby bastards.

 

FUCK. OFF.