I saw The Spirit yesterday. I like to think I’m pretty good at separating the art from the artist — I happen to believe it’s much more important to support good writing than nice writers — but sometimes that is just not possible. I sat through the entire film wondering about Frank Miller. What did he think he was doing? I mean, really, what did he think he was doing? I may say more in due course.

The BBC is reporting that NHS deaths due to staff errors have risen by 60% over the last two years. It’s a he-said-she-said story: the Lib Dems say the figures are unacceptably high; the government says the rise is due to better reporting, not increasing error rates. These stories never cover what I want them to — 3,645 deaths compared to what? What are the figures like for other countries and other systems? What are they doing that’s different? As it stands, this is a pretty useless article.

Steven Soderbergh interviewed by the AV Club. He says, near the end: It’s unfortunate that we don’t live in a time now where a polarizing film is a positive. Like in the ’70s, if you made a film like Straw Dogs, and half the people hate it and half the people think it’s a masterpiece, that’s viewed as cool. Now it’s not. Now if you don’t get unified critical acclaim, your film is viewed as a failure. There’s no badge of honor in having a high-end critic bash you and have it in a sense prove that the film is not down the middle.

Interesting point. I use rottentomatoes.com a lot and it’s true that films which 85% of critics have been positive about will generally be pretty good. But maybe there’s a sort of lowest common denominator effect going on here and relying on sites like metacritic and Rotten Tomatoes means that you’ll see the likeable and worthy films but miss out on the brilliantly poisonous, divisive moviemaking. Hmm.

autoposted from stuartwest.com