In my experience, there are two types of film buffs: the ones who enjoy films out of many times, places, circumstances, and traditions (including Hollywood) ... and those who obsess over mainstream Hollywood flicks all day, and see any appreciation of something outside that sphere as a direct affront on their taste.

I'm the type that enjoys movies, obscure and mainstream. I'll happily watch Peter Greenaway movies and a blockbuster or something from the black and white era. I don't really care if a movie is pretentious if I enjoy it. I also have a lot of fun watching MST3K. Bad movies can be quite enjoyable.

My personal philosophy is that, if the movie is really "pretentious," then you must be in possession of the ability to explain why you feel that way.

Absolutely. I'm not calling the movies pretentious, I'm calling O'Hehir pretentious. I'm also calling him lazy and disdainful of popular movies. Look at the article we're commenting on. Besides the title he prefaces his last paragraph with "In a vain effort to prove that I sometimes watch movies other people have heard of" and goes on to mention two movies that were made before most readers here were born. Personally, I like both of those quite a bit, but he thinks that to enjoy "To Catch a Thief" you have to be "Hitchcockian" and includes the sentence "the added bonus that it swaddled his queasy-making misogyny in many layers of artifice" showing that he is both trying very hard to convince the reader that he's smart and that he doesn't understand his subject.

And then, just so you know he's only a real fan of "real" culture, he says "later hammered into TV history by Tony Randall and Jack Klugman".

Hammered into TV history? Quite a disdainful way to put it. That plus why he thinks the movie version was better (and strangely this one doesn't get a misogyny mention) shows his low opinion of the "low culture" of tv.

A better question: why do some people (presumably of tomreedtoon's ilk) work so hard to create this high/low binary? All of the people I know who like "art films" also enjoy their fair share of Hollywood movies

The problem is that O'Heir himself creates this binary. Did you read his ham-fisted "review" of Star Trek? The impression I get from his reviews, and I used to read quite a few of them, is that he loves "obscure" or "art" films and drips disdain on anything "mainstream". Could you dig up a review of a mainstream movie by him that was positive? Perhaps, but it'd require a lot of searching. It'd probably be equally hard to find one that was accurate.

And his other reviews simply reek of "I saw a movie that none of you idiots will have seen". I mean hell, look at the title of this article. "DVDs you should have seen, but didn't (you worthless proles)"

And he backs this all up with being not very bright. Not a good combination, but a fairly typical one of the pretentious.

Years ago, someone else wrote a letter here about an author writing about a subject that had been covered elsewhere. It was quite amusing.

You're a little late to the game.

Sorry, but your account just isn't true. And it doesn't take into account companies like Oracle who have a product inferior to Microsoft's yet manage to stay in business. And most of your descriptions of Microsoft products aren't accurate either. The other companies weren't superior, just "other". Yes, Microsoft used its size and foothold to leverage its products, but the companies it beat lost because they were flawed.

The popular understanding of evolutionary biology can be sketchy even among (I'm tempted to say especially among) its most enthusiastic lay proponents.

This whole article demonstrates that quite well, but nowhere as blatantly as in the sentence

As Boyd points out, the process of natural selection is supposed to gradually weed out any traits in a species that don't contribute to its survival and its ability to pass on its genes to offspring who will do the same.

Sketchy understanding indeed.

This is rich coming from someone who's attitude was

"I’m going to, I don’t care what the law says, I’m going to come out, I’m going to pursue an outcome that my boss wants. I’m going to rewrite the law."

Gonzales left in disgrace, why is anyone interviewing him? The only questions he should be asked in an interview are along the lines of "Will you turn yourself in or run if indicted? How can you sleep at night? What the hell is wrong with you? Will you turn State's evidence when your bosses are indicted?"

And another thing about Because the 450 can't do the job the CEO is doing.

I daresay anyone in the nation could have fucked up HP or GM or Enron the way the CEOs did, most probably wouldn't have done as bad a job. CEO is the most overrated position in capitalism.

Because the 450 can't do the job the CEO is doing.

And there's the lie that underpins it all.

Whether or not they can do the job isn't the question, it is how much more valuable is what the CEO brings and it isn't 200 times what the lowest paid employee brings. He can't do what I can do for his company either, does that mean I should make more than he does? Should he still be making 10 to 100 times what I do?

Not hardly.

Hi, thanks for letting us know you have no idea what you're talking about.

You could always change the definition of "employee" so that those contract employees are covered as well.

That was the Eisenhower era.