While I hate the idea of aligning myself with the New Yorker, I do like that comic.

Jesus fucking Christ trag. No no no no no no a thousand billions times no you philistine

I'm gonna need an actual argument, LV.

You will get it once I get off work. But I can't believe this needs an argument.

I'm sad LV has to work on Sunday

I look forward to it.

The creation of art always starts from one of three places:

1. "I've got a feeling I need to share with the world."
2. "I have no real goals with this, I'm just gonna start creating something and see what comes out."
3. "I want to make something that makes money."

Of course a final product can include elements of all three.

IHRM struggled with this same issue a few years ago, right here on this very board. That's why there's a thread with the awkward name "Cinematic Motion Picture News Thread".

IHRM?

And I'm not struggling. My thinking on this is totally clear.

Clear-ly bad

Well now we're getting somewhere.

RM user I Hail Randy Moss. I miss him even though he threatened my life

Your ability to (subjectively) identify the motivations behind an artistic professional's work doesn't really mean anything, trag. The end product, movie/film, is experienced through the same medium, and this semantics argument is arbitrary snob culture crap.

Film is a physical thing. That's the only distinction.

What does the medium have to do with anything? Be it celluloid or digital, movie screen or tablet, that has no bearing on what I'm talking about. I'm discussing the inception of an artistic idea, and the endeavoring that happens to bring that idea to the consumer. There are multiple paths that process can take, but they all start from one of the positions I've stated. To what extent the idea gets formed by the needs of commerce depends on the project and the team behind it. How does seeing that fundamental truth make me a snob?

Did you kill him?

This kind of hierarchy of artistic purity makes no sense to me, and I have no idea how anyone could apply it in any kind of meaningful, consistent, or logical way. Who is making that distinction? Who decides what is pure and what isn't? And why, ultimately, does it matter?

Every movie - no matter what its genre, who made it, how much it cost, how profitable it was, or what the filmmaker's intent was - is equally capable of insight, emotion, sensuality, and artistic success. Because all art is going to subjectively judged, an artist's intent has very little meaning to the artistic success of the final work of art. That is determined by the person taking in that work of art.

I think Commando is a greater artistic success than Manchester by the Sea. I think Jurassic Park is a greater artistic success than Schindler's List. These are all movies. These are all films. They are all works of art. They are all commercial. The only distinction is which ones I think are good or bad. I can be just as profoundly moved by a $100 million dollar blockbuster as I can an arthouse movie from the Czech Republic. There's no difference.

I totally agree with all of this. I wasn't suggesting that Get Out was somehow of higher merit than, say, BvsS; just that the creators' intentions were vastly different, and that for Jordan Peele, this movie seems to indicate a shift from crowd-pleasing/money-making fare to something with some sort of message.

Perhaps Jordan Peele thinks something with "some sort of message" will make lots of money and please lots of crowds.

Perhaps...but I doubt it.