June 27, 2008

Genre

Hey there stranger! I'm sure you're here because you were googling for Indiana Jones, but this here's a not very well maintained blog about comics, politics, and all kinds of nerdity.

Anyway, I was driving home today and heard an excerpt from an interview between Roger Ebert and Martin Scorsese from the late 90s. At one point Ebert says, "movies aren't about their subject; they're about how they're about their subject...I don't want to see a bad cowboy movie, or a bad boxing movie, I want to see a good boxing movie." And then, and I'll paraphrase because he wasn't very diplomatic here, that he doesn't understand people that say they don't like movies about subject X.

I've never heard it described so perfectly. I've never understood people that avoid genres because I've always thought that what they really meant wasn't that they disliked the genre, they just dislike the bad examples of that genre. The same goes for video games or comics: When people say they don't like comics, I hear "I haven't really tried very hard to find comics that I like."

1 comment:

sarah said...

I heard that too! I thought it was an awesome concept and it applies to nearly everything in art.