If you are serious about film, must the films you enjoy be 'serious'? Can art and entertainment co-exist in the same work? Michael Open tackles these an other questions.

'Sitting through this pointless, dreary, nearly incoherent mess of a movie is a painful endurance test I wouldn't wish on my worst enemy. I tried to sneak out of a sneak preview, but didn't want to offend the cast and crew. I should have offended them anyway – gone home and done something creative – like taking out the garbage. The fact that this lackluster snore-fest won the Grand Prize at Sundance and good reviews from major critics is the latest proof that "serious" (read: "tedious") reality/verité-style European filmmaking is the only type, apparently, that American reviewers and judges deem worthy these days (audiences, thankfully, know better).

'How far we've come from the days of great cinema! I can't imagine what Welles or Hitchcock or John Ford would have thought of this tripe. Even the founding fathers of neo-realism would have taken a nap long before the last reel creaked through the projector.

'I never thought I'd be thanking God for Spielberg until I stumbled away in a daze from [this] trance-inducing catastrophe...'

I encountered the above comment on IMDb (www.imdb.com) by chance. I haven't seen the film in question and have no idea whether I would agree or disagree with the writer's judgement, but his general sentiments about the place of seriousness in modern cinema struck a chord with me. It seems to me that too many films these days are being lauded without being enjoyable or profound or even stylistically cohesive or expressive. So if they are none of the above things, what are they? They are 'serious'. Could it, I wondered, be some misinterpretation of the concept of 'serious cinema' that allows the talentlessly gloomy to thrive critically while those fine artists who respect their audiences are under-valued as pandering?

The full article is printed in Film Ireland 110.