All posts tagged "Matt Zoller Seitz"

Matt Zoller Seitz, in his usual wannabe contrarian way, has an article up at Salon about why he thinks that anonymous comments do the public a service, by showing how ugly, vicious, racist, misogynist, and mean-spirited Americans can be if they don't feel like they have to be held accountable for their actions. I find some of his points intriguing, though I have to point out that it's easy for a white dude to see it all as a big science experiment, because he's blinded to the way that hate speech reflects actual threats of violence and oppression in the real world for many people. For instance, take this quote:

There's a lot of things you can say about superhero movies and sucking, mainly involving bad pacing, boring characterization, bad motivations for super villains, and cliches. But Matt Zoller Seitz shoves all that aside in his denunciation of the form to make what is, to my mind, one of the most tediously wrong assumptions about what makes something artistically valuable or interesting, the assumption that something's worth can be measured by how grim or horrific it is. The main thing that superhero movies do wrong, in his book, is they don't make you sad enough. This is equated with bravery.