You're attempting to define and limit art, which itself is robbing and destroying what art truly is. Are there things which are definitely not art? Sure; things without merit aren't art. Things like the mad haphazard brushstrokes of random colors with no actual effort or thought put in that the creator claims to be a "gateway to my soul", that's not art. It's without meaning, without effort or creativity, it has no message, no point. It's senseless chaos. It doesn't *show* senseless chaos, it *is* senseless chaos. A movie that's strictly improv and jump cuts from random cameras at random angles at random intervals, that's not art. That's chaos.
Michael Bay films, likewise, aren't art. There's the same lack of merit and effort and thought and heart put in as the haphazard strokes. Aside from the designs and effects work in Transformers, I'll honestly grant them that, I thought they were beautifully rendered and designed. Art makes you feel, makes you think, his movies don't do that, but what Michael Bay films do is entertain. His movies are entertainment.
Entertainment =/= art, art =/= entertainment. They may overlap, they may not, but the presence of one does not require the other, and the lack of one does not imply the presence of the other. For instance there are plenty of movies both artistic and entertaining (Fight Club), plenty of movies that are just one or the other (Fish Tank, Back to the Future), and plenty of movies that are neither (The Room, unless you count "so bad its good" as entertaining). But that doesn't mean one is inherently better than another, sans the films that are devoid of both. It simply means they're different, different in what purpose they serve and at what time they're more appealing, but to say one is better than another one must look at each film on its own merits, not whether its artistic or serves simply for entertainment. That means nothing, and anyone who claims that art/entertainment is inherently superior is at best misled and at worst a liar, trying to limit expression and the meaning of expression.
Now, this movie had merit, unlike the random strokes on canvas or the pointless shots on celluloid, and it was unflinching in that merit as Ree. It was well acted, well shot, the dialogue well written. There was intensity, it *felt* real. I felt disgusted after watching it, but not the hollow disgusted I get from gore-ror films like Saw, but the sort of disgusted that comes from knowing this *is* reality, that it happens, that there's nothing that can be done about it. We are as helpless to stop it in reality as we were to stop it in the film. We're just along for the uncomfortable ride.
Art is meant to make you feel, make you think, and it has merit, effort, and thought put in. This movie had that thought, that effort, its merit comes from what it shows you. Is it a story that *needed* to be told? I can't answer that, but given that shows you just as much a side of the human condition as any of those happy-ass movies you'd like to see, and it does so in an infinitely more real, more poignant manner, I'd say that it is one that should be told.
Art is meant to make you feel and think, and that's exactly what this movie does. It's uncomfortable, but it's the right kind of uncomfortable. If you felt uncomfortable (a feeling not derived from the over- and mis-use of gore like most modern horror) then you gave a damn about the characters, their predicament, which speaks to how well-executed the movie was; the acting, the directing, the writing. Hating the story, hating how their lives play out, is exactly the point, feeling uncomfortable is exactly the point. It made you think about reality, it made you reflect on life, on experiences you say you have, you saw them from a third person perspective and , it made you feel a given way about that reality and those experiences.
You say that isn't art, but that's exactly what art is supposed to do; elicit a response that has meaning, whether that response is good or bad. Art isn't all sunshine and flowers, art isn't just the pretty side of the human condition, and that this shows you the horrors of reality, how disgusting some things, some people, can be, that doesn't make this any less worthy of being called art. And the fact that it does that, that it shows you an unflinching look at the reality of life for many people, then that makes it as worthy of being called art as any, and makes the creators of this work braver than most.
Fishtank. Fishtank and Shame are, for me, two of my favorite examples of truly artistic cinema, not in spite of, but because of the way they make me feel, because they *can* make me feel that way.
Rarely would I say this because opinions can rarely be objectively one thing or another, but your opinion is in point of fact flat out wrong, for all the reasons pointed out above. You may not like the way you feel after watching it, but with everything that's behind it, how it achieved making you feel that way, that's exactly what makes it art.
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