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      <title>Comments On: In defense of spoilers
    
      by Jonathan Rosenbaum</title>
      <link>http://www.chicagoreader.com/TheBlog/archives/2006/11/14/defense-spoilers</link>
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      by Jonathan Rosenbaum</description>
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      <pubDate>Sat, 21 Nov 2009 00:00:01 -0600</pubDate>
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    <title><![CDATA[Re: In defense of spoilers]]></title>
    
    
    <link><![CDATA[http://www.chicagoreader.com/TheBlog/archives/2006/11/14/defense-spoilers/#950418]]></link>
    
    <guid isPermaLink="true"><![CDATA[http://www.chicagoreader.com/TheBlog/archives/2006/11/14/defense-spoilers/#950418]]></guid>
    <author><![CDATA[Scott]]></author>
    <description>
      
      <![CDATA[I think the author of this article is a disgruntled reviewer who needs to get over it.  The argument presented here is completely ignoring the distinction between "1st time experience" and "2nd time experience".  Some people place more value on the 1st time experience and enjoy the emotional response of having their expectations fulfilled or denied. Spoiling someone with information that doesn't allow them to have the full emotional response is irresponsible at best. 
    
    But the 2nd time experience, where your emotional response is different, and then colored with the knowing of what happens and the memory of your 1st time through is also just as valid and important.  And for critics and reviewers who are more concerned with analyzing and going over something again and again, they often times lose sight of the importance of that "1st time experience".
        
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          Posted by Scott]]>
    </description>
    <pubDate>Thu, 13 Mar 2008 16:22:24 -0500</pubDate> 
    <source url="http://www.chicagoreader.com">Chicago Reader</source>
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    <title><![CDATA[Re: In defense of spoilers]]></title>
    
    
    <link><![CDATA[http://www.chicagoreader.com/TheBlog/archives/2006/11/14/defense-spoilers/#973592]]></link>
    
    <guid isPermaLink="true"><![CDATA[http://www.chicagoreader.com/TheBlog/archives/2006/11/14/defense-spoilers/#973592]]></guid>
    <author><![CDATA[budowa dom&Atilde;&sup3;w]]></author>
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      <![CDATA[<a href="http://www.fokus.info.pl">budowa dom&Atilde;&sup3;w</a>
        
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          Posted by budowa dom&Atilde;&sup3;w]]>
    </description>
    <pubDate>Wed, 20 Jun 2007 02:14:37 -0500</pubDate> 
    <source url="http://www.chicagoreader.com">Chicago Reader</source>
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    <title><![CDATA[Re: In defense of spoilers]]></title>
    
    
    <link><![CDATA[http://www.chicagoreader.com/TheBlog/archives/2006/11/14/defense-spoilers/#966488]]></link>
    
    <guid isPermaLink="true"><![CDATA[http://www.chicagoreader.com/TheBlog/archives/2006/11/14/defense-spoilers/#966488]]></guid>
    <author><![CDATA[Paul Martin]]></author>
    <description>
      
      <![CDATA[Reviews or criticism are something I prefer to read AFTER I've seen a film as part of a dialogue on its merits or otherwise.  The less one knows about a film beforehand, the more one is able to be told the story as intended.
    
    I believe that film reviewers (reviewers of new releases) have a responsibility to discuss the qualitative aspects of a film without divulging too many specifics (spoilers).  But post-viewing analysis/criticism is another thing.
        
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          Posted by Paul Martin]]>
    </description>
    <pubDate>Mon, 15 Jan 2007 14:15:43 -0600</pubDate> 
    <source url="http://www.chicagoreader.com">Chicago Reader</source>
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    <title><![CDATA[Re: In defense of spoilers]]></title>
    
    
    <link><![CDATA[http://www.chicagoreader.com/TheBlog/archives/2006/11/14/defense-spoilers/#967851]]></link>
    
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    <author><![CDATA[David]]></author>
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      <![CDATA[I am lecturing on The Son(Dardennes) this week and some of the students will have seen it in advance and some not. For those who haven't my lecture, or read Jonathan Rosenbaum's Capsule Review, something of the viewing of this film will be taken from them. The first half an hour, to my reckoning, implicates the viewer in how it is that they see and how film culture has encouraged them to see. If you know in advance, in this film, why what is happening is happening, it loses not only narrative punch (and I agree wholeheartedly that this element is exaggerated) but a portion of its possible moral movement within me as a viewer. I only read reviews and discussions about films I have seen because who knows what you might be robbed of? Thus criticism / commentary/ discussion is not negated by my concern about spoilers but instead is received by me as an opening for conversation and not as dictation.
        
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          Posted by David]]>
    </description>
    <pubDate>Sat, 13 Jan 2007 11:12:28 -0600</pubDate> 
    <source url="http://www.chicagoreader.com">Chicago Reader</source>
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    <title><![CDATA[Re: In defense of spoilers]]></title>
    
    
    <link><![CDATA[http://www.chicagoreader.com/TheBlog/archives/2006/11/14/defense-spoilers/#957731]]></link>
    
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    <author><![CDATA[Steve]]></author>
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      <![CDATA[I think if the filmmaker wanted us to know what was going to happen at the end of the movie, he would have put it in the title or given it away from  the beginning. But then, I'm afflicted with a neurosis about spoilers that goes far beyond my actual views on them: When I was but a wee film buff, a friend told me that that bust in The Sting was faked, so to this day I flinch at spoilers. But that's not to say I didn't greatly enjoy the film, and later, I loved The Sixth Sense even after being plainly told the "surprise." The blended horror and sadness of the film completely overshadowed any "shocking" twist. But here's how I deal with the neurosis, anyway: If I know I'm going to see a movie, I don't read any reviews beforehand. Or once a critic has convinced me to see the movie, I stop reading. What's the point of stuffing my head with someone else's opinions in advance, anyway?
        
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          Posted by Steve]]>
    </description>
    <pubDate>Fri, 05 Jan 2007 00:02:56 -0600</pubDate> 
    <source url="http://www.chicagoreader.com">Chicago Reader</source>
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    <title><![CDATA[Re: In defense of spoilers]]></title>
    
    
    <link><![CDATA[http://www.chicagoreader.com/TheBlog/archives/2006/11/14/defense-spoilers/#973651]]></link>
    
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    <author><![CDATA[Laura]]></author>
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      <![CDATA[Jonathan, I am so pleased to discover that On Film has a blog, and the cherry on the top is that you've given Gilbert Adair a plug; as for spoilers, I agree with you almost entirely. My thoughts are set out here: http://www.thevalve.org/go/valve/article/cruel_spoiler_that_embosomd_foe/
        
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          Posted by Laura]]>
    </description>
    <pubDate>Wed, 03 Jan 2007 05:40:40 -0600</pubDate> 
    <source url="http://www.chicagoreader.com">Chicago Reader</source>
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    <title><![CDATA[Re: In defense of spoilers]]></title>
    
    
    <link><![CDATA[http://www.chicagoreader.com/TheBlog/archives/2006/11/14/defense-spoilers/#956212]]></link>
    
    <guid isPermaLink="true"><![CDATA[http://www.chicagoreader.com/TheBlog/archives/2006/11/14/defense-spoilers/#956212]]></guid>
    <author><![CDATA[Ed]]></author>
    <description>
      
      <![CDATA[For all you Pynchonauts spoiling to be spoiled about Jonathan's missing movie monster, check out the star of that Burgher King, pp. 915-6, and Kit's suggestive "what's with that piece of business where he bites old Heidi's neck, what was that all about?"
    
    My feeling about spoilers is that many of the pleasures of plot - the sudden reversal, the startling revelation - are at best minor, and at worst a hindrance to all the other ways that stories make meaning. Any narrative that depends for its impact on a momentary disclosure of information might as well be announcing, not unsadistically, that the time spent getting to that moment was only important as an investment, unimpassioned, hands-off, all too sensible, toward a one-time payoff. If my enjoyment of, say, "Against the Day" is even slightly diminished by knowing ahead of time that - major spoiler alert! - it ain't one of the Traverse boys who finally does in Scarsdale Vibe, then what does that say about the particularity, the resonance, the sense of lived experience of the thirty hours of reading that preceded that single scene?
    
    A smaller example of what I'm talking about: yesterday I watched Rob Nilsson's "Heat and Sunlight." The movie's central bit of conventional suspense - Will Carmen Choose Mel or Adam? - is dispensed with right on the DVD case's front cover: "The last 16 hours of a Love Affair." By the time I'd been through enough of the story to know that maybe I ought to be annoyed by the spoiler, it felt more like a gift. The viewer, and in no small way the movie itself, are freed from the impatient, time-abolishing anxiety of needing to know how things are going to end. The focus is shifted to how things move, or don't move, toward an end. Time, even while Mel desperately tries to kill it, marking it to the minute, wanting to fast-forward to that answer himself, flows on occupied, living and full. The movie opens itself up to Mel trying to win a fight by stuffing fruit in his shirt, insurance salesmen talking warmly about sexual jealousy, and a tender surprise party in a Tenderloin alley. These scenes all, it might be said, push Mel toward a realization that's as momentary and willfully delayed as any M. Night might take to the bank, but insofar as that realization asks Mel, and the viewer, to recast the scenes that led to it, to know that they, and all scenes like them, have to be inhabited, made to matter, as they happen, the movie refuses to reduce itself to a point. It's all, indeed, "paths leading nowhere," or, as the movie itself cagily suggests, "jokes without a punchline."
        
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          Posted by Ed]]>
    </description>
    <pubDate>Sat, 02 Dec 2006 14:30:49 -0600</pubDate> 
    <source url="http://www.chicagoreader.com">Chicago Reader</source>
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    <title><![CDATA[Re: In defense of spoilers]]></title>
    
    
    <link><![CDATA[http://www.chicagoreader.com/TheBlog/archives/2006/11/14/defense-spoilers/#947605]]></link>
    
    <guid isPermaLink="true"><![CDATA[http://www.chicagoreader.com/TheBlog/archives/2006/11/14/defense-spoilers/#947605]]></guid>
    <author><![CDATA[Jonathan Rosenbaum]]></author>
    <description>
      
      <![CDATA[Good point--though unfortunately, critics can't undertake such anti-marketing exercises without jeopardizing their jobs. Where I feel a little more freedom--though not as much freedom as I'd like to feel I have in relation to my readers--is in being able to write about films that for one reason or another aren't available in the marketplace, e.g., Pere Portabella films once the retrospective at the Gene Siskel Film Center is over, or Atom Egoyan's 'Citadel' after its only public screening in the U.S. to date, at Doc Films. Some readers would prefer it if I pretended such films didn't exist; others would like to hear about them regardless of whether or not they can see them. It would be interesting to get some more feedback on this tricky subject.
        
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          Posted by Jonathan Rosenbaum]]>
    </description>
    <pubDate>Wed, 22 Nov 2006 21:11:07 -0600</pubDate> 
    <source url="http://www.chicagoreader.com">Chicago Reader</source>
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    <title><![CDATA[Re: In defense of spoilers]]></title>
    
    
    <link><![CDATA[http://www.chicagoreader.com/TheBlog/archives/2006/11/14/defense-spoilers/#957044]]></link>
    
    <guid isPermaLink="true"><![CDATA[http://www.chicagoreader.com/TheBlog/archives/2006/11/14/defense-spoilers/#957044]]></guid>
    <author><![CDATA[jonk]]></author>
    <description>
      
      <![CDATA[5. "Spoiling" films can also be considered an anti-marketing of sorts.  Don't like Clint Eastwood or the politics of 'Million Dollar Baby'?  Tell folks that "Baby" gets knocked down by a dirty fighter, becomes disabled and then killed by Clint.
    
    Why is it that film-goers should be convinced to relinquish all marketing to the film corporations that are in a strictly profit-driven endeavor?  We shouldn't.
        
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          Posted by jonk]]>
    </description>
    <pubDate>Wed, 22 Nov 2006 12:03:53 -0600</pubDate> 
    <source url="http://www.chicagoreader.com">Chicago Reader</source>
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