Roger Ebert supplants my thoughts on Monetarism

I'm going to go a little meta for a moment and blog about blogging. My thought is; blogging is easier than journal writing and cooler than scrap-booking (no offense intended for all the creative memories representatives in our circle of friends).

So Alison and I watched Fever Pitch again yesterday; at least most of it. Fever Pitch one of many examples that prove Roger Ebert is the only film critic worth paying attention too. It has been shown that financial analysts tend to anti-herd, they try to stand out just enough to get noticed without getting too far off that they get squashed when they're wrong; either way they appear to act with a lot of credence given to the average opinion of other analysts. When you're Roger Ebert though, and you have your own TV show and are the biggest name in film criticism, you can do what ever you want and the remainder tend to herd around you. Fever Pitch is one of those romantic comedy/dramas with a bunch of baseball thrown in to keep the guys interested; that's all most critics saw in the film and it tended to get mediocre ratings, 2 stars or so.

When I saw the movie, I really enjoyed it but I couldn't really identify why I liked it so much or what set it apart from the voluminous library of similar romantic drama/comedies. In my opinion the other critics were wrong, but I couldn't identify what it was about the movie that was so right it warranted more credit than it was given.

Roger Ebert gave Fever Pitch three and a half stars (his review). What sets Fever Pitch apart, what I couldn't identify and he puts so eloquently, is that the movie is authentic, the baseball sure, but more significantly the struggle between two people to understand each other. Authentic representations are educational, even (one might say especially) when the work is fiction. In life there are some things you learn by rote, like history and punctuation rules, and some that are learned by experience. Authentic representations in film and literature allow us to vicariously experience things and learn; things we might not be able to otherwise.

By the same standard, non-authentic depictions are damaging. We learn, by experience, incorrect things that distort our perceptions of reality. You can think of one navigating through life collecting data points on how to live day to day; non-authentic immersing experiences add biased or false data points.

I think an important dimension of talent in creating media of any sort is its ability to convey reality/authenticity/truth. A dimension that is frequently overlooked. And Roger Ebert better beat cancer or I'm going to have to find some other way to justify liking romantic comedies.