Is it really necessary to dissect, analyse and review a film to completely enjoy it?

Absolutely not. Indeed, I have pretty lowbrow sensibilities in a lot of ways that I don’t talk about much here (though I have confessed to loving Abba and something will come shortly).

And I’m sorry I come across as intimidating (a language thing, maybe?). One of the most-important books in my life was Allan Bloom’s “The Closing of the American Mind,” which I found intimidating in precisely the way you describe. Once I’d starting reading the philosophers he cites promiscuously, and I could wrap my mind around his prose, the book became as undeniable to me as a mathematical proof.

Also, some of the classics and movies featuring in most “top” lists, I found to be frankly boring.

Well, it makes a difference why you find them boring.

Some of the greatest movies can come across as boring because they are remote from modern experience in terms of their soulcraft and assumptions. I have listened to audiences snicker through such period masterworks as Dreyer’s DAY OF WRATH and Rohmer’s THE MARQUISE OF O because it couldn’t connect with their characters’ worldviews.

I’m wondering also whether a lot of Western movies seem strange to an Indian. I myself have a minor jones for Bollywood films, but the parallel or “art” cinema I tend to find rather obvious (see one of the capsules here).

Others among the great films might seem boring because they were hugely influential in ways that have since been assimilated into the cinematic mainstream. For example, early Robert Altman is doing things with overlapping sound and with loose or interlocking story structure that everybody does now.

These things will evaporate some with greater knowledge, experience and general education, which can only come with time. But the lack of an emotional connection is something that still will happen, and for that there is simply no cure.

However in general, and I would say this to any young person still in the “exhausting the canon” phase, I would advise that if a film or a director is in the canon, they are in the canon for a reason. Indeed, one of the purposes of reading criticism is to straighten out a “huh?” reaction. Or more formally, learning what others see in a work that I do not.

Now, I’m not saying you have to *like* what’s considered important. We all have our blindspots; I will go to my grave thinking Jean-Luc Godard and Robert Bresson are overpraised bores. But I do think those men are owed my attention and efforts in a way a contemporary film-maker I don’t care for — oh, say, Wes Anderson — is not. If MOUCHETTE plays in a theater near me at a time I can see it, I will go and expect a bad film. And sometimes get surprised, as in WEEKEND or A MAN ESCAPED. A friend of mine, whom I won’t name because I don’t want to be seen as calling him out, recently saw Dreyer’s GERTRUD for the first time after I confidently predicted “bud, you will not like this film.” I predicted correctly as it turned out, but he still went to see it because it was Dreyer’s last work and lots of people whom he respects (hopefully myself included) think it’s great.

I like this. This is insightful and a good way to look at the film.

A clarification. On “discomfort over which characters are alive and dead at the end”: This is not, for me, a matter of “virtue being rewarded,” as you suggest. Rather, it’s a matter of enjoying a fairly inconsequential comedy. I don’t at all object to movies in which the good suffer unjustly while the evil live happily ever after. I am all over Job and theodicy. I don’t think it makes for very good comedy.

I wouldn’t call Burn After Reading “nihilistic.” I think “misanthropic” fits the bill nicely.

Job is not misanthropic. For example, it has Job in it.

No Country is a completely different issue. There the nihilism is explicit as one of several possible onscreen worldviews, and the movie’s structure offers some kind of of commentary on the relative merits of the different worldviews.