At a time when Wikileaks is about as exciting as The Bourne franchise meets The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo franchise it already seem old hat to say so, but The Social Network is (so far) the film of 2010. This at least is what 85 critics from all points of the compass have concluded for Sight and Sound, the world's top English movie mag. As I did in my review, S & S now compare the movie to Citizen Kane. It may not be that good, but its take on rivalry, business, friendship, youth, money and media, and startlingly fresh mise-en-scene, turn it in to a very original and satisfying film that has won plaudits from all types, and even made money. I predict it will win much at the Oscars.
When you open your mouth to speak, are you smart? A funny question from a great song, but also, a good one, when it comes to poets, and poetry. We tend to have a very ambiguous view of intelligence in poetry, one that I'd say is dysfunctional. Basically, it goes like this: once you are safely dead, it no longer matters how smart you were. For instance, Auden was smarter than Yeats , but most would still say Yeats is the finer poet; Eliot is clearly highly intelligent, but how much of Larkin 's work required a high IQ? Meanwhile, poets while alive tend to be celebrated if they are deemed intelligent: Anne Carson, Geoffrey Hill , and Jorie Graham , are all, clearly, very intelligent people, aside from their work as poets. But who reads Marianne Moore now, or Robert Lowell , smart poets? Or, Pound ? How smart could Pound be with his madcap views? Less intelligent poets are often more popular. John Betjeman was not a very smart poet, per se. What do I mean by smart?
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