Everyone probably has an ax of some sort to grind, Stilly. ;-)

I think he just plain detested the film, as did I, therefore he definitely had an ax to grind immediately after having seen it.

I AM the "English major" type of person he is alluding to...that's the type of kid I was when I was in school, the highly read and highly articulate intellectual, and yes, I did get unmercifully bullied by the bullies in my classes because they figured I was an easy target and they also figured I was smarter than they were (or at least thought I was!), and they resented it.

So why am I not the least bit offended by his sardonic references to "English Majors"????

Heh! ;-) Nope, I'm not offended at all by it, and I don't think he has an ax to grind against English majors...he may even BE one of them himself...I think he has an ax to grind against nihilism and really sadistic movies that don't take you to any kind of good place when you watch them.

He probably hasn't read the book, and neither have I. I've just seen the movie. I think, Stilly, that because you have read the book and you really like the author's writing, that it has given you some additional reasons to like the movie. That's fine, but I don't think it sheds much light on the validity of the reviewer's or my reactions to the film. We're just reacting to a movie we saw, period...not to the book it was based on.

I understand the kind of head-game intellectual pretensiousness he's referring to in the movie review. I'm familiar with it. One finds it in quite a few people...the majority of them being males in my experience. The fact that he chose the term "English majors" to characterize it may be fairly arbitrary, because all English majors are obviously not, by definition, guilty of that sort of intellectual pretentiousness. He was probably just looking for a handy term that would encapsulate the idea, I would figure.

I see no reason to take it that seriously.