Wow, this blogger doesn’t seem to have a very good grasp on film history if he thinks that the stuff he’s complaining about is in any way a new movement in film-making.

I think he would have found more fertile ground for a post had he thought to engage the question of Why film-makers have come back time and again over the years to the themes of the bildungsroman. What is it about the edge between childhood and adult life that so intrigues us as a society. My guess is that, societally, we feel that that transitional period usually defines who we are for the rest of our lives, so the subtle choices we make at that stage will mark the directional nuance of our more overt choices in later stages.

Of course, if ever film were an examination of this theme, we’d get pretty tired of it. So fortunately for us, only a small handful of these coming-of-age explorartoriums come out in any given year.

As to the question of “Think quickly: what would you rather watch—Russell Crowe trying to escape gladiator life to save his wife and son (in Gladiator), or Owen Wilson annoyingly bossing his brothers around on an Indian train (in The Darjeeling Limited)?“… I didn’t see Darjeeling Limited, but there are so many kinds of movies that I would rather see than a movie about a gladiator trying to escape his life as a gladiator (and I enjoyed Gladiator) that, sure, I’d probably prefer to see the Wes Anderson thingy.

It may be a matter of subtlety.

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