As Ed William posted below, I had my tongue-and-cheek go at this awhile back:
A movie buff likes the classics and largely will talk about movies made now relative to movies made in the past, and their favorite movie is very likely to have been made in the 1970s. No matter how old they are, they’ve been perpetually negative on the direction the movie industry is going since the 1930s.
A film bro is a movie buff except replace the classics with whatever big name directors command the highest budgets for original scripts in the last 20 years. If they have seen 20th century films it’s by people like Hitchcock and Kubrick who “exerted so much control over their productions.” The word ‘control’ comes up perturbingly often with film bros.
A cinephile is a movie buff except for obscure experimental 8 hour long movies that only 30 people saw before it was lost for seven decades and then found in the closet of an abandoned insane asylum and restored. They get really annoyed that commercial cinema even exists, seeing it as an affront to culture, and will do things like compare big movie budgets to entire country’s GDP or non-profit budgets and get into long discourse about hamburgers vs fine dining metaphors.
A fanboy is like a film bro except switch original concept movies with big tent franchises like Star Wars or Marvel or Planet of the Apes or something, and probably hasn’t seen a movie made before the 21st century at all, or if has finds it really boring. Fanboys get weirdly personally offended when film buffs or cinephiles don’t like their movies, taking it as an affront to ‘shared culture’ and ‘modern mythos.’
A cultist is a cinephile except for f grade, punk, lo-fi, counterculture movies with tiny budgets, terrible effects, and gratuitous violence, drugs, and nudity. Cultists basically don’t even watch the rest of the movies, not seeing the point of wasting the time and money. For them a big budget spectacle from the fanboy, or a Turner classic movie from the film buff, or whatever Eastern european mumblecore about aging farmers the cinephile is slinging at them, are all equally boring.
A hipster is a film bro except switch whatever directors from the last 20 years command the highest budgets with whatever directors from the last 20 years made the most feature length movies with no budget whatsoever. Unlike cultists they prefer the camera not move or anything happen in the movie at all. Unlike the cinephiles they prioritize the contemporary to the historical and independents to the international.
This taxonomy is also very fun: https://substack.com/@danebenko/note/c-56629650?r=p29dh&utm_medium=ios&utm_source=notes-share-action
Ha, came here to repost it. Glad that someone else remembered it!
Now I'm curious as to why there are no such lists for types of readers, music listeners, or viewers of paintings?
Dane’s got you covered! https://substack.com/@danebenko/note/c-67688428?r=p29dh&utm_medium=ios&utm_source=notes-share-action
As Ed William posted below, I had my tongue-and-cheek go at this awhile back:
A movie buff likes the classics and largely will talk about movies made now relative to movies made in the past, and their favorite movie is very likely to have been made in the 1970s. No matter how old they are, they’ve been perpetually negative on the direction the movie industry is going since the 1930s.
A film bro is a movie buff except replace the classics with whatever big name directors command the highest budgets for original scripts in the last 20 years. If they have seen 20th century films it’s by people like Hitchcock and Kubrick who “exerted so much control over their productions.” The word ‘control’ comes up perturbingly often with film bros.
A cinephile is a movie buff except for obscure experimental 8 hour long movies that only 30 people saw before it was lost for seven decades and then found in the closet of an abandoned insane asylum and restored. They get really annoyed that commercial cinema even exists, seeing it as an affront to culture, and will do things like compare big movie budgets to entire country’s GDP or non-profit budgets and get into long discourse about hamburgers vs fine dining metaphors.
A fanboy is like a film bro except switch original concept movies with big tent franchises like Star Wars or Marvel or Planet of the Apes or something, and probably hasn’t seen a movie made before the 21st century at all, or if has finds it really boring. Fanboys get weirdly personally offended when film buffs or cinephiles don’t like their movies, taking it as an affront to ‘shared culture’ and ‘modern mythos.’
A cultist is a cinephile except for f grade, punk, lo-fi, counterculture movies with tiny budgets, terrible effects, and gratuitous violence, drugs, and nudity. Cultists basically don’t even watch the rest of the movies, not seeing the point of wasting the time and money. For them a big budget spectacle from the fanboy, or a Turner classic movie from the film buff, or whatever Eastern european mumblecore about aging farmers the cinephile is slinging at them, are all equally boring.
A hipster is a film bro except switch whatever directors from the last 20 years command the highest budgets with whatever directors from the last 20 years made the most feature length movies with no budget whatsoever. Unlike cultists they prefer the camera not move or anything happen in the movie at all. Unlike the cinephiles they prioritize the contemporary to the historical and independents to the international.