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Old 01-03-2013, 18:24
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Join Date: Apr 2007
Location: Aberdeen
Posts: 8,632
But there's no objective measure of what counts as 'exquisite' dialogue, so your argument that the OP is talking only about - and therefore the thread has to confine itself to - such is ridiculous. Even if that was the OP's intention, just because he mentions Skyfall and Tarantino films as having, in his opinion, good dialogue, doesn't make it so, so people are quite entitled to come in and disagree, which in turn will generate debate about what constitutes good and bad dialogue.
I get that dialogue is subjective. What may be great to me seem poor to another. That seems to me a healthy standard, and probably what many people consider the norm. But the OP wasn't talking about what you or I may consider to be the norm. To the precise, he was talking about

But the issue is there seem to be a lot of people who just don't seem to actually get dialogue at all
So, the op seems to be talking about people whose default position is "dialogue = boring".

As for relevance, take an earlier poster whose accretion was that the reason these people find dialogue boring is because the quality of dialogue has decreased in the last 20 years. Whilst the concept itself is worthy of a discussion of its own, it's irrelevant to this thread, because, the people the OP seems to be talking about would also find 20+ year old move dialog boring.

It's also interesting that at least four posters made comments that are as simplistic as 'people who don't like dialogue scenes are idiots' and you didn't pick up on that.
I didn't pick up on that because, as unpalatable as it may be, within the context of the thread they are probably right.

Long dialogue scenes are neither good nor bad, they just are. Some are fantastic, some are awful, and it's for each person to decide for themselves. It's nonsense to criticise people who say they don't like them without qualifying the comment, just as it's ludicrous for arthouse darlings to criticise the likes of Michael Bay for being all about the action without at least acknowledging that he's bloody good at it.
Well yes, it would be just as small minded to have an "action = boring" default position.
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