how to be a pretentious film critic

Night of The Living Dead was on last night. The film critic David Pirie once wrote that it ‘says more about the Vietnam War than a thousand documentaries.’ Actually that’s my snappy paraphrase: he uses terms like ‘the psychological underpinnings of racist war’. But my line can be usefully applied to almost any film ever made (though it’s particularly effective if the film in question has nothing whatsoever to do with Vietnam). Take it from me, if you stand up during the closing credits of Notting Hill, say, or The Muppets Take Manhattan and declare in your most authoritative voice: ‘That film says more about the Vietnam War than a thousand documentaries’, nobody within earshot can fail to be impressed.