"I just feel I'm on a different page from the reviewers, so I've learned not to care about them too much"
About this Quote
There’s a practiced shrug in Bobby Farrelly’s line, but it’s not as blasé as it sounds. “Different page” is a director’s diplomatic way of saying the critic and the maker aren’t even watching the same movie. It’s a soft phrase that does hard work: it frames reviews not as verdicts but as a category error. If the reviewers don’t share the project’s wavelength, their judgment isn’t merely harsh; it’s irrelevant.
The subtext is survival. Farrelly came up in the loud, gross-out, crowd-pleasing lane of American comedy, a genre critics have historically treated like a guilty habit rather than a craft. When your creative identity is built on timing, vulgarity, and emotional sucker punches that land in multiplexes, critical scorn isn’t an outlier; it’s part of the weather. “I’ve learned” signals that this attitude was earned the hard way, after enough cycles of opening-weekend pile-ons and cultural handwringing.
What makes the quote work is its quiet rebalancing of power. Farrelly doesn’t posture as anti-intellectual or claim critics are corrupt; he simply demotes them. The line asserts a competing metric of legitimacy: audience laughter, mass connection, the messy alchemy of popular taste. It’s also a subtle hedge against the modern review economy where aggregation can harden into narrative. By refusing to “care,” he tries to keep the work from being written by people who never wanted the joke in the first place.
The subtext is survival. Farrelly came up in the loud, gross-out, crowd-pleasing lane of American comedy, a genre critics have historically treated like a guilty habit rather than a craft. When your creative identity is built on timing, vulgarity, and emotional sucker punches that land in multiplexes, critical scorn isn’t an outlier; it’s part of the weather. “I’ve learned” signals that this attitude was earned the hard way, after enough cycles of opening-weekend pile-ons and cultural handwringing.
What makes the quote work is its quiet rebalancing of power. Farrelly doesn’t posture as anti-intellectual or claim critics are corrupt; he simply demotes them. The line asserts a competing metric of legitimacy: audience laughter, mass connection, the messy alchemy of popular taste. It’s also a subtle hedge against the modern review economy where aggregation can harden into narrative. By refusing to “care,” he tries to keep the work from being written by people who never wanted the joke in the first place.
Quote Details
| Topic | Confidence |
|---|
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