The Mumpsimus

Arguments about "spoilers" are [SPOILER ALERT!] tedious and annoying, and nobody who feels strongly about such things one way or the other will ever convince the fanatics people on the other side to agree with them, so such arguments are a huge waste of time and energy, and I have vowed [SPOILER ALERT!] to stay out of them for ever and ever and evermore, but now the film scholar David Bordwell has gone and made a fascinating blog post about [SPOILER ALERT!] how spoiler standards have changed and shifted over time and in various circumstances. Very much worth reading.

I knew almost nothing about the Norwegian film Reprise before going into the theatre, which is a good thing, because if anybody had told me its central characters are a couple of young novelists, one of whom struggles with mental illness, I would have said, "No thanks, I'll wait for the DVD" and I would have missed the best movie I've seen in months. Before I get into what makes Reprise so good, I have to pause to describe the audience I and my companion were stuck in while watching the film. We arrived at Lincoln Plaza half an hour before the show, got tickets, and then waited in what seemed, even for New York, a pretty long line for an afternoon on a beautiful day. We also seemed to be the youngest people in the line, which also seemed odd, because, as far as we knew, this was more the sort of movie to attract a crowd of hipster Cinema Studies majors than, well, grandparents -- but this is New York, after all, and if there's anywhere in the world where grand...