Gaspar Noé doesn’t make the kind of films that are everyone’s tastes. An auteur to the core, the director is known for sensibility-shocking works like Love and the forthcoming Climax. So maybe it shouldn’t be such a surprise that Noé doesn’t care much for the type of blockbusters that seem to please audiences at large — like the record-shattering Black Panther.
“I tried Black Panther,” he told Variety. “I escaped from the cinema after 20 minutes. I thought it was as bad as Star Wars. I hated Star Wars.”
It wasn’t just the big action and sociopolitical themes that didn’t seem to connect with Noé, as he seemed flatly offended by the soundtrack work of hip-hop megastar Kendrick Lamar. “I hated the R&B music,” Noé added, proving there really is no accounting for taste. “The music was so bad that I had to escape.”
Personally, I’d never trust a man who didn’t at least appreciate the cinematic validity of Black Panther or Star Wars, but to each their own. For his own, Noé said he prefers buying documentaries than watching big budget movies. Or indie rom-coms. Or really much of modern cinema at all. “There are not so many movies that really learn you anything,” he said. “I mostly get bored by comedies, action movies, science fiction movies. They are so predictable.”
He did, however, reserve a fondness for a few modern sci-fi classics. He seemed to like Blade Runner 2049 just fine, and said of Arrival, “That one was good.”
That’s okay Noé; some people prefer our explorations of greater cultural and societal themes couched in big science-fiction adventure films that keep us on the edge of our seats, and others like prefer it distributed via visceral images and unsimulated sex scenes we can classify as “true art” through the cracks between our fingers.
Excuse me while I go line up for my early screening of Deadpool 2.
