I’ve spent years having passionately pointless conversations on film with people. The name/title dropping, the hate, the love, the metaphors, the references, the history, the gossip, there is no better way to pass the time when you are actually forced to talk to another human being. They are conversations that can be as deep or shallow as you like depending on what you know. Now it is commonly thought that in order to sound knowledgeable on the subject you actually have to learn film history. I have taken that route and don’t regret it but the truth is it doesn’t take any actual effort to sound intelligent the next time you interrupt someone’s conversation at your local coffee shop, just follow these guidelines:

Some basic information:

Dates:

1910
1928
1934
1947
1967

Key names and phrases that will gain you instant respect:

(Just pick three or four and you’ll be fine)

Thomas Edison
Lumiere Brothers
D.W. Griffith
Sergei Eisenstein
Harold Llyod
Orson Wells
Alfred Hitchcock
Jean Renoir
Andre Bazin
Caheirs du Cinema
Jean-Luc Godard
Akira Kurowsawa
Yasujiro Ozu
Federica Fellini
Michelangelo Antonioni
Ingmar Bergman
Francis Ford Coppola
Martin Scorsese
Robert Altman
Terrence Malick

That alone should be enough, but just in case name dropping wasn’t enough to impress you’re probably going to have to take a stand, in which case I would choose stating an opinion about Hollywood. Why? Because everyone has an opinion about Hollywood. Here are a couple discussion points you could use.

Everyone hates Hollywood for two reasons:

1) Past generations have been taught to hate Hollywood.
2) Hollywood is doing it’s best to make future generations hate them.

Names you could use:

Fatty Arbuckle
Rupert Murdoch
Ted Turner
William Hays
Jack Valenti
Joseph Breen
Disney

Other points you could add in:

Celebrity Scandals
The Blacklist
Censorship (If you use this be sure to throw out acronyms such as MPAA
and PCA liberally as if they were expletives.)
Blockbusters
Pointless Lawsuits (Suing the very fans for downloading that are going to shell the extra $30 for the special edition DVD to get 3 15 second deleted     scenes.)

Now if you wanted to defend Hollywood:

I can’t think of anything at the moment, I’ll add any later when I can think of some, but honestly if you’re in it to impress someone this isn’t the best angle to take.

So now that you have some random information, all you have to do is mix it all up and form a cognitive sentence and you should be able to convince the majority of people that you know something about film.

-Tim Moore

(Pictured above: Jane Fonda from the film Tout Va Bien)