1. No mindless 'action.' No race and chase, crash and burn. I am not a robot, so I don't want to watch a movie made by robots about robots for robots.
2. No gratuitous sex, violence, and offensive language. I have no objection to sex, violence, and bad language as such. There is a time and place for each. I would have no problem, for example, with blowing a home invader to Kingdom Come where he is more likely to receive justice than here below from a criminal justice system lousy with tolerate-anything liberals. But sex, violence and bad language ought not be thrown in for no reason or just to titillate or offend in the manner of the adolescent (whatever his age) who thinks it cool to append the F-ing qualifier to every F-ing word. Example: the opening scenes of Titanic.
I'm as much into Posterior Analytics as the next guy, but what was that female derriere doing on the screen at the beginning of Lost in Translation? The female tail is a thing of beauty whose display can rise to the genuinely erotic as in The Unbearable Lighness of Being and Blue Velvet. But to insert it any old place, for no reason, is the mark of an impoverished cinematic bonehead.
When Bogie took one of the leading ladies into the bedroom, you knew what was about to transpire. But your nose wasn't rubbed into the raw hydraulics of it.
In a 'fifties movie, if a man was about to be hanged, you say a shot of the scaffold and perhaps a shot of him lying in a pine box; but you didn't see him twisting in the wind. Violence was part of a story and not presented to demean and debase the audience by a nihilistic leftist out to trash people's aesthetic and moral sensibilities.
3. No gratuitous crudity. In About Schmitt, was there any need to see the Jack Nicholson character taking a leak? At this point a Hollywood liberal might invoke his free speech rights and assert that people urinate, and we need to depict reality as it is. Invoking my free speech rights, I would call him an idiot and pronounce him beneath refutation.
4. No manipulation of the audience by the filmaker, no 'pushing of their buttons' in the manner of a used car salesman who tells you what you want to hear, or plays to your fears, or tries to evoke hackneyed emotional responses. I want the filmmaker to address me as a rational being.
5. No beating over the head with the obvious. Make the point and move on. For example, in Das Boot there is a bailing scene that goes on and on. In that sappy piece of crap Terms of Endearment — that everybody loved except me — there is protracted scene in which the lovers are driving along a beach. Enough already! The casting in that movie was awful as well. Remember the English professor?
6. Intelligent and witty dialogue, and no cut-away to more 'action' when the discussion starts to get good. There was a dinner table scene in The Big Chill in which the old friends were starting to achieve a bit of conversational depth. But just at that point, the cut-away occurs. By contrast, the dinner table scene in Woody Allen's Crimes and Misdemeanors is exactly right. But of course, the average movie-going idiot, stupefied by a lifetime of watching robotic crap, finds intelligent conversation 'boring.'
By the way, Crimes and Misdemeanors is a masterpiece, a truly great movie. It has it all. A great story, great music (Schubert), humor, great dialogue, and most important, great depth. Woody Allen hints at his point of view, but he doesn't proselytize. Some movies can be classified as 'conservative' or 'liberal.' This is great art beyond such classification. The moral and religious questions raised are raised with subtlety and the viewer is left to form his own opinion. The best line is put in the mouth of the Martin Landau character, Judah: "Without God, this world is a cesspool."
7. No knee-jerk religion-bashing. Religion and religionists are not above criticism, of course, but HollyWeird liberals makes asses of themselves in their gratuitous depictions of priests and nuns as simpletons and frauds. These leftist bums ought to study Eli Kazan's On the Waterfront and once in a while depict a priest the way the Karl Malden character is depicted. And of course, the bashing is typically of Christianity. Let these chickens take on Islam for a change. And then we'll see how much courage they have and how committed to the free expression they so prize.
8. Human meaning. See my notes on Harry and Tonto.