Film Twitter declares war on Taiki Watiti

Do we have to actually pretend that people who aren't interested in classic film know the name Michael Curtiz just to take potshots at Waititi for being flippant? Curtiz was not an Alfred Hitchcock or Frank Capra or Orson Welles. He was a studio journeyman from an era where celebrity directors were even less common than they are today.

People remember Casablanca for its ending, its many quotable lines and for Bogie and Bergman, not for its direction. Its reputation is not inextricable from its director in the same way that Citizen Kane or Psycho are, and claiming otherwise is just the type of performative outrage that makes Twitter so awful.

To be fair, this is the first time I've heard of Michael Curtiz. Which is odd. Why do I know the directors of Citizen Kane, The Godfather, The Seventh Seal, Stalker... but not the director of Casablanca? And I listen to countless movie podcasts, so I'm not exactly low in information here.

I'm looking at his filmography now and my god, he directed so many movies I instantly recognise.

Sorry, I posted before r1's reply loaded, I see my question has pretty much been answered already.

The problem with Taika Waititi’s statement is not that Michael Curtiz is irrelevant now.

The problem with Taika Waititi’s statement is that Taika Waititi is irrelevant now. It doesn’t matter that no one will know who is he in fifty years. No one knows who he is NOW. He was unable to follow up his “promising newcomer” Oscar with any meaningful work, his next film is rumored to be a turkey and his “aren’t I adorable” shtick is irritating as fuck. Rather than be introspective about his fortunes, he simply qualifies himself alongside a director of beloved classics and consigns everything to irrelevancy.

I don’t want to know the Philistines who don’t know the director of Casablanca and Mildred Pierce.

David Niven made me aware of Curtiz. The only trait I'm aware of is his use of silhouettes, e.g., the dancing girl at Sydney Greenstreet's club in [italic]Casablanca[/italic] is shown in silhouette. But he was capable of making great movies of whatever the studios tasked him with, where other directors might have made forgettable if profitable melodramas.

R4, he is adorable, though, and What We Do in the Shadows is one of the funniest, most charming films of the new millennium.

I stopped following Taika Waititi on Instagram because he was so weird and exhausting!

He seems really nutty.