This movie is by turns brilliant and dumb, naïve and wise, nowhere near good enough and something close to great.
But whether through brilliant bets or dumb luck, Goldman Sachs made $500 million from that short.
The book designer Peter Mendelsund weighed in: "The trailer for Pynchon's new novel is, um, bad?" And the blog kottke.org hedged its bet, calling the teaser "either brilliant or the dumbest thing ever".
What's in question, as ever, is whether, and for whom, the trade is dumb or brilliant.
This week, as Joe Biden inched closer to jumping into the presidential race, Ben Carson inched closer to forcing us to retire the use of "brain surgeon" as a linguistic stand-in for "brilliant genius," with thunderingly dumb comments about guns, the Umpqua Community College shooting, and the Holocaust.
"A man whose ideas were sometimes so dumb they were brilliant".
These comic postures range from frequently brilliant (Beastie Boys, Eminem) to endearingly dumb (Kid Rock) to monumentally witless (Insane Clown Posse), but what is notable is the apparent consensus among white rappers about their need to play hip-hop for laughs.
Co-opting the club was brilliant publicity -- "I'm not dumb," Mr. Garrett said with a chuckle -- but also something much more.
Lasereyedcorgis called Arnie and pals' ill-fated fight against an invisible alien "big, dumb, ludicrously homoerotic … brilliant!", Bartel said it was "one of the best overblown satires of male machismo" and TheNoiseOfCarpet labelled it "second only to Terminator as the ultimate trashy sci-fi romp of the 1980s".
Through Dec. 30 "Television," an interactive computer installation by Claude Closky, a French conceptualist, is either really dumb entertainment or a brilliant satire of electronic consumerism.
