Check out Molly Lambert's piece on David Fincher

One of my editors frequently complains about how modern critics are too predictable in their panning of anything that expresses overt sentimentality. I picked up a little nugget in this Molly Lambert piece on Grantland about David Fincher.
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Films like Se7en and Zodiac root around in the ugliest parts of the human psyche, interrogating the audience’s desire to see terrible things happen and taking very different routes to their dark punch-line endings. He also weathers the same criticisms as Kubrick and Hitchcock: cold, unemotional, overly cynical. But Fincher, like Kubrick and Hitchcock, is just unsentimental. He is interested in emotions, but real, raw ones that people would rather conceal, which come out via micro-slips.
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Lambert more or less implies that "sentimental" is a pejorative, and insinuates that classically sensationalized emotions (i.e. love) are less authentic. This taste preference for exploration of things like fear and loathing (so to speak) -- which I happen to share -- oughtn't be rooted in some righteous sense that these emotions are more real than sentimental ones, right? It's simply an aesthetic preference, probably rooted in the fact that they have less coverage in art and entertainment.

Thoughts?

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