"Most of all, Serena is interesting because it’s a much more rare artifact than a really bad movie: It’s an incompetent movie. Unlike more famous movie disasters, it plays out not like the product of one unchecked monstrous ego but of a thousand tiny decisions gone wrong. The editing is incompetent. The pacing is incompetent. The scenes don’t logically flow from one to the next. The soundtrack sounds like it was generated by a computer-soundtrack algorithm set to “mournful fiddle.”" - Andrew C (✔)

"Serena is a bracing reminder of how much expertise goes into making even the most uninspired movie — how dozens of people with wildly different skill sets all have to perform well or the whole project is imperiled. The stars may be the ones with their names plastered over the title, but if you’re Jennifer Lawrence, trapped in Serena like Rapunzel in her tower dungeon, your powers of self-salvation are limited. You can’t reedit the film or rescore its music or rescout its locations. In the end, the lesson of Serena isn’t how remarkable it is when a movie like this goes badly, but how improbable it is that any movie at all turns out to be good." - Andrew C (✔)

A good reminder that the people who aren't the actors and directors often don't get nearly enough credit or remuneration for their contributions. - Jennifer Dittrich

Well, in theory the director is ultimately responsible for all that stuff. Esp in auteur theory. - Andrew C (✔)

True, but there's a reason why Hitchcock asked Saul Bass for advice on more than just his title sequence work. As good as any director ever is, there's a bunch of other people that have to be wicked good at their important piece of whatever's going on, and the people who forget that often end up with forgettable films (which, I suppose, is part of the point of the article.) - Jennifer Dittrich