Mark Harris, author of “Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollwyood,” started a bit of a contretemps when he tweeted the following earlier today:

Current indie pet peeve: Lazy, slack, flabby dialogue and unshaped scenes passed off as “naturalism.”

— Mark Harris (@MarkHarrisNYC) September 5, 2013

Most folks were just dying to know which movie, or movies, he was talking about (I have my own thoughts), but Richard Brody of The New Yorker replied as follows:

@angryaesthete @thehighsign The taut and the shaped are not intrinsically better; such movies are often just airless plot mechanisms.

— Richard Brody (@tnyfrontrow) September 5, 2013

It's a common disagreement among critics and moviegoers: the well-structured and dull vs the formless and dull. I like being surprised by the new as much as anyone but lately I haven't; lately I've grown bored with the indie aesthetic. More from Harris:

@tnyfrontrow @thehighsign ...but what I'm seeing is directors who don't know how to write trying to turn their inability into an aesthetic.

— Mark Harris (@MarkHarrisNYC) September 5, 2013

Ha! Then this exchange:

@tnyfrontrow That's true only if you view directing as authorship and scripts as a blob of clay a non-artist hands to an artist. More later!

— Mark Harris (@MarkHarrisNYC) September 5, 2013

Brody, by the way, was the man who liked “Tabu” so much.

More later, as the man said.