and theres the problem. Its rarely used right, and is really distracting because of that. I have lost count of the shows where a scene was shot with two different lenses - one with the smear and one without, with the edit rapidly cutting between the two.
If you want to use it to focus in on a character fine…its a greasy variant of a vignette. But i would suggest correctly composing the shot would be a better solution.
Surely the point is to help progress the narrative, not to give post production a fun challenge?
my 2p well spent.