Considering I have read numerous essays that are about films but steer the conversation away from having to include commentary on all its technical features, then I think you also miss the point of what makes a film a film.
This doesn't make any sense. The fact that there are many, many, many essays out there like this proves nothing about "what makes a film a film" - in fact, it merely proves that, unfortunately, what makes film unique is very often ignored.
Literature is a sophisticated art not because commentary always need to fall back on having to include technical details like style and grammar, but because literature can inspire discussion to sometimes go beyond it. I think film needs to aspire to that sort of gravity.
And of course film too CAN be talked about without reference to "technical details" (a phrase that doesn't begin to cover everything I'm talking about - i.e.: the entire film as we have it) - whether it should is another matter. I would be the absolute last person to suggest that we don't need to talk about the (say) political or philosophical meanings of movies, and i haven't suggested anything of the kind. However, I would point out, again, that we have no access to these meanings without the 'form' of the film, and our response to them is thus dictated BY this 'form'; this, in turn, means that the most correct and sensitive account OF these meanings would need to discuss how they were communicated to us cinematically.
The main reason I have been pushing this point here, however, is that especially if we want to EVALUATE a film (which is where this discussion grew from - you saying TWBB was bad), then we need to evaluate it AS A FILM. This necessarily involves differentiating it from any other mediums that also happen to convey meanings and messages.
To use your analogy: literature IS a sophisticated art form, but it is most definitely not sophisticated because it can "inspire discussion", since ANYTHING (not even only artforms) can inspire discussion, so what is particularly special about literature being able to do so? A piece of literature has the capacity to be sophisticated precisely because of what makes it LITERATURE, rather than an essay, or a pamphlet, or a movie. In order to convince someone of the greatness of a novel we would need to convince them of more than the fact that it brings up (say) weighty philosophical concepts, because otherwise they might as well read a book of philosophy, which would likely convey these concepts in a much more direct and in-depth manner. No - to convince someone a novel is great, we need to argue that it is great because of what it does AS A NOVEL. The same is true of film.
I know you often want to bypass 'form' because it allows you to talk about issues emerging from 'content', which you regard as having more (as you put it) "gravity". But if you really just want to talk about, say, philosophy, or politics, or history, or psychology, then you should study one of those subjects. If you want to talk about film, then you need to be constantly alive to what makes this medium unique.