If only he had more water, he could've added Africa, Australia, Antarctica and the rest of the North American continent. Alas, multiplying water is not one of Billy Mays' superpowers.
Wednesday, June 24, 2009
Billy Mays Spills Water on Conan's Desk And Makes World Map
Usually I do movie reviews, but I have to share something I noticed last night. Pitchman celebrity Billy Mays was a guest on Tuesday night's episode of "The Tonight Show." Conan O'Brien brings out the (stolen by Shamwow) Zorbeez. To demonstrate its use, Billy Mays spills a mug of water onto Conan's desk. What no one realized was that Billy Mayes is also a topographical genius and can make a map of the world just by spilling water:
If only he had more water, he could've added Africa, Australia, Antarctica and the rest of the North American continent. Alas, multiplying water is not one of Billy Mays' superpowers.
If only he had more water, he could've added Africa, Australia, Antarctica and the rest of the North American continent. Alas, multiplying water is not one of Billy Mays' superpowers.
Tuesday, March 24, 2009
My reaction to Yahoo!'s 100 Movies To See Before You Die
[Scroll to the bottom for the complete list]
I must say that I am in absolute shock. This is an extraordinary list. Even more impressive is that, unlike AFI's Top 100, this list includes foreign releases as well. And from Yahoo!? Really? They're not supposed to recommend "M" or "The Third Man." But rightly so, they do. Omissions were very, very difficult to think of (which is a sign of a great list). Most of the foreign ones I have not seen (sadly), but the ones listed (like "The 400 Blows" and "Wild Strawberries") I am very familiar with as being recognized so highly. I also commend its bold inclusion of movies like "Enter the Dragon" and "Fast Times At Ridgemont High." These are genre defining movies which should be welcomed just as any great director should be welcomed.
Every decade is represented rather well too. The past couple decades are not, and, if I may say so, should not be represented heavily. It commonly takes decades to discover whether a film can stand the test of time. The fewer, the better, I say. But sometimes you just have to include them (like "Lord of the Rings").
The only titles I take issue with are "The Usual Suspects," "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon," "When Harry Met Sally...," and maybe "Titanic." Admittedly, these are great movies I would not only recommend to anybody but also wouldn't mind owning (if I don't already).
My favorite part of this list is how every omitted movie I try to think of is either on the list (yay "Groundhog Day"!) or has that director's seminal film present. For instance, "North By Northwest" didn't make the list, but Hitchcock's "Psycho," "Rear Window" and "Vertigo" all made it. Its exclusion deemphasizes Hitchcock, so that exclusion I understand. All the greats are represented well: Kubrick, Kurosawa, Truffaut, Fellini, Pinter and Bergman (most with multiple entries). Amazingly, those that I just mentioned happen to be considered by many the best directors of their respective countries: America, Japan, France, Italy, India and Sweden. China and Korea are also represented with their greatest filmmakers, Ang Lee and Wong Kar-Wai.
The only titles I truly think are omitted are "Forrest Gump," "The Princess Bride" and either of David Fincher's movies "Fight Club" or "Se7en." "Lost In Translation" is debatable, but the inclusion of Wong Kar-Wai's "In the Mood For Love" (the direct inspiration) is an inspired decision, because it not only draws allusion to Sofia Coppola's film but also puts Wong Kar-Wai on the list (which he most deservedly so belongs). I would also like to see Wes Anderson represented, but as I think about his films, I couldn't recommend them to anybody the way I could with everything else here. But if he were to be represented, either "Rushmore" or "The Royal Tenenbaums" would be on there. I would also like to have seen the Coen brothers on the list. But, as the problem with Wes Anderson, they may be a bit too quirky. If they were represented, I would say "Blood Simple," "Fargo," "The Big Lebowski" or "No Country For Old Men" should be listed.
I don't know how, but Yahoo! came up with a very inspired list; one that could easily rival AFI's Top 100. Dare I even say... better? Are there any movies you think were omitted? Here's the full list:
12 Angry Men (1957)
2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
The 400 Blows (1959)
8 ½ (1963)
A Hard Day’s Night (1964)
The African Queen (1952)
Alien (1979)
All About Eve (1950)
Annie Hall (1977)
Apocalypse Now (1979)
The Battle of Algiers (1967)
The Bicycle Thief (1948)
Blade Runner (1982)
Blazing Saddles (1974)
Blow Up (1966)
Blue Velvet (1986)
Bonnie and Clyde (1967)
Breathless (1960)
The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957)
Bringing Up Baby (1938)
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969)
Casablanca (1942)
Chinatown (1974)
Citizen Kane (1941)
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000)
Die Hard (1988)
Do the Right Thing (1989)
Double Indemnity (1944)
Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964)
Duck Soup (1933)
E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982)
Enter the Dragon (1973)
The Exorcist (1973)
Fast Times At Ridgemont High (1982)
The French Connection (1971)
The Godfather (1972)
The Godfather, Part II (1974)
Goldfinger (1964)
The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (1968)
Goodfellas (1990)
The Graduate (1967)
Grand Illusion (1938)
Groundhog Day (1993)
In the Mood For Love (2001)
It Happened One Night (1934)
It’s a Wonderful Life (1946)
Jaws (1975)
King Kong (1933)
The Lady Eve (1941)
Lawrence of Arabia (1962)
The Lord of the Rings (2001,2002,2003)
M (1931)
M*A*S*H (1970)
The Maltese Falcon (1941)
The Matrix (1999)
Modern Times (1936)
Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975)
National Lampoon’s Animal House (1978)
Network (1976)
Nosferatu (1922)
On the Waterfront (1954)
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975)
Paths of Glory (1958)
Princess Mononoke (1999)
Psycho (1960)
Pulp Fiction (1994)
Raging Bull (1980)
Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981)
Raise the Red Lantern (1992)
Rashomon (1951)
Rear Window (1954)
Rebel Without a Cause (1955)
Rocky (1976)
Roman Holiday (1953)
Saving Private Ryan (1998)
Schindler’s List (1993)
The Searchers (1956)
Seven Samurai (1954)
The Shawshank Redemption (1994)
The Silence of the Lambs (1991)
Singin’ in the Rain (1952)
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937)
Some Like It Hot (1959)
The Sound of Music (1965)
Star Wars (1977)
Sunset Blvd. (1950)
Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991)
The Third Man (1949)
This is Spinal Tap (1984)
Titanic (1997)
To Kill a Mockingbird (1962)
Toy Story (1995)
The Usual Suspects (1995)
Vertigo (1958)
When Harry Met Sally… (1989)
Wild Strawberries (1957)
Wings of Desire (1988)
The Wizard of Oz (1939)
Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (1988)
The World of Apu (1959)
I must say that I am in absolute shock. This is an extraordinary list. Even more impressive is that, unlike AFI's Top 100, this list includes foreign releases as well. And from Yahoo!? Really? They're not supposed to recommend "M" or "The Third Man." But rightly so, they do. Omissions were very, very difficult to think of (which is a sign of a great list). Most of the foreign ones I have not seen (sadly), but the ones listed (like "The 400 Blows" and "Wild Strawberries") I am very familiar with as being recognized so highly. I also commend its bold inclusion of movies like "Enter the Dragon" and "Fast Times At Ridgemont High." These are genre defining movies which should be welcomed just as any great director should be welcomed.
Every decade is represented rather well too. The past couple decades are not, and, if I may say so, should not be represented heavily. It commonly takes decades to discover whether a film can stand the test of time. The fewer, the better, I say. But sometimes you just have to include them (like "Lord of the Rings").
The only titles I take issue with are "The Usual Suspects," "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon," "When Harry Met Sally...," and maybe "Titanic." Admittedly, these are great movies I would not only recommend to anybody but also wouldn't mind owning (if I don't already).
My favorite part of this list is how every omitted movie I try to think of is either on the list (yay "Groundhog Day"!) or has that director's seminal film present. For instance, "North By Northwest" didn't make the list, but Hitchcock's "Psycho," "Rear Window" and "Vertigo" all made it. Its exclusion deemphasizes Hitchcock, so that exclusion I understand. All the greats are represented well: Kubrick, Kurosawa, Truffaut, Fellini, Pinter and Bergman (most with multiple entries). Amazingly, those that I just mentioned happen to be considered by many the best directors of their respective countries: America, Japan, France, Italy, India and Sweden. China and Korea are also represented with their greatest filmmakers, Ang Lee and Wong Kar-Wai.
The only titles I truly think are omitted are "Forrest Gump," "The Princess Bride" and either of David Fincher's movies "Fight Club" or "Se7en." "Lost In Translation" is debatable, but the inclusion of Wong Kar-Wai's "In the Mood For Love" (the direct inspiration) is an inspired decision, because it not only draws allusion to Sofia Coppola's film but also puts Wong Kar-Wai on the list (which he most deservedly so belongs). I would also like to see Wes Anderson represented, but as I think about his films, I couldn't recommend them to anybody the way I could with everything else here. But if he were to be represented, either "Rushmore" or "The Royal Tenenbaums" would be on there. I would also like to have seen the Coen brothers on the list. But, as the problem with Wes Anderson, they may be a bit too quirky. If they were represented, I would say "Blood Simple," "Fargo," "The Big Lebowski" or "No Country For Old Men" should be listed.
I don't know how, but Yahoo! came up with a very inspired list; one that could easily rival AFI's Top 100. Dare I even say... better? Are there any movies you think were omitted? Here's the full list:
12 Angry Men (1957)
2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
The 400 Blows (1959)
8 ½ (1963)
A Hard Day’s Night (1964)
The African Queen (1952)
Alien (1979)
All About Eve (1950)
Annie Hall (1977)
Apocalypse Now (1979)
The Battle of Algiers (1967)
The Bicycle Thief (1948)
Blade Runner (1982)
Blazing Saddles (1974)
Blow Up (1966)
Blue Velvet (1986)
Bonnie and Clyde (1967)
Breathless (1960)
The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957)
Bringing Up Baby (1938)
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969)
Casablanca (1942)
Chinatown (1974)
Citizen Kane (1941)
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000)
Die Hard (1988)
Do the Right Thing (1989)
Double Indemnity (1944)
Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964)
Duck Soup (1933)
E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982)
Enter the Dragon (1973)
The Exorcist (1973)
Fast Times At Ridgemont High (1982)
The French Connection (1971)
The Godfather (1972)
The Godfather, Part II (1974)
Goldfinger (1964)
The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (1968)
Goodfellas (1990)
The Graduate (1967)
Grand Illusion (1938)
Groundhog Day (1993)
In the Mood For Love (2001)
It Happened One Night (1934)
It’s a Wonderful Life (1946)
Jaws (1975)
King Kong (1933)
The Lady Eve (1941)
Lawrence of Arabia (1962)
The Lord of the Rings (2001,2002,2003)
M (1931)
M*A*S*H (1970)
The Maltese Falcon (1941)
The Matrix (1999)
Modern Times (1936)
Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975)
National Lampoon’s Animal House (1978)
Network (1976)
Nosferatu (1922)
On the Waterfront (1954)
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975)
Paths of Glory (1958)
Princess Mononoke (1999)
Psycho (1960)
Pulp Fiction (1994)
Raging Bull (1980)
Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981)
Raise the Red Lantern (1992)
Rashomon (1951)
Rear Window (1954)
Rebel Without a Cause (1955)
Rocky (1976)
Roman Holiday (1953)
Saving Private Ryan (1998)
Schindler’s List (1993)
The Searchers (1956)
Seven Samurai (1954)
The Shawshank Redemption (1994)
The Silence of the Lambs (1991)
Singin’ in the Rain (1952)
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937)
Some Like It Hot (1959)
The Sound of Music (1965)
Star Wars (1977)
Sunset Blvd. (1950)
Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991)
The Third Man (1949)
This is Spinal Tap (1984)
Titanic (1997)
To Kill a Mockingbird (1962)
Toy Story (1995)
The Usual Suspects (1995)
Vertigo (1958)
When Harry Met Sally… (1989)
Wild Strawberries (1957)
Wings of Desire (1988)
The Wizard of Oz (1939)
Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (1988)
The World of Apu (1959)
Monday, February 23, 2009
My Oscar Reaction... sorta
I can't tell you how much I don't want to review the Oscars right now. I started a new job today. I'm preparing to leave for NY for the weekend on Friday. I've been doing things and going places non-stop since Friday. The last thing I want to do is review a 4hr anything. However, I shall give my opinions on it soon. Before Friday is gonna be my goal... time permitting.
I'll give you my highlights, starting with this introduction:
I think many audiences were dreading the Oscars. I'm not sure why. I, however, have been looking forward to this, well, pretty much since a year before (but especially within the past several months). Y'see, I've been reading movie news covering the Oscars since the buzz began (it usually starts the beginning of fall, but summer has its share of buzz too [remember "Dark Knight" was beginning of summer]). So as it all culminates into this one evening, my fears and apprehensions have already subsided. My expectations, carefully honed and calculated, are fulfilled with gentle ease (yeah, I knew it'd be a big night for "Slumdog" about a month ago). So much *could* go wrong. I was thoroughly pleased with pretty much all of it. And, I must point out, more highlights than the past 3 broadcasts combined. You may whine, but you know I'm right:
Here are my own personal highlights:
Epic Actor Award Presentation. Impossible to beat. The only way it could be bigger is if every living Academy member did a retrospective on each nominee. Really, how could it get any better?
Hugh Jackman's "I'm Wolveriiiine" crescendo. Top 5 funniest moments. Others on that list...
Ben Stiller's uproarious Joaquin Phoenix send-up
The Pineapple Express reprise.
Best speech of the night: Best Animated Short Film. "Domo arigoato, Mr. Robot."
Most entertaining acceptance: Best Documentary ("Man On Wire"). I had been looking forward to this ever since I saw it. The speech has a beautiful metaphor with a simple magic trick by the mischievous Philipe followed by the balancing of the Oscar on his chin. A bold and exhilarating act performed with as much destiny as was shown in the movie.
Slumdog got a lot of recognition. Probably too much. But I'm okay with that. Yeah! Take away from Benjamin Button and (ugh) The Reader! Go Slumdog! Wait... save room for Wall*E... oh, well, nevermind.
I was happy with every single win except one: Best Actor, Sean Penn. Bill Murray gave his career-defining performance in "Lost In Translation." Sean Penn gave yet another Oscar-bait performance and won instead that year with "Mystic River" (albeit a remarkable performance). Mickey Rourke gave his career-defining performance this year (and won every award he'd been nominated for) but lost to.... Sean Penn.
Best Foreign Film: "Waltz With Bashir" was supposed to win. "The Departures" (one of the biggest "Never heard of it" noms in the category) pulls arguably the hugest upset of the evening.
I <3 Tina Fey & Steve Martin. If a movie doesn't happen with them soon, riots will break out soon. I encourage these types of riots. More Tina Fey, please. More!
Heath Ledger's win: Seeing the teary-eyed distraught faces on the usually glittering faces of celebrities was absolutely heart-breaking. The Ledger family's acceptance seemed rehearsed by comparison. Nevertheless, it was a very sombre and touching moment. The terminally unlucky Bill Maher's opening line for the following category was prescient: "Everyone's crying and now I go on."
There are probably more moments I should talk about, but I'll hold off till later in the week. Check again soon!
I'll give you my highlights, starting with this introduction:
I think many audiences were dreading the Oscars. I'm not sure why. I, however, have been looking forward to this, well, pretty much since a year before (but especially within the past several months). Y'see, I've been reading movie news covering the Oscars since the buzz began (it usually starts the beginning of fall, but summer has its share of buzz too [remember "Dark Knight" was beginning of summer]). So as it all culminates into this one evening, my fears and apprehensions have already subsided. My expectations, carefully honed and calculated, are fulfilled with gentle ease (yeah, I knew it'd be a big night for "Slumdog" about a month ago). So much *could* go wrong. I was thoroughly pleased with pretty much all of it. And, I must point out, more highlights than the past 3 broadcasts combined. You may whine, but you know I'm right:
Here are my own personal highlights:
Epic Actor Award Presentation. Impossible to beat. The only way it could be bigger is if every living Academy member did a retrospective on each nominee. Really, how could it get any better?
Hugh Jackman's "I'm Wolveriiiine" crescendo. Top 5 funniest moments. Others on that list...
Ben Stiller's uproarious Joaquin Phoenix send-up
The Pineapple Express reprise.
Best speech of the night: Best Animated Short Film. "Domo arigoato, Mr. Robot."
Most entertaining acceptance: Best Documentary ("Man On Wire"). I had been looking forward to this ever since I saw it. The speech has a beautiful metaphor with a simple magic trick by the mischievous Philipe followed by the balancing of the Oscar on his chin. A bold and exhilarating act performed with as much destiny as was shown in the movie.
Slumdog got a lot of recognition. Probably too much. But I'm okay with that. Yeah! Take away from Benjamin Button and (ugh) The Reader! Go Slumdog! Wait... save room for Wall*E... oh, well, nevermind.
I was happy with every single win except one: Best Actor, Sean Penn. Bill Murray gave his career-defining performance in "Lost In Translation." Sean Penn gave yet another Oscar-bait performance and won instead that year with "Mystic River" (albeit a remarkable performance). Mickey Rourke gave his career-defining performance this year (and won every award he'd been nominated for) but lost to.... Sean Penn.
Best Foreign Film: "Waltz With Bashir" was supposed to win. "The Departures" (one of the biggest "Never heard of it" noms in the category) pulls arguably the hugest upset of the evening.
I <3 Tina Fey & Steve Martin. If a movie doesn't happen with them soon, riots will break out soon. I encourage these types of riots. More Tina Fey, please. More!
Heath Ledger's win: Seeing the teary-eyed distraught faces on the usually glittering faces of celebrities was absolutely heart-breaking. The Ledger family's acceptance seemed rehearsed by comparison. Nevertheless, it was a very sombre and touching moment. The terminally unlucky Bill Maher's opening line for the following category was prescient: "Everyone's crying and now I go on."
There are probably more moments I should talk about, but I'll hold off till later in the week. Check again soon!
Monday, February 9, 2009
The History of Poop In the Movies
I will designate all my entries of this blog into one of three categories:
1. Movie Reviews
2. Interesting Articles About Movies
3. Movie Contemplations (personal reflections about the art of film)
Here's an article that fits snugly into Category 2. It's called The History of Poop In the Movies:
http://www.slashfilm.com/2009/02/09/geekbomb-number-two-with-a-bullet-poop-in-the-movies/
"He called the sh** poop!!!" --Billy Madison, "Billy Madison" (1995)
1. Movie Reviews
2. Interesting Articles About Movies
3. Movie Contemplations (personal reflections about the art of film)
Here's an article that fits snugly into Category 2. It's called The History of Poop In the Movies:
http://www.slashfilm.com/2009/02/09/geekbomb-number-two-with-a-bullet-poop-in-the-movies/
"He called the sh** poop!!!" --Billy Madison, "Billy Madison" (1995)
Coming Soon To A Weblog Near You: Another Movie Review
Having my worldview of movie criticism obliterated by the article in my last post, I have felt a need to reviewing movies again (not sure exactly when, but soon). Why? That is something that I am struggling with internally. I have been muddled in indecision this whole interim, but what I need to realize is this: I can wallow in indecision without action or I can wallow in indecision with aimless action. Since aimless action is better than no action at all, I shall press forward in hopes that my actions have some meaning, whatever that may be.
"I have to believe in a world outside my own mind.
I have to believe that my actions still have meaning.
Even if I can't remember them.
I have to believe that when my eyes are closed, the world's still here.
Do I believe the world's still here?
Is it still out there?
Yeah.
We all need memories to remind ourselves who we are.
I'm no different.
Now, where was I?"
--Leonard Shelby, last words of "Memento" (2001)
"I have to believe in a world outside my own mind.
I have to believe that my actions still have meaning.
Even if I can't remember them.
I have to believe that when my eyes are closed, the world's still here.
Do I believe the world's still here?
Is it still out there?
Yeah.
We all need memories to remind ourselves who we are.
I'm no different.
Now, where was I?"
--Leonard Shelby, last words of "Memento" (2001)
Saturday, May 17, 2008
Revoking My Movie Reviewing
This may very well be my last post on this website. The reason for this is because one well-written article has single-handedly reshaped my views on all of film criticism. It is because of the reasons brought forth that I feel inept to continue to review movies. That is, until I can fully absorb all that has been brought forth to my attention. Here is the article in its entirety. I hope you will be enlightened just as I have been:
WHAT WE DON’T TALK ABOUT WHEN WE TALK ABOUT MOVIES
Armond White takes aim at the critics who write with their thumbs.
(originally posted here: http://ftl.nypress.com/21/17/news&columns/feature3.cfm)
By Armond White
There’s more writing about movies these days than ever before. In print and online, it’s never been worse—especially on the Internet where film buffs emulating the Vachel Lindsay-Manny Farber tradition are no longer isolated nerds but an opinionated throng, united in their sarcasm and intense pretense at intellectualizing what is basically a hobby.
Although criticism is everywhere, and some online reviewers prove themselves honest and less beholden to the power elite than print critics, the problem is this: So many Internetters get to express their “expertise,” which essentially is either their contempt or idiocy about films, filmmakers or professional critics. The joke inherent in the Internet hordes (spiritedly represented by the new REELZ-TV program The Movie Mob) is that they chip away at the professionalism they envy, all the time diminishing cultural discourse—perhaps as irreversibly as professional critics have already diminished it themselves.
Recently, professional critics have felt a backlash from this Internet frenzy. Print publications restructuring to keep up with the web have dismissed or offered buyouts to noticeable numbers of employees, including critics. Trimming these fatted ranks is a result of basic disrespect for criticism as both a true journalistic profession and a necessary intellectual practice.
This backlash follows a perfect storm of anti-intellectual prejudice: Movies are considered fun that needn’t be taken seriously. Movies contain ideas better left unexamined. Movies generate capital in all directions.
The latter ethic was overwhelmingly embraced by media outlets during the Reagan era, exemplified by the sly shift from reporting on movies to featuring inside-industry coverage. Focusing on weekend box-office totals—now a post-Sabbath religious habit—first legitimized movie-talk for that era enthralled with tax shelters, bond-trading and pro-trust legislation (peaking with Reagan’s regressive repel of the landmark 1949 Paramount Decree, giving back monopolies to the studios). This sea change in media attitude was typified by the American launch of Premiere magazine (finally trimmed away two years ago), which perverted movie journalism from criticism to production news. It familiarized the production of movies, not like the trade publications Variety and Hollywood Report do for industry participants, but by simply jettisoning exegesis and replacing interest in content with production stills, personality profiles and a humor column that witheringly trivialized the critic’s pursuit.
This disrespect for thinking—where film criticism blurred with celebrity gossip—has resulted in today’s cultural calamity. Buyouts and dismissals are, of course, unfortunate personal setbacks; but the crisis of contemporary film criticism is that critics don’t discuss movies in ways that matter. Reviewers no longer bother connecting movies to political or moral ideas (that’s was what made James Agee’s review of The Human Comedy and Bosley Crowther’s review of Rocco and His Brothers memorable). Nowadays, reviewers almost never draw continuity between new films and movie history—except to get it wrong, as in the idiotic reviews that belittled Neil Jordan’s sensitive, imaginative The Brave One (a movie that brilliantly contrasts vengeful guilt to 9/11 aftershock) as merely a rip-off of the 1970s exploitation feature Death Wish.
If the current indifference to critical thought is a tragedy, it’s not just for the journalism profession betraying its promise of news and ideas but also for those bloggers. The love of movies that inspires their gigabytes of hyperbole has been traduced to nonsense language and non-thinking. It breeds a new pinhead version of fan-clubism.
••••••••••••
What we don’t talk about when we talk about movies these days reveals that we have not moved past the crippling social tendency that 1990s sociologists called Denial. The most powerful, politically and morally engaged recent films (The Darjeeling Limited, Private Fears in Public Places, World Trade Center, The Promise, Shortbus, Ask the Dust, Akeelah and the Bee, Bobby, Running Scared, Munich, War of the Worlds, Vera Drake) were all ignored by journalists whose jobs are to bring the (cultural) news to the public. Instead, only movies that are mendacious, pseudo-serious, sometimes immoral or socially retrograde and irresponsible (4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, Army of Shadows, United 93, Marie Antoinette, Zodiac, Last Days, There Will Be Blood, American Gangster, Gone Baby Gone, Letters From Iwo Jima, A History of Violence, Tarnation, Elephant) have received critics’ imprimatur.
That there isn’t a popular hit among any of these films proves how critics have failed to rouse the moviegoing public in any direction.
Critics customarily show their allegiance to Hollywood blockbusters, granting them inordinate attention in the entertainment pages, but that’s not the way to build an enlightened public or a healthy culture. You can’t praise the Pirates of the Caribbean movies or the Bourne movies and then expect benumbed thrill-riders to sit still for A Prairie Home Companion, Neil Young: Heart of Gold or Munich. The critical consensus toward denial forsakes what really inspires passion in moviegoers—those priceless moments when a movie addresses personal emotion (Dakota Fanning asking “Are we still alive?” in War of the Worlds) or informs some confounding social experience (Broken Sky’s young lovers alienated by soulless disco beats).
Jeff Nichols’ Shotgun Stories is a perfect example of what critics don’t talk about. Shotgun Stories should have rocked film culture. Ideally complementing the Coen brothers’ No Country for Old Men, it questions the temperamental and social sources for modern behavior. Nichols tells a Faulknerian, Snopes-like story of male fecklessness and the reality of frustration in the American working class. We are introduced to three Hayes brothers in Arkansas: Son (Michael Shannon), Boy (Douglas Ligon) and Kid (Barlow Jacobs) are totally rudderless—gambling, coaching basketball, womanizing—yet succumbing to the instinct for vengeance passed on to them by their bitter, resentful mother. This recognizable sense of family isolation (the flipside of The Darjeeling Limited) reveals a warped masculinity that goes to the heart of American experience. Shotgun Stories is set in a Red State community, but the truth of its ineffectual, slatternly men can be seen across the country, even in Blue State parochialism.
Its story of warring clans (sympathetic reprobates mirroring sympathetic churchgoers) confirms a concept of brotherhood that has wide-ranging application, but it is primarily, stunningly empathetic. Like last year’s family drama Black Irish (another good, modest film that critics lost), Shotgun Stories deals with fundamental experiences that media consensus ignores. When Son and his siblings crash the funeral for their father (who left them behind when he remarried to begin a second family), it starts a stupid, unstoppable feud. Things get nasty and then work out tragically: It’s the opposite of There Will Be Blood, where things begin tragically then work out nastily—a trajectory that slakes the dissatisfaction and lack of control that spooks our everyday lives. Yet Shotgun Stories dramatizes human compulsion.
P.T. Anderson creates aestheticized tension and a floridly melodramatic, false sense of history that’s easy for critics to endorse. Blood is meant to impress, while Shotgun Stories is meant to be felt. Director-writer Nichols shows a weird yet authentic sense of classical style. This doesn’t feel like a regional work, nor is it a movie-soaked movie like The Darjeeling Limited. It’s between the two. Nichols understands countrified living and American habit that may repel urban reviewers: But it allows him to jump off from Hatfields-McCoys legend into a non-condescending vision of how slackerdom really manifests itself. He counters the meretricious tendency of Richard Linklater, Gus Van Sant and Judd Apatow films whose celebrations of American sloth have blunted the sensibilities of critics trying to keep up with industry fads.
There’s hardly language or space in our class-based, Hollywood-pledged film journalism to deal with the way Shotgun Stories keeps its Faulknerian roots while branching out to a new sense of American behavior. (When Boy’s car radio blasts a Ronnie Montrose song, suddenly reminding him of Kid, it’s the kind of richly authentic moment we used to only get in documentaries like Joel DeMott’s Seventeen.) Nichols’ lyric sense of location—of men and women keeping their own balance as they walk, argue and clash—conveys a complicated spiritual agony. Being a non-hipster film meant that Shotgun Stories was off established critics’ radar screens. Even I, shamefacedly, only caught up after it had opened; but it’s been the most resonant American movie so far this year.
Son, Boy and Kid’s actions (you have to be in touch with your own American roots to feel the humor in those names; the only thing left out is Phil Morrison’s Junebug) point toward a common, unknowable future. Nichols uncannily combines hope and despair. On appearance, Shotgun Stories is a world away from the attention-grabbing topicality of critics’ faves There Will Be Blood, In the Valley of Elah, Redacted, Rendition and The Kingdom; it’s quiet, almost elliptical like George Washington (David Gordon Green is the producer). Yet this terse family epic may be the Iraq War movie we’ve waited for without being able to articulate exactly what we wanted. Nichols’ complex mix of native resentment and culturally bred fury also contains knotted-up affection and pride. Shotgun Stories is genuine. When it ends, it isn’t over. It’s something to talk about.
••••••••••••
To discuss movies as if they were irrelevant to individual experience—just bread-and-circus rabble-rousers—breeds indifference. And that’s only one of the two worst tendencies of contemporary criticism. The other is elitism.
This schism had an ironic origin—the popularization of film criticism as a consumer’s method. A generation of readers and filmgoers were once sparked by the discourse created by Pauline Kael and Andrew Sarris during the period that essayist Philip Lopate described as ìthe heroic era of moviegoing.î The desire to be a critic fulfilled the urge to respond to what was exciting in the culture. Movie commentary was a media rarity in those days and relatively principled (even the Times’ Arts & Leisure section used to present a forum for contrary opinions). And then the television series At the Movies happened. Its success, moving from public to commercial broadcast (who can tell the difference anymore?), resulted in an institution. Permit an insider’s story: It is said that At the Movies host Roger Ebert boasted to Kael about his new TV show, repeatedly asking whether she’d seen it. Kael reportedly answered “If I want a layman’s opinion on movies, I don’t have to watch TV.”
Kael’s cutting remark cuts to the root of criticism’s problem today. Ebert’s way of talking about movies as disconnected from social and moral issues, simply as entertainment, seemed to normalize film discourse—you didn’t have to strive toward it, any Average Joe American could do it. But criticism actually dumbed down. Ebert also made his method a road to celebrity—which destroyed any possibility for a heroic era of film criticism.
At the Movies helped criticism become a way to be famous in the age of TV and exploding media, a dilemma that writer George W. S. Trow distilled in his apercu “The Aesthetic of the Hit”: “To the person growing up in the power of demography, it was clear that history had to do not with the powerful actions of certain men but with the processes of choice and preference.” It was Ebert’s career choice and preference to reduce film discussion to the fumbling of thumbs, pointing out gaffes or withholding “spoilers”—as if a viewer needed only to like or dislike a movie, according to an arbitrary set of specious rules, trends and habits. Not thought. Not feeling. Not experience. Not education. Just reviewing movies the way boys argued about a baseball game.
Don’t misconstrue this as an attack on the still-convalescent Ebert. I wish him nothing but health. But I am trying to clarify where film criticism went bad. Despite Ebert’s recent celebration in both Time magazine and The New York Times as “a great critic,” neither encomium could credit him with a single critical idea, notable literary style or cultural contribution. Each paean resorted to personal, logrolling appreciations. A.O. Scott hit bottom when he corroborated Ebert’s advice, “When writing you should avoid cliché, but on television you should embrace it.” That kind of thinking made Scott’s TV appearances a zero.
Unfortunately, it is this very process of affirming the Ebert institution that contributes to confusion about what film criticism has lost. Time marvels that Ebert “typically would give thumbs up to two or three” of the “four or five films up for review on his weekly TV show” without asking if it’s credible or disingenuous. (It will take a separate article to expose the absurdity of a TV show bearing Ebert’s name without his presence, whose interchangeable roster of ineffectual reviewers loyally prevaricate in Ebert’s manner—a “criticism” show owned and sponsored by the Disney conglomerate!)
In the Ebert age of criticism, the Aesthetic of the Hit dominates everything. Behind those panicky articles about critics losing their jobs (what about autoworkers and schoolteachers?), lurks the writers’ own fear of falling victim to the same draconian industry rule: Most publishers and editors are only interested in supporting hits in order to reach Hollywood’s deep-pocket advertisers. This is what makes traditional criticism seem indefinable and obsolete, leaving web criticism as a ready (but dubious) alternative.
The Internetters who stepped in to fill print publications’ void seize a technological opportunity and then confuse it with “democratization”—almost fascistically turning discourse into babble. They don’t necessarily bother to learn or think—that’s the privilege of graffito-critique. Their proud non-professionalism presumes that other moviegoers want to—or need to—match opinions with other amateurs. That’s Kael’s “layman” retort made viral. The journalistic buzzword for this water-cooler discourse is “conversation” (as when The Times saluted Ebert’s return to newspaper writing as “a chance to pick up on an interrupted conversation”). But today’s criticism isn’t real conversation; on the Internet it’s too solipsistic and autodidactic to be called a heart-to-heart. (Viral criticism isn’t real; it’s mostly half-baked, overlong term-paper essays by fans who like to think they think.)
And in print, “conversation” is regrettably one-sided. Power-sided. This is where the elitist tendency sours everything. The social fragmentation that fed the 1980s indie movement, decentralizing film production away from Los Angeles, had its correlative in film journalism. Critics everywhere flailed about for a center, for authority, for knowledge; they championed all sorts of unworked-out, poorly made films (The Blair Witch Project, Gummo, Dogville, Southland Tales) proposing an indie-is-better/indie-is-new aesthetic. The sophomoric urge to oppose Hollywood fell into the clutches of Hollywood (i.e., Sundance). Similarly, the decentralized practice of criticism now scoffs at former New York Times potentate Bosley Crowther, while crowning a network of bizarro authorities—pompous critics who replace Crowther’s classical-humanist canon with a hipster/avant-garde pack mentality (from The Village Voice to Time Out New York to IndieWire).
The new inclination is to write esoteric criticism. Post-Tarantino cinema has wrung the pop aesthetic dry, so the new gods of criticism have made totems of movies so unwatchable and so unappealing that they prohibit the basic pleasure and amazement of moviegoing. Critical babble doesn’t talk about what matters, but it sustains Ten Current Film Culture Fallacies: 1)“The Three Amigos” Iñárritu, Cuarón and del Toro are Mexico’s greatest filmmakers while Julian Hernandez is ignored. 2) Gus Van Sant is the new Visconti when he’s really the new Fagin, a jailbait artful dodger. 3) Documentaries ought to be partisan rather than reportorial or observational. 4) Chicago, Moulin Rouge and Dreamgirls equal the great MGM musicals. 5) Paul Verhoeven’s social satire Showgirls was camp while Cronenberg’s campy melodramas are profound. 6) Brokeback Mountain was a breakthrough while all other gay-themed movies were ignored. 7) Todd Haynes’ academic dullness is anything but. 8) Dogma was a legitimate film movement. 9) Only non-pop Asian cinema from J-horror to Hou Hsiao Hsien counts, while Chen Kaige, Zhang Yimou and Stephen Chow are rejected. 10) Mumblecore matters.
These delusions derive from an elitist, art-for-art’s-sake notion. It’s the “Smart About Movies” syndrome allowing bloggers and critics to feel superior for having suffered through Dead Man, Ye-Ye, Gerry, Inland Empire—movies that ordinary moviegoers want no part of and that hardly reflect a community of citizens or the New Millennium’s political stress. It may be a coincidence of social class that most movies are made by people espousing a liberal bent, but it is the shame of middle-class and middlebrow conformity that critics follow each other when praising movies that disrespect religion, rail about the current administration or feed into a sense of nihilism that only people privileged with condos and professional tenure can afford.
Routine reporting from Cannes and Sundance is another expression of journalists’ perks that encourage a sense of elitism. Fact is, those fests are remote from how most people experience or relate to film culture. Like the weekend grosses list, it promotes a false sense of being informed—not art interpretation or feeling. And festival favorites aren’t discussed in fundamental terms. Critics talk around what’s happening inside Pedro Costa or Apichatpong Weerasethakul movies. Instead, they call the latter “Joe”—proof of their in-group shamelessness. They’d rather make xenophobic jokes about Weerasethakul’s exotic name than actually deal with the facts of his Asianness, his sexual outlawry and his retreat into artistic and intellectual arrogance that evades social categorization. Such hipoisie canonizing is as unhelpful as TV’s pop reviewers who only respect banal Hollywood blockbusters. They also, consequently, discuss the Oscars as a plebiscite that readers must dutifully and mindlessly observe. It’s entertainment—weakly.
Avoiding the substance of movies in film discussion has worsened beyond Ebert’s TV glibness. Recall how few critics were able to apply standard Judeo-Christian readings to No Country for Old Men (let alone The Passion of the Christ) but remained perplexed or aggrieved. Contemporary criticism doesn’t deal with politics, morality or history. That’s why critics wrote head-in-the-sand responses to the obvious Clinton censure in David Mamet’s The Winslow Boy and praised socialist Mike Leigh’s Topsy-Turvy as if it were an Anglophile’s Merchant-Ivory pageant. They even let pass the Paranoid Park scene of a security guard’s vivisected torso crawling across railroad tracks—surely the most egregious movie moment of the decade. Critics say nothing about movies that open up complex meaning or richer enjoyment. That’s why they disdained the beauty of The Darjeeling Limited: Wes Anderson’s confrontation with selfishness, hurt and love were too powerful, too humbling. It’s no wonder that the audience for movies shrinks into home-viewership; they also shrink away from movies as a great popular art form.
These desperate stakes became even more alarming with the recent announcement of the Museum of the Moving Image’s Second Annual Institute on Criticism and Feature Writing—a project seemingly designed to further confuse the profession. Offering a session on marketing and publicity, the MMI’s Institute implies that flackery is part of critical journalism, and that’s really the root of the problem—sanctioning the way in which critical journalism has blurred its mandate into promoting the industry, not the art form. It overlooks any chance for criticism to unite while enlightening the audience, keeping it divided. There is no “conversation” when what we say when we talk about movies is driven by elitism or commerce, both now horribly combined in Queens. Hollywood’s emphasis on impersonal product then holds sway over art. Ideas get smothered in formula, and hype becomes the language of so-called discourse.
Does the training of movie critics matter if they aren’t taught to preserve the idea that movies must affirm our humanity? The public deserves critics who appreciate when an audience wants to be moved, encouraging them to experience catharsis at World Trade Center or War of the Worlds. But when people walk out of Paranoid Park feeling bewildered and unedified, where do they turn? What do they talk about?
WHAT WE DON’T TALK ABOUT WHEN WE TALK ABOUT MOVIES
Armond White takes aim at the critics who write with their thumbs.
(originally posted here: http://ftl.nypress.com/21/17/news&columns/feature3.cfm)
By Armond White
There’s more writing about movies these days than ever before. In print and online, it’s never been worse—especially on the Internet where film buffs emulating the Vachel Lindsay-Manny Farber tradition are no longer isolated nerds but an opinionated throng, united in their sarcasm and intense pretense at intellectualizing what is basically a hobby.
Although criticism is everywhere, and some online reviewers prove themselves honest and less beholden to the power elite than print critics, the problem is this: So many Internetters get to express their “expertise,” which essentially is either their contempt or idiocy about films, filmmakers or professional critics. The joke inherent in the Internet hordes (spiritedly represented by the new REELZ-TV program The Movie Mob) is that they chip away at the professionalism they envy, all the time diminishing cultural discourse—perhaps as irreversibly as professional critics have already diminished it themselves.
Recently, professional critics have felt a backlash from this Internet frenzy. Print publications restructuring to keep up with the web have dismissed or offered buyouts to noticeable numbers of employees, including critics. Trimming these fatted ranks is a result of basic disrespect for criticism as both a true journalistic profession and a necessary intellectual practice.
This backlash follows a perfect storm of anti-intellectual prejudice: Movies are considered fun that needn’t be taken seriously. Movies contain ideas better left unexamined. Movies generate capital in all directions.
The latter ethic was overwhelmingly embraced by media outlets during the Reagan era, exemplified by the sly shift from reporting on movies to featuring inside-industry coverage. Focusing on weekend box-office totals—now a post-Sabbath religious habit—first legitimized movie-talk for that era enthralled with tax shelters, bond-trading and pro-trust legislation (peaking with Reagan’s regressive repel of the landmark 1949 Paramount Decree, giving back monopolies to the studios). This sea change in media attitude was typified by the American launch of Premiere magazine (finally trimmed away two years ago), which perverted movie journalism from criticism to production news. It familiarized the production of movies, not like the trade publications Variety and Hollywood Report do for industry participants, but by simply jettisoning exegesis and replacing interest in content with production stills, personality profiles and a humor column that witheringly trivialized the critic’s pursuit.
This disrespect for thinking—where film criticism blurred with celebrity gossip—has resulted in today’s cultural calamity. Buyouts and dismissals are, of course, unfortunate personal setbacks; but the crisis of contemporary film criticism is that critics don’t discuss movies in ways that matter. Reviewers no longer bother connecting movies to political or moral ideas (that’s was what made James Agee’s review of The Human Comedy and Bosley Crowther’s review of Rocco and His Brothers memorable). Nowadays, reviewers almost never draw continuity between new films and movie history—except to get it wrong, as in the idiotic reviews that belittled Neil Jordan’s sensitive, imaginative The Brave One (a movie that brilliantly contrasts vengeful guilt to 9/11 aftershock) as merely a rip-off of the 1970s exploitation feature Death Wish.
If the current indifference to critical thought is a tragedy, it’s not just for the journalism profession betraying its promise of news and ideas but also for those bloggers. The love of movies that inspires their gigabytes of hyperbole has been traduced to nonsense language and non-thinking. It breeds a new pinhead version of fan-clubism.
••••••••••••
What we don’t talk about when we talk about movies these days reveals that we have not moved past the crippling social tendency that 1990s sociologists called Denial. The most powerful, politically and morally engaged recent films (The Darjeeling Limited, Private Fears in Public Places, World Trade Center, The Promise, Shortbus, Ask the Dust, Akeelah and the Bee, Bobby, Running Scared, Munich, War of the Worlds, Vera Drake) were all ignored by journalists whose jobs are to bring the (cultural) news to the public. Instead, only movies that are mendacious, pseudo-serious, sometimes immoral or socially retrograde and irresponsible (4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, Army of Shadows, United 93, Marie Antoinette, Zodiac, Last Days, There Will Be Blood, American Gangster, Gone Baby Gone, Letters From Iwo Jima, A History of Violence, Tarnation, Elephant) have received critics’ imprimatur.
That there isn’t a popular hit among any of these films proves how critics have failed to rouse the moviegoing public in any direction.
Critics customarily show their allegiance to Hollywood blockbusters, granting them inordinate attention in the entertainment pages, but that’s not the way to build an enlightened public or a healthy culture. You can’t praise the Pirates of the Caribbean movies or the Bourne movies and then expect benumbed thrill-riders to sit still for A Prairie Home Companion, Neil Young: Heart of Gold or Munich. The critical consensus toward denial forsakes what really inspires passion in moviegoers—those priceless moments when a movie addresses personal emotion (Dakota Fanning asking “Are we still alive?” in War of the Worlds) or informs some confounding social experience (Broken Sky’s young lovers alienated by soulless disco beats).
Jeff Nichols’ Shotgun Stories is a perfect example of what critics don’t talk about. Shotgun Stories should have rocked film culture. Ideally complementing the Coen brothers’ No Country for Old Men, it questions the temperamental and social sources for modern behavior. Nichols tells a Faulknerian, Snopes-like story of male fecklessness and the reality of frustration in the American working class. We are introduced to three Hayes brothers in Arkansas: Son (Michael Shannon), Boy (Douglas Ligon) and Kid (Barlow Jacobs) are totally rudderless—gambling, coaching basketball, womanizing—yet succumbing to the instinct for vengeance passed on to them by their bitter, resentful mother. This recognizable sense of family isolation (the flipside of The Darjeeling Limited) reveals a warped masculinity that goes to the heart of American experience. Shotgun Stories is set in a Red State community, but the truth of its ineffectual, slatternly men can be seen across the country, even in Blue State parochialism.
Its story of warring clans (sympathetic reprobates mirroring sympathetic churchgoers) confirms a concept of brotherhood that has wide-ranging application, but it is primarily, stunningly empathetic. Like last year’s family drama Black Irish (another good, modest film that critics lost), Shotgun Stories deals with fundamental experiences that media consensus ignores. When Son and his siblings crash the funeral for their father (who left them behind when he remarried to begin a second family), it starts a stupid, unstoppable feud. Things get nasty and then work out tragically: It’s the opposite of There Will Be Blood, where things begin tragically then work out nastily—a trajectory that slakes the dissatisfaction and lack of control that spooks our everyday lives. Yet Shotgun Stories dramatizes human compulsion.
P.T. Anderson creates aestheticized tension and a floridly melodramatic, false sense of history that’s easy for critics to endorse. Blood is meant to impress, while Shotgun Stories is meant to be felt. Director-writer Nichols shows a weird yet authentic sense of classical style. This doesn’t feel like a regional work, nor is it a movie-soaked movie like The Darjeeling Limited. It’s between the two. Nichols understands countrified living and American habit that may repel urban reviewers: But it allows him to jump off from Hatfields-McCoys legend into a non-condescending vision of how slackerdom really manifests itself. He counters the meretricious tendency of Richard Linklater, Gus Van Sant and Judd Apatow films whose celebrations of American sloth have blunted the sensibilities of critics trying to keep up with industry fads.
There’s hardly language or space in our class-based, Hollywood-pledged film journalism to deal with the way Shotgun Stories keeps its Faulknerian roots while branching out to a new sense of American behavior. (When Boy’s car radio blasts a Ronnie Montrose song, suddenly reminding him of Kid, it’s the kind of richly authentic moment we used to only get in documentaries like Joel DeMott’s Seventeen.) Nichols’ lyric sense of location—of men and women keeping their own balance as they walk, argue and clash—conveys a complicated spiritual agony. Being a non-hipster film meant that Shotgun Stories was off established critics’ radar screens. Even I, shamefacedly, only caught up after it had opened; but it’s been the most resonant American movie so far this year.
Son, Boy and Kid’s actions (you have to be in touch with your own American roots to feel the humor in those names; the only thing left out is Phil Morrison’s Junebug) point toward a common, unknowable future. Nichols uncannily combines hope and despair. On appearance, Shotgun Stories is a world away from the attention-grabbing topicality of critics’ faves There Will Be Blood, In the Valley of Elah, Redacted, Rendition and The Kingdom; it’s quiet, almost elliptical like George Washington (David Gordon Green is the producer). Yet this terse family epic may be the Iraq War movie we’ve waited for without being able to articulate exactly what we wanted. Nichols’ complex mix of native resentment and culturally bred fury also contains knotted-up affection and pride. Shotgun Stories is genuine. When it ends, it isn’t over. It’s something to talk about.
••••••••••••
To discuss movies as if they were irrelevant to individual experience—just bread-and-circus rabble-rousers—breeds indifference. And that’s only one of the two worst tendencies of contemporary criticism. The other is elitism.
This schism had an ironic origin—the popularization of film criticism as a consumer’s method. A generation of readers and filmgoers were once sparked by the discourse created by Pauline Kael and Andrew Sarris during the period that essayist Philip Lopate described as ìthe heroic era of moviegoing.î The desire to be a critic fulfilled the urge to respond to what was exciting in the culture. Movie commentary was a media rarity in those days and relatively principled (even the Times’ Arts & Leisure section used to present a forum for contrary opinions). And then the television series At the Movies happened. Its success, moving from public to commercial broadcast (who can tell the difference anymore?), resulted in an institution. Permit an insider’s story: It is said that At the Movies host Roger Ebert boasted to Kael about his new TV show, repeatedly asking whether she’d seen it. Kael reportedly answered “If I want a layman’s opinion on movies, I don’t have to watch TV.”
Kael’s cutting remark cuts to the root of criticism’s problem today. Ebert’s way of talking about movies as disconnected from social and moral issues, simply as entertainment, seemed to normalize film discourse—you didn’t have to strive toward it, any Average Joe American could do it. But criticism actually dumbed down. Ebert also made his method a road to celebrity—which destroyed any possibility for a heroic era of film criticism.
At the Movies helped criticism become a way to be famous in the age of TV and exploding media, a dilemma that writer George W. S. Trow distilled in his apercu “The Aesthetic of the Hit”: “To the person growing up in the power of demography, it was clear that history had to do not with the powerful actions of certain men but with the processes of choice and preference.” It was Ebert’s career choice and preference to reduce film discussion to the fumbling of thumbs, pointing out gaffes or withholding “spoilers”—as if a viewer needed only to like or dislike a movie, according to an arbitrary set of specious rules, trends and habits. Not thought. Not feeling. Not experience. Not education. Just reviewing movies the way boys argued about a baseball game.
Don’t misconstrue this as an attack on the still-convalescent Ebert. I wish him nothing but health. But I am trying to clarify where film criticism went bad. Despite Ebert’s recent celebration in both Time magazine and The New York Times as “a great critic,” neither encomium could credit him with a single critical idea, notable literary style or cultural contribution. Each paean resorted to personal, logrolling appreciations. A.O. Scott hit bottom when he corroborated Ebert’s advice, “When writing you should avoid cliché, but on television you should embrace it.” That kind of thinking made Scott’s TV appearances a zero.
Unfortunately, it is this very process of affirming the Ebert institution that contributes to confusion about what film criticism has lost. Time marvels that Ebert “typically would give thumbs up to two or three” of the “four or five films up for review on his weekly TV show” without asking if it’s credible or disingenuous. (It will take a separate article to expose the absurdity of a TV show bearing Ebert’s name without his presence, whose interchangeable roster of ineffectual reviewers loyally prevaricate in Ebert’s manner—a “criticism” show owned and sponsored by the Disney conglomerate!)
In the Ebert age of criticism, the Aesthetic of the Hit dominates everything. Behind those panicky articles about critics losing their jobs (what about autoworkers and schoolteachers?), lurks the writers’ own fear of falling victim to the same draconian industry rule: Most publishers and editors are only interested in supporting hits in order to reach Hollywood’s deep-pocket advertisers. This is what makes traditional criticism seem indefinable and obsolete, leaving web criticism as a ready (but dubious) alternative.
The Internetters who stepped in to fill print publications’ void seize a technological opportunity and then confuse it with “democratization”—almost fascistically turning discourse into babble. They don’t necessarily bother to learn or think—that’s the privilege of graffito-critique. Their proud non-professionalism presumes that other moviegoers want to—or need to—match opinions with other amateurs. That’s Kael’s “layman” retort made viral. The journalistic buzzword for this water-cooler discourse is “conversation” (as when The Times saluted Ebert’s return to newspaper writing as “a chance to pick up on an interrupted conversation”). But today’s criticism isn’t real conversation; on the Internet it’s too solipsistic and autodidactic to be called a heart-to-heart. (Viral criticism isn’t real; it’s mostly half-baked, overlong term-paper essays by fans who like to think they think.)
And in print, “conversation” is regrettably one-sided. Power-sided. This is where the elitist tendency sours everything. The social fragmentation that fed the 1980s indie movement, decentralizing film production away from Los Angeles, had its correlative in film journalism. Critics everywhere flailed about for a center, for authority, for knowledge; they championed all sorts of unworked-out, poorly made films (The Blair Witch Project, Gummo, Dogville, Southland Tales) proposing an indie-is-better/indie-is-new aesthetic. The sophomoric urge to oppose Hollywood fell into the clutches of Hollywood (i.e., Sundance). Similarly, the decentralized practice of criticism now scoffs at former New York Times potentate Bosley Crowther, while crowning a network of bizarro authorities—pompous critics who replace Crowther’s classical-humanist canon with a hipster/avant-garde pack mentality (from The Village Voice to Time Out New York to IndieWire).
The new inclination is to write esoteric criticism. Post-Tarantino cinema has wrung the pop aesthetic dry, so the new gods of criticism have made totems of movies so unwatchable and so unappealing that they prohibit the basic pleasure and amazement of moviegoing. Critical babble doesn’t talk about what matters, but it sustains Ten Current Film Culture Fallacies: 1)“The Three Amigos” Iñárritu, Cuarón and del Toro are Mexico’s greatest filmmakers while Julian Hernandez is ignored. 2) Gus Van Sant is the new Visconti when he’s really the new Fagin, a jailbait artful dodger. 3) Documentaries ought to be partisan rather than reportorial or observational. 4) Chicago, Moulin Rouge and Dreamgirls equal the great MGM musicals. 5) Paul Verhoeven’s social satire Showgirls was camp while Cronenberg’s campy melodramas are profound. 6) Brokeback Mountain was a breakthrough while all other gay-themed movies were ignored. 7) Todd Haynes’ academic dullness is anything but. 8) Dogma was a legitimate film movement. 9) Only non-pop Asian cinema from J-horror to Hou Hsiao Hsien counts, while Chen Kaige, Zhang Yimou and Stephen Chow are rejected. 10) Mumblecore matters.
These delusions derive from an elitist, art-for-art’s-sake notion. It’s the “Smart About Movies” syndrome allowing bloggers and critics to feel superior for having suffered through Dead Man, Ye-Ye, Gerry, Inland Empire—movies that ordinary moviegoers want no part of and that hardly reflect a community of citizens or the New Millennium’s political stress. It may be a coincidence of social class that most movies are made by people espousing a liberal bent, but it is the shame of middle-class and middlebrow conformity that critics follow each other when praising movies that disrespect religion, rail about the current administration or feed into a sense of nihilism that only people privileged with condos and professional tenure can afford.
Routine reporting from Cannes and Sundance is another expression of journalists’ perks that encourage a sense of elitism. Fact is, those fests are remote from how most people experience or relate to film culture. Like the weekend grosses list, it promotes a false sense of being informed—not art interpretation or feeling. And festival favorites aren’t discussed in fundamental terms. Critics talk around what’s happening inside Pedro Costa or Apichatpong Weerasethakul movies. Instead, they call the latter “Joe”—proof of their in-group shamelessness. They’d rather make xenophobic jokes about Weerasethakul’s exotic name than actually deal with the facts of his Asianness, his sexual outlawry and his retreat into artistic and intellectual arrogance that evades social categorization. Such hipoisie canonizing is as unhelpful as TV’s pop reviewers who only respect banal Hollywood blockbusters. They also, consequently, discuss the Oscars as a plebiscite that readers must dutifully and mindlessly observe. It’s entertainment—weakly.
Avoiding the substance of movies in film discussion has worsened beyond Ebert’s TV glibness. Recall how few critics were able to apply standard Judeo-Christian readings to No Country for Old Men (let alone The Passion of the Christ) but remained perplexed or aggrieved. Contemporary criticism doesn’t deal with politics, morality or history. That’s why critics wrote head-in-the-sand responses to the obvious Clinton censure in David Mamet’s The Winslow Boy and praised socialist Mike Leigh’s Topsy-Turvy as if it were an Anglophile’s Merchant-Ivory pageant. They even let pass the Paranoid Park scene of a security guard’s vivisected torso crawling across railroad tracks—surely the most egregious movie moment of the decade. Critics say nothing about movies that open up complex meaning or richer enjoyment. That’s why they disdained the beauty of The Darjeeling Limited: Wes Anderson’s confrontation with selfishness, hurt and love were too powerful, too humbling. It’s no wonder that the audience for movies shrinks into home-viewership; they also shrink away from movies as a great popular art form.
These desperate stakes became even more alarming with the recent announcement of the Museum of the Moving Image’s Second Annual Institute on Criticism and Feature Writing—a project seemingly designed to further confuse the profession. Offering a session on marketing and publicity, the MMI’s Institute implies that flackery is part of critical journalism, and that’s really the root of the problem—sanctioning the way in which critical journalism has blurred its mandate into promoting the industry, not the art form. It overlooks any chance for criticism to unite while enlightening the audience, keeping it divided. There is no “conversation” when what we say when we talk about movies is driven by elitism or commerce, both now horribly combined in Queens. Hollywood’s emphasis on impersonal product then holds sway over art. Ideas get smothered in formula, and hype becomes the language of so-called discourse.
Does the training of movie critics matter if they aren’t taught to preserve the idea that movies must affirm our humanity? The public deserves critics who appreciate when an audience wants to be moved, encouraging them to experience catharsis at World Trade Center or War of the Worlds. But when people walk out of Paranoid Park feeling bewildered and unedified, where do they turn? What do they talk about?
Sunday, April 6, 2008
"There Will Be Blood"
COMING TO DVD Tuesday, April 8th:
"There Will Be Blood" (2007)
Starring Daniel Day-Lewis, Paul Dano, Dillon Freasier, Kevin J. O'Connor, Russell Harvard
Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson
The story is very simple. A man builds an oil empire by exploiting a small California town in the early 1900's. The story works great (although it comes off just as confusing as "No Country For Old Men" does with its similar novelesque sequences), but I would venture to say this is more of a character study than an epic tale. It was (loosely) adapted from the Upton Sinclair novel "Oil!" by director P.T. Anderson (whose films "Magnolia" and "Punch-Drunk Love" are quirky masterpieces). This may be his least humorous movie to date displaying both boldness and maturity.
"There WIll Be Blood" is really about an epic character which is what engages the movie's audience far more than anything else. Taking Daniel Day-Lewis' character out (or replacing the character with a lesser actor) would show how thinly engaging many aspects of the movie are. I'm glad Daniel Day-Lewis got his Best Actor Oscar (deservedly so considering he carried this nearly 3 hour movie solely based on his charisma).
This is a very well made movie. The main character, Daniel Plainview, is worth the price of admission (or rental). I would maybe put it in my Top 10 (or maybe 15) of the year. I wondered how this movie could get nominated for Best Picture at this year's Oscars, and I realized it came out at the exact perfect time. When it appeared "No Country For Old Men" had no strong competition, I imagine others wanted to crown another favorite but who? "Juno" was too small. "Michael Clayton" was too unpopular. "Atonement" ran out of steam early on. "There Will Be Blood" was next in line. This is all just my theory of course.
I feel like I should say more (about Paul Dano's role [which is probably too big for him to handle at this point] or the infamous "milkshake" conversation), but there really isn't all that much left to be said here about my opinion of this movie.
TWO HUMOROUS ANECDOTES ABOUT MY THEATER EXPERIENCE:
1.) This was easily the darkest theater I had ever attended (made more astounding being the fact that it was a matinee). I walked in just as the previews were beginning and not a single reflection of the audience was made by the flickering screen ahead. It was pitch black. I stood by the door with my hat's brim covering the screen to allow my eyes to adjust as fast as possible (before anyone came in and wondered what I was doing there). I feared sitting in the back row worrying I would wind up in someone's lap. Twice I stepped down the aisle only to find my eyes still unprepared for the journey and made my way back to the door. After a couple previews, I managed to grab an empty aisle seat (most of which were full of people in a similar predicament). The best part was watching the other people walk down the aisles, fresh from daylight, stumbling over their own lack of sight. I had to bite my knuckles a few times to avoid boisterous laughter.
2.) Even better than this was the two black gentlemen in their mid to late 20's at the front of the theater. The movie's title came up, and one guy said (loud enough for the whole theater to hear) "Alright let's see some blood!" I thought either this was a joke or these guys were in for a three hour snoozefest. If it were the latter, I don't think you could get any farther away from the kind of movie they were looking for. I have to give the guys credit for sticking it through the first 40 minutes (the first 10 having very little sound at all). They both got up, but, just before leaving, one of them turned to the audience, and, with an explanatory tone said, "There ain't no blood!" That line has stuck with me since, and it still gives me a chuckle when I say it to myself. It wasn't until after leaving the theater that I thought of the perfect retort (which, being so perfect, I would have overcome my shyness and belted it out):
"There will be!"
BIT O' TRIVIA: While on location in Marfa, Texas, "No Country for Old Men" was the neighboring film production. One day, director Paul Thomas Anderson and his crew tested the pyrotechnical effects of the oil derrick fire, causing an enormous billowing of smoke, intruding the shot that Joel Coen and Ethan Coen were shooting. This caused them to put off filming until the next day when the smoke dissipated from view. Both this film and "No Country for Old Men" would eventually become the leading contenders at the Academy Awards a year and a half later.
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