January 2007 Archives

I love Sarah Silverman and A.O. Scott all the more for this, from today's New York Times:

While most actors are reluctant to discuss critics’ opinions of them, Ms. Silverman addresses them head on, particularly a 2005 review of “Jesus Is Magic” by A. O. Scott, a film critic for The New York Times.

“It totally hurt my feelings and was like a kick in the stomach,” but, she said, she found it fascinating.

In the review Mr. Scott said her act was “the latest evidence that mocking political correctness has become a form of political correctness in its own right.”

“She depends on the assumption that only someone secure in his or her own lack of racism would dare to make, or to laugh at, a racist joke, the telling of which thus becomes a way of making fun simultaneously of racism and of racial hypersensitivity,” he wrote. In short, he added, “naughty as she may seem, she’s playing it safe.”

Ms. Silverman said the review articulated a point that she had felt, but had been struggling to express. “That was something that always festered in the back of my mind that I never talked about,” she said. Her crowds are usually liberal ones, “and we know we’re not racist,” she said. “But the whiter the crowd, the more that kind of voice in the back of my head comes toward the front, and I feel grosser doing that kind of stuff.”

“At the very least, it’s made me assess the choir,” she continued. “Context is everything, and I don’t think he would be pondering all that stuff if I was doing the material in front of an all-black crowd or a very mixed crowd,” which, she said, she regularly does.

Still, she added, she is reassessing at least part of her work.

“It was rebellious to be politically incorrect now and in the past couple of years,” she said. “But I don’t know how rebellious it will be when everybody has that point of view. It becomes hackneyed and it becomes irrelevant and it turns into something else.”

I've been arguing for several years now that, especially since 9/11, "political correctness" has evolved into a mostly reactionary phenomenon. The lefty PC that began as a way of showing sensitivity to minorities and those who had been discriminated against for years (women, the disabled, etc.) eventually turned into a form of monolithic, euphemistic denial of reality, where questioning was verboten and anything that could be interpreted as doubt or dissent was denounced as "fascist." Now we see the same thing coming from the right. The terminology has changed but the brainwashed thinking hasn't.

The inevitable backlash to liberal PC came in the form of the right-wing, talk-radio rebellion, in which uppity women were "feminazis" and liberals were "terrorist sympathizers" (even when they were too timid and spineless to oppose the administration's foreign policy blunders, which, ironically, flagrantly violated traditional conservative principles). Fox News took the talk-radio attitude mainstream, appealing to its viewers' PC biases so that it appeared, at least to the network's partisans, "fair and balanced." (If somebody already sees the world in black and white, and you show them a black and white image, they won't notice it's not in color.)

Anyway, even though I was a fan of Silverman's "Jesus Is Magic," I appreciate Scott's warning about where this is all going in the era of so-called "'South Park' Republicans." And I admire Silverman for questioning her own (and her audiences') underlying assumptions, as well.

My review of David Lynch's "Inland Empire" in the Chicago Sun-Times and on RogerEbert.com today:

Put on the watch. Light the cigarette, fold back the silk, and use the cigarette to burn a hole in the silk. Then put your eye up to the hole and look through, all the way through, until you find yourself falling through the hole and into the shifting patterns you see on the other side.

That's a metaphor for watching and making movies, and it's one way to watch "Inland Empire" -- a way that is, in fact, specifically recommended in the movie itself. This is David Lynch's film -- the one he's been making since "Eraserhead" -- and it offers you multiple ways to view it as it uncoils over nearly three hours, encouraging you to see it from all of them at once. It is, after all, overtly about the relationship between the movie and the observer, the actor and the performance, the watcher and the watched (and the watch).

In this sense, you might say, "Inland Empire" is a digital film, through and through. Not because Lynch shot it with the relatively small Sony PD-150 digicam and fell in love with the smeary, malleable and unstable texture of digital video (where the brightest Los Angeles sunlight can be as void and terrifying as the darkest shadow), or because the first pieces of the movie were digital shorts he made for his Web site before they grew and crystallized into a narrative idea. "Inland Empire" unfolds in a digital world (a replication of consciousness itself -- hence the title), where events really do transpire in multiple locations at the same time (or multiple times at the same place), observers are anywhere and everywhere at once, and realities are endlessly duplicable, repeatable and tweakable. This is a digital dimension where, to paraphrase Jean-Luc Godard, there's no difference between ketchup and paint and light and blood: On the screen, it's red.

"Inland Empire" presents itself as a Hollywood movie (and a movie about Hollywood) in the guise of an avant-garde mega-meta art movie. When people say "Inland Empire" is Lynch's "Sunset Boulevard," Lynch's "Persona," or Lynch's "8½," they're quite right, but it also explicitly invokes connections to Stanley Kubrick's "The Shining," Jean-Luc Godard's "Pierrot le Fou," Bunuel and Dali's "Un Chien Andalou," Maya Deren's LA-experimental "Meshes of the Afternoon" (a Lynch favorite), and others.

Of course, it's also a tour-de-Lynch, in which we virtually revisit spaces and images and faces (Laura Dern, Justin Theroux, Grace Zabriskie, Harry Dean Stanton ... ) that resonate with memories of "Eraserhead," "Blue Velvet," "Twin Peaks," "Wild at Heart," "Lost Highway," "Mulholland Drive," "Inland Empire" itself -- and some perpetually unfinished Lynch movie of the future. Because, in the Inland Empire, nobody can quite remember if it's today or two days from now, because yesterday and the day after tomorrow are all transpiring in the present tense. Or, as one character puts it so memorably, "I suppose if it was 9:45, I would think it is after midnight."

Rest of review at RogerEbert.com

Critics, filmmakers and pundits have been writing quite a bit over the last few years about what "digital" means for the future of cinema, and about the sorry state of the audience for foreign language films (not just distribution and exhibition, but demand) in the United States in the age of the DVD. Much of this speculative writing has been hopelessly vague and rather dismal -- and, in some cases, I don't think the writers really understand what they're talking about. But for every dozen "digital doomsday" observations, there's a concrete insight that's worth considering.

I'd like to take excerpts from three recent pieces and follow a thread that I think connects them:

David Denby, The New Yorker (January 8, 2007):

In a theatre, you submit to a screen; you want to be mastered by it, not struggle to get cozy with it. Of course, no one will ever be forced to look at movies on a pipsqueak display—at home, most grownups will look at downloaded films on a computer screen, or they’ll transfer them to a big flat-screen TV. Yet the video iPod and other handheld devices are being sold as movie-exhibition spaces, and they certainly will function that way for kids. According to home-entertainment specialists I spoke to in Hollywood, many kids are “platform agnostic”—that is, they will look at movies on any screen at all, large or small.

A.O. Scott, The New York Times (January 21, 2006):

The [National Society of Film Critics] vote stands out a bit amid all this welter because its top three choices for best picture of the year were all movies in languages other than English. The third-place finisher was Clint Eastwood’s “Letters From Iwo Jima,” which is in Japanese; the runner-up was “The Death of Mr. Lazarescu,” a Romanian film directed by Cristi Puiu; and the winner, by a narrow margin, was “Pan’s Labyrinth,” Guillermo del Toro’s tale of magic and malevolence in 1940s Spain. [NOTE: Subsequently, the mostly-foreign-language films "Flags of Our Fathers" and "Babel" were nominated for Best Picture Oscars, while "Pan's Labyrinth" received six nominations, including Best Foreign Language Film.]

The honors bestowed on those three movies, not only by the National Society of Film Critics, might be taken as evidence that foreign films are flourishing.... The movies are out there, more numerous and various than ever before, but the audience — and therefore the box-office returns, and the willingness of distributors to risk even relatively small sums on North American distribution rights — seems to be dwindling and scattering. For every movie that manages to solicit a brief flicker of attention, there are dozens that will be seen only at film festivals or on region-free DVD players.

David Lynch, in his book "Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity" (published December 28, 2006):

I'm through with film as a medium. For me, film is dead. If you look at what people all over the world are taking still pictures with now, you begin to see what's going to happen. I'm shooting in digital video now and I love it. [...]

How we see films is changing.... A tiny little picture, instead of a giant big picture, is going to be how people see films. And the good news: At least people will have their headphones. Sound will become, I think, even more important.... The whole thing is, when those curtains open up, and the lights go down, we must be able to go into that world. And it many ways, it's getting very difficult to go into a world. People talk so much in theaters. And there's a tiny, crummy little picture. How do you get the experience?

I think it's going to be a bit of a bumpy road. But the possibility is there for very clean pictures -- no scratches, no dirt, no water marks, no tearing -- and an image that can be controlled in an infinite number of ways. If you take care of how you show a film, it can be a beautiful experience that lets you go into a world. We're still working out ways for that to happen. But digital is here; the video iPod is here; we've just got to get real and go with the flow.

I think Lynch, Scott and Denby are all correct in what they say above. Although elsewhere in his piece, Denby oversells an idealized view of "the theatrical experience" (which "theatrical experience"?) as if all 16mm, 35mm and/or 70mm (or VistaVision or Todd A-O or IMAX) presentations were the same: The Best Of All Possible Ways To See A Movie. The most important thing, as I think all of us would agree, is that the audience feel able to submit to the film. We may fight it, we may be unwilling to go where the film wants to take us, but we should, as Lynch says, be allowed to "go into that world."

"As its poster and advertising remind us, "Quinceañera" won both the jury and audience prizes at the 2006 Sundance Film Festival, and those honors are strangely indicative of its dramatic and stylistic limitations. If there was ever a movie that seemed precision-tailored for a Park City reception, this is it -- the quintessential example of the festival's favored brand of hand-crafted, slice-of-life, youth-oriented filmmaking that expresses affection for a nicely captured American subculture. In other words, it's a Sundance specialty, right from the box.

"This is a shopping-list movie: A double coming-of-age story spiced with local color; a bittersweet portrait of a Los Angeles neighborhood in transition; a warm and soapy celebration of a Mexican-American community. "Quinceañera" is also a thoroughly predictable melodrama that's both kitchen-sink and 'After-School Special.'"

-- from my review of "Quinceañera" last summer

One of the debilitating side effects of the pop-culture "mainstreaming" (if I may use an ugly marketing term) of the Sundance Film Festival brand over the last 20 years or so has been the over-glorification of what I call resumé movies. These are films, cobbled together from familiar elements designed to appeal not only to a Sundance jury (or audience), but with an eye toward getting the filmmakers some "Hollywood" money for their next picture. And that, in itself, is fine. Nothing wrong with trying to climb the ladder of success. But I don't particularly want to watch somebody's resumé on a movie screen, particularly when it's sold to me as a "personal story" (or a "subversive thriller") and plays like pure Hollywood formula schlock.

John Sayles admits that "Return of the Secaucus 7" was just such a resumé picture. After years of writing horror and exploitation scripts for Roger Corman ("Piranha," "The Lady in Red," "Alligator"), he wanted to start directing his own, more personal stuff. The reason there's a basketball game in the movie was simply to show that he knew how to handle an action sequence. But Sayles was expanding his craft and moving from formulaic commercial genre filmmaking toward more personal projects, not the other way around.

Remember "Project Greenlight," the HBO (then Bravo) series, produced with good intentions by Matt Damon and Ben Affleck, with the Weinstein Miramax? The deal was that they would choose an unproduced first-time script and give a novice director a chance to make the movie, which Miramax would finance and distribute. By the third (and final) season, they joined forces with Wes Craven and were making a horror exploitation film for Miramax's Dimension division.

It is possible that many people would not describe David Lynch's movies as "straightforward," but they're really pretty simple to grasp if you think of them as meditations on states of consciousness rather than chronological narratives (or, uh, "straight stories"). They still have beginnings, middles and endings and they take you from one place (or way of seeing) to another. "Inland Empire," for example, is about a Hollywood actress (who may or may not be unfaithful to her husband -- but is that the actress or the Southern gal she's playing or someone else?), a suburban wife married to a former animal handler in a Polish carny, a mistress, a Polish whore... And all of them appear to be aspects of the same woman, played by Laura Dern. Or, perhaps, all these women are aspects of one another: the actress feels like a whore, the wife is also a mistress, the whore is also an actress, the actress's character is having an adulterous affair, and so on and so on.

I think "Lost Highway," "Mullholland Drive" and "Inland Empire" are ("Twin Peaks" aside -- that's in a realm of its own) Lynch's strongest work, and they also feel like extensions of one another. The saxophonist played by Bill Pullman and the mechanic played by Balthazar Getty, the actresses played by Naomi Watts and Laura Harring, the actress played by Laura Dern -- they all seem like variations on similar ideas.

In Lynch's book "Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity" he describes "Lost Highway," for example, in a way that seems perfectly clear when you watch it:

At the time Barry Gifford and I were writing the script for "Lost Highway," I was sort of obsessed with the O.J. Simpson trial. Barry and I never talked about it this way, but I think the film is somehow related to that.

What struck me about O.J. Simpson was that he was able to smile and laugh. He was able to go golfing with seemingly very few problems about the whole thing. I wondered how, if a person did these deeds, he could go on living. And we found this great psychology term -- "psychogenic fugue" -- describing an event where the mind tricks itself to escape some horror. So, in a way, "Lost Highway" is about that. And the fact that nothing can stay hidden forever.

(The fact that Robert Blake, who appeared as the chilling Mystery Man in that film, was latter tried for the murder of his wife, adds another sinister dimension to the film, or the atmosphere surrounding it.) Dave McCoy, Editor of MSN Movies, has summarized the movie this way: "It's about a guy who kills his wife and is so horrified by what he's done that the only way he can deal with it is to become another person... and a character in a film noir, no less, where women are evil and violence can be easily rationalized."

Hey, what more do ya need? A map? Just remember: DON'T YOU EVER F---IN' TAILGATE!!! I'm sorry about that, Pete, but tailgating is one thing I cannot tolerate....

Here's Roger Ebert's analysis of this morning's Oscar nominations:

Oscar is growing more diverse and international by the year. This year's Academy Award nominations, announced Tuesday, contain a few titles that most moviegoers haven't seen and some they haven't heard of. That's perhaps an indication that the Academy voters, who once went mostly for big names, are doing their homework and seeing the pictures.

From relative obscurity came the nominees Ryan Gosling, whose overlooked work in "Half Nelson," as a drug-addicted high-school teacher was little seen, and Jackie Earle Haley, the conflicted child molester in "Little Children," an erotic tale of stolen love in the afternoon. Also consider 10-year-old Abigail Breslin, and 72-year-old veteran actor Alan Arkin, in "Little Miss Sunshine," a story of a dysfunctional family's cross-country road trip. Adriana Barraza, whose heartbreaking role as a housekeeper in "Babel" earned her a supporting actress nomination, and Rinko Kikuchi, whose emotionally wrenching performance as a grieving deaf teenager in "Babel" also earned her a nomination in that same category.

Read complete article at RogerEbert.com

I'm thrilled to report that Roger Ebert will be filing his own analysis of this morning's Oscar nominations, too. In the meantime, here's what I got:

Last summer, according to most industry prognosticators, this whole Oscar race thing was supposed to be all over already. Before its release, Clint Eastwood's "Flags of Our Fathers" was widely expected to be greeted with flowers and statuettes. The combination of Eastwood and Paul Haggis (screenwriter of the last two Best Picture winners, Eastwood's "Million Dollar Baby" and Haggis's "Crash") made the Red Carpet look like a cakewalk. "Letters From Iwo Jima" wasn't even on the release schedule for 2006, so as not to interfere with "Flags"' Oscar chances. Martin Scorsese's "The Departed," on the other hand, was cheered as a "return to his (generic) roots, " a straight-up commercial cops-and-crooks movie to follow up his prestige-picture Oscar bids, "Gangs of New York" and "The Aviator," but not something seriously For Your Consideration.

Meanwhile, the Christmas roadshow release "Dreamgirls" was positioned as the "Chicago" nominee, a glitzy musical that took years to get to the big screen (the stage version played on Broadway more than 20 years ago), and was thought to be a shoo-in for a Best Picture nomination.

Don't you love it when the conventional wisdom is just wrong?

Story continued at RogerEbert.com

David Lynch returned to the Great Pacific Northwest Wednesday night for two screenings of his three-hour "Inland Empire" (at 7:30 and midnight), bringing with him to Seattle a fresh, hot shipment of David Lynch Coffee. That's good coffee! (Packaging tagline -- from "Inland Empire," it turns out: "It's all in the beans, and I'm just full of beans.") Just a few blocks away, in the Pike Place Market, was a little shop where I used to get my beans, when I first became a serious coffee-drinker in college. It's still there, and it's still called Starbuck's, but I hear there are more of them now.

I went to the early show. (When it was 9:45 I probably thought it was after midnight.) Lynch began by introducing a cellist who performed a brief improvisational piece "to set a mood." Then Lynch read a short verse:

We are like the spider.
We weave our life and then move along in it.
We are like the dreamer who dreams and then lives in the dream.
This is true for the entire universe.
-- Upanishads

And then "Inland Empire" hit the big Cinerama screen (in the theater where I saw "2001: A Space Odyssey" in its original release, when I was 10). I won't say much more about the movie now (I just finished a longer piece that will run next week), but the local crowd went wild when a lumberjack appeared. We live in the land of "Twin Peaks" here, you know. Lynch spent some of his formative years growing up in Spokane, on the other side of the Cascades, in what Washingtonians refer to as the Inland Empire (though most people associate the term with California).

After the movie, Lynch took questions from the audience. Most of them were pretty lame (as is usually the case at these sorts of events), but nothing fazed Lynch, who was gentle, gracious and folksy. He was most passionate when talking about finding "the idea" for whatever he was trying to create, and working and working to realize it. With actors, he said, he likes to bring them in for a rehearsal of one scene -- any scene. (This process is shown in an early scene in "Inland Empire," which was reportedly filmed over the space of a couple years without any finished script. Lynch would shoot when he decided he had an idea for something he wanted to shoot.) The actors would read it and, "if it wasn't perfect" -- and Lynch admitted it rarely is, the first time through -- they would talk. Then rehearse some more. Then talk some more. And so on until he felt they'd brought the scene around to where it was serving "the idea."

He spoke similarly of music and sound, which he feels are -- or should be -- inseparable from the images. (Lynch did the sound design and wrote some music for "Inland Empire," but credits composer Angelo Badalamenti with introducing him to "the world of music.") He finds or writes or creates the music first, and then spends a lot of time and effort and experimentation getting the sounds and images to combine catalytically.

Lynch was enthusiastic about his experience shooting with a small digital camera (the Sony PD-150), and said he began using it to make shorts for his web site. After he'd made a few, he started thinking about them in terms of a larger framework story, and by then he was "already locked into" the digital format. He said he loved the freedom it allowed him (wait till you see the close-ups he goes for -- he coulda poked somebody's eye out!). Sure, he said, this format (it's NOT high-definition like, say, "Miami Vice") doesn't have the quality of film, but it has its own qualities, its own textures. And, Lynch said, it was so easy to push and to tweak at will to get the effects he wanted. Best of all, he didn't have to stop the actors to re-load the camera after every ten minutes of exposed film. He could keep things going for 40 minutes (sometimes shooting with three cameras simultaneously), which he thought allowed for interesting things to happen that might not have happened otherwise.

A questioner noted that characters in David Lynch movies are often subjected to great anguish and trauma. He asked Lynch what was the worst he'd ever been hurt -- physically, the fellow clarified. After a long pause, Lynch told a story about his childhood in Spokane. His family was visiting another family, and they had a punching-bag snowman with sand in the bottom. Another boy hit the snowman, which knocked over young David, who gashed his head on the moulding around the doorway. Lynch said he remembers being adamant about not wanting to get stitches, but doesn't recall what happened.

Someone observed that Laura Dern uses a touch-tone phone in "Inland Empire," perhaps the first non-rotary telephone in the Lynch oevre. Lynch suggested that, perhaps, with this movie, he was slowly moving into the 20th century. Or did he say 21st?

Lynch's new book is called "Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity." He said the first step in the creative process for him was letting go of negativity, which then allowed creativity to flow in. Somebody asked if "Inland Empire" was itself a big fish.

"'Inland Empire' is a whale," said Lynch, "with a lot of smaller fish swimming around inside it."

One woman posed the most succinct question of the evening: "What is the movie about?" (This, it should be pointed out, was after she'd just seen it.)

Lynch said: "It's on the poster."

(Updated with the actual Upanishads verse 1/23/07.)

In the few sentences that I've posted about Tom Tykwer's "Perfume: The Story of a Murderer" (just blurbs on my Best of 2006 and Double-Bills lists), I mentioned that the movie was a striking feat of "cine-sthesia," as it were, and that the murders themselves reminded me of Hannibal Lecter's analysis of Jame Gumb in "Silence of the Lambs": The killing is incidental. What does he seek? (In this sense it reminded me of Michael Powell's "Peeping Tom," too -- voyeurism as a form of possession through the senses -- sight or smell.) And, of course, Grenouille (the scentless apprentice) kills because he covets. Jame Gumb wants to possess a woman's skin; Grenouille wants her scent -- and, by extension, all women's scents.

I wonder if one reason I was so enthralled by Tykwer's film (it's gotten mixed reviews: a 54 on RottenTomatoes) is that I'm told I have mild synesthesia, where senses bleed together a bit so that, for example (from the American Heritage Dictionary definition of the word), "the hearing of a sound produces the visualization of a color." That's very much like what the movie does, with color, shape, texture and sound orchestrated to express odors. But doesn't everybody experience this to some degree? My sensations have mostly to do with color, shape, texture and brightness. Sounds, particularly music (and to a lesser extent tastes, smells, even tactile feelings), are always accompanied by colors and shapes. Doesn't everybody know that trumpets are round and red? That violins are long and yellow? That pianos are (generally speaking) ovoid and green? Snare drums are light grey, short and thin and flat, like em-dashes, while cymbals are silvery, shimmery and round-ish but with no distinct edges, like a spray. Those are some of the things I always see in my head when I listen to music. Also: The number two is green, just as surely as the number five is red and seven is blue. (And the funny thing is, that's true for Roman numerals as well as Arabic ones, though the colors aren't all as strong.) I don't know where these associations come from -- if I've always had them or if I made them when I was a kid.

Do you have these experiences? Care to describe them?

Getting back to my first paragraph, I wanted to refer you to a splendid (and splendidly titled) piece by Stephen Romer in the Times Literary Supplement called "Distilled, bottled, and bewildered" that is a combined discussion of Tykwer's film, Patrick Süskind’s original 1985 novel, and a book of historical research and analysis of the "olfactory arts" by Richard Stamelman called "Perfume: Joy, Obsession, Scandal, Sin." An excerpt that I thought was exceptionally perceptive (beware of spoilers):

I just learned from a reader that somebody has posted some of my Scanners comments about Jonathan Rosenbaum's "Bobby" review (involving his comparisons to "Nashville") under my name at Rosenbaum's blog in the Chicago Reader. I've written to Jonathan to explain that it wasn't me. I may take issue with what somebody writes, but I would never simply double-post my own stuff on their blog. If I had something else to say to them, I'd at least address them directly and write something original in their own comments section. Sheesh.

I enjoyed our "Contrarian Week" discussions so much (even made it its own category!) that I wanted to open it up even more and ask my fellow movie bloggers to discuss any and all aspects of contrarianism on their blogs (and send me a link!) for a "Contrarian Blog-a-Thon," the weekend of February 16-18, 2007 -- a full month from today. That's the weekend before the Oscars, so things should be pretty dull around then (and if you're not sick of Oscar speculation by then, you never will be). Please help me spread the word.

Most of us like to inveigh against the conventional wisdom from time to time. What do you think makes for a good contrarian argument -- or a bad one? Make your own contrarian argument for/against a movie or a specific moment in a movie or a filmmaker's work or a whole genre if you want to. Just make sure you build a real argument (with examples!) rather than a crackpotty ad hominem attack.

I'm excited to see what you come up with. Please feel free to drop me a line (address in nav bar above) to let me know if you're "in." Muchas gracias!

The lyrics to the theme for this year's Golden Globes telecast began (and I'm not making this up):

One night only, one night only
That's all I have to spare
One night only
Let's not pretend to care...

Um... OK.

This guy's pretty talented. He should go on "American Idol" or something. He could be as famous as Clay Aiken one day.

2006 was a big year for stories about the "death of movie criticism" -- which were really just bandwagon-jumping trend pieces about the increasing numbers of studio products that the studios themselves don't deem worthy of the expense of advance critics' screenings. How can this be tied to some mythical decline in the influence of film critics? Have critics ever had the power to sell a stinker to the public? Or to warn a substantial portion of moviegoers away from a bad movie with a monster ad budget, marquee names and/or genre appeal (horror, comedy, action)? Would "You, Me & Dupree" (which was pre-screened for critics) have done substantially better at the box office if it had gotten good reviews? Of course not. Word-of-mouth travels fast.

So, if American film criticism is wounded or dying, it's not because of any publicity department's policies. It's because of the crap some of the critics -- even some of the most reputable -- are writing.

If you want to watch film criticism writhe in agony from a mortal wound, if you want to see critical standards expire pitilessly before your very eyes, you need only read Jonathan Rosenbaum's four-star ("Masterpiece") review of Clint Eastwood's "Letters From Iwo Jima" last week:

One reason I wasn't sure what to think of "Letters" the first time I saw it was that I didn't know how it would be received in Japan. I wondered if it would seem accurate to most viewers there. I've since learned that the response has been very favorable and that it's been near the top of the box-office charts since it opened.

A Japanese film critic and friend, Shigehiko Hasumi, who was around eight years old when the Americans landed on Iwo Jima, admitted to me that even though he likes "Letters From Iwo Jima," he prefers "Flags of Our Fathers." I suspect he prefers it for the same reason I prefer "Letters From Iwo Jima" -- because it tells a less familiar story. (I'll concede that "Flags of Our Fathers" is stylistically more ambitious -- in its exploration of how images are made and turned into emblems -- but that doesn't necessarily make it more successful.) I told Hasumi I worried that "Letters From Iwo Jima" might define the humanity of the Japanese characters only in terms of American traits (a bias I see in spades in "Lost in Translation"), but he assured me the film is true to a "certain Japanese reality." He added that he found the portraits of the pro-American Japanese officers in the film a bit "romantic," comparing them to John Ford's depictions of Confederate officers in such films as "The Horse Soldiers."

Critics be warned: Don't form your opinions about a movie until you've checked the box-office charts and the critical and popular reaction from the region in which it is made or set! (I did a Google search for 腐ったトマト, but I couldn't find a Japanese rottentomatoes.com -- what am I to do?)

If Rosenbaum wanted to include the critical opinions of this "close friend" Shigehiko Hasumi, why didn't he ask him what those opinions were? We learn that Hasumi preferred "Flags of Our Fathers," but Rosenbaum can only "suspect" why. He says Hasumi "assured me that the film is true to a 'certain Japanese reality'" -- but what "certain Japanese reality" might that be? And is there only one?

I share Rosenbaum's concern about films that "might define the humanity of the Japanese characters only in terms of American traits" (but I don't see how it applies to the deliberately jet-lagged, discombobulated, "stranger in a strange land" sensibility of "Lost in Translation" -- which, heaven forbid, was not popular in Japan!) But I don't read Jonathan Rosenbaum to find out how a picture is being received in Japan, or anywhere else. I'd like to know how he sees the movie.

In other Contrarian News:

The Reeler (aka S.T. VanAirsdale) moderated a critics' panel on the best and worst films of 2006 Wednesday in New York. The critics: David Edelstein (New York Magazine), Owen Gleiberman (Entertainment Weekly) and Stephanie Zacharek (Salon.com). According to The Reeler's own account of the evening, Zacharek said, "...I think there is some sort of unspoken sort of pressure. Like, 'If I put something really weird on there, people are just going to think I'm cracked.' " Writes VanAirsdale:

I couldn't control myself. "Exactly!" I said. "So how long before we admit that Top 10s are completely intellectually bankrupt exercises?"

"I think what Stephanie has captured, though -- if what (she's) saying is true -- is that these lists have become very political," Gleiberman said. "But in a strange way; not in the way of people putting on these big commercial movies so they please their editors and to show that they're on the side of the people. But even in picking idiosyncratic films, it's films that all the critics kind of collude on deciding are good; therefore, maybe they can get away with putting those films on their list in terms of their editors. But the point is that they're not reflecting 100 percent themselves. And I don't get the idea of any critic who reflects anything other than himself. What's the point of going into this profession? It's not really that important anyway. I mean, it's all about your own reaction. I think if you take that out of it, you've lost the reason for doing it."

"That's why you should all treasure the crackpots," Edelstein told the crowd. "You know? Don't look for the people who are just going to rubber-stamp the Oscar-winning movies. Seek out minority points of view -- even insane points of view -- that maybe will help you do some fresh thinking, because it's amazing how easily we settle into this conventional wisdom. Even critics, in our splendid arrogance, I mean... I can't tell you how lazy my thinking is and how often, and how I need great critics to shake me up. Like, you know, the people on this panel."

OK, this exchange strikes me as peculiar (and a little disturbing) in several respects:

President Bush reminded me of the District Attorney in Chinatown (that is, in "Chinatown") the other night, as he stood in the White House "liberry," stiffly mumbling about his "new strategy" for Iraq, which amounts to: "As little as possible." Then Jon Stewart made me cry last night (with laughter and outrage -- and relief that somebody was telling the manifest truth) as he cut through all the lazy, endlessly recycled punditry about how Bush was "really putting it all on the line this time" (as he's been said to do every time he makes an empty gesture toward Iraq, or his Boratian "War of Terror"). Talk about creating a false sense of drama. Bush put nothing of himself on the line. He risked nothing. He did... as little as possible.

The only people Bush is putting on the line are the troops and the Iraqis. As Stewart pointed out, what is the addition of 21,000 more troops (returning the level to that of two years ago) supposed to accomplish that it didn't accomplish back then, when conditions were a whole lot better than they are now, and we still couldn't secure Baghdad? We have 130,000 troops in Iraq now, Stewart observed. Another 21,000 is a 15 percent increase. "That's not a surge, it's a gratuity. It's a tip," Stewart said. (Watch the whole segment here.) Perhaps Stewart's best metaphor for the President's actions: "He cooked up a giant, giant pot of shit, and looked at it last night and said, 'You know what that needs? ... A pinch of salt.'"

The real strategy? Do just enough to pretend you're trying, then blame the failure on the American people (for not supporting a losing strategy) and Congress (for not supporting a losing strategy) and the Iraqis (for being Iraqis). Amazing. Now here's a (bullshit) artist who shows nothing but contempt for his audience -- and his "characters" (i.e., the lives he's cynically and recklessly monkeying around with).

From the 2003 RAND Corporation study: "America's Role in Nation-Building: From Germany to Iraq," Chapter Nine, "Lessons Learned," page 153:

"The highest levels of casualties have occurred in the operations with
the lowest levels of U.S. troops, suggesting an inverse ratio between
force levels and the level of risk. Germany, Japan, Bosnia, and Kosovo
had no postconflict combat deaths. The postconflict occupations in
Germany and Japan proved relatively risk-free because both Japan
and Germany were thoroughly defeated and because their govern-
ments had agreed to unconditional surrender. The low numbers of
combat deaths also show that postconflict nation-building, when
undertaken with adequate numbers of troops, has triggered little vio-
lent resistance. Only when the number of stabilization troops has
been low in comparison to the population have U.S. forces suffered
or inflicted significant casualties."

If Bush had proposed to send in 200,000 more troops I still would have thought it was a bad idea (being about three or four years too late), but at least I might have thought he was (once) serious about trying to bring stability, freedom and democracy to Iraq. One again, he's done nothing more than reveal what a bad bluffer he is.

It's great to hear from Roger Ebert, who has this message at RogerEbert.com:

It's been some time since I checked in to let you know how I'm doing. I had hoped to be back in my seat in the balcony alongside my partner Richard Roeper, but the surgeons tell me they will have to take a staged, multi-phased approach to getting me back in shape. To borrow from the Chicago Bears, we tried for the long pass, but now we're going for a series of shorter passes until we score a touchdown.

Although I won't be able to conduct my red carpet interviews at the Academy Awards, I plan to conduct my "Outguess Ebert" contest in the Sun-Times, and I intend to work with WLS/ABC 7 to make my predictions for the Oscars. In fact, I am eagerly awaiting watching the Academy Awards like a regular spectator for the first time. And Richard and the guest hosts will carry on our tradition on "Ebert & Roeper" of telling who they think should win.

For the rest of Roger's letter, and an update on what he's been doing, click here.

From The Onion, October 23, 2006:

"I've been making pictures for 40 years," said the intense, fast-talking Scorsese in an excerpt from "The Entitled," during which the Rolling Stones' "Gimme Shelter" can be heard in the background. "For 40 years, I've been making pictures. And I've always been fascinated with the struggles a man must endure when people don't appreciate him. People say I'm the best. I didn't say it, they did. I just do my work. But for years they've been talking and you know it. You do. I deserve that award, is all I'm saying."

[...]

"For years I did the little pictures about the types of people I grew up with," said a passionately gesturing Scorsese in another "Entitled" scene. "Then I did the prestige-y, historical stuff like 'Last Temptation' and 'The Age Of Innocence' because I related to the characters, you know, outsiders in repressive environments making fateful choices. Then I started making the big sweeping epics, like 'Kundun' and 'The Aviator.' I've made comedies and documentaries, even concert films. Ever heard of 'The Last Waltz'? No? Okay. You should."

Continued Scorsese, "What happens? Nothing. Nothing for the versatile visionary who lives and breathes pictures."

Roger Ebert on "Perfume: The Story of a Murderer": "Why I love this story, I do not know. Why I have read the book twice and given away a dozen copies of the audiobook, I cannot explain. There is nothing fun about the story, except the way it ventures so fearlessly down one limited, terrifying, seductive dead end, and finds there a solution both sublime and horrifying. It took imagination to tell it, courage to film it, thought to act it, and from the audience it requires a brave curiosity about the peculiarity of obsession."

Jim Emerson on "Letters from Iwo Jima": "In both his films, Eastwood empathizes with the "expendable" soldier on the ground, the "poor bastard" who is only a pawn in a war conceived by generals and politicians, some of whom have never come anywhere near a battlefield or a combat zone. And Eastwood fully commits to a boots-on-the-ground POV: The raising of the American flag, presented as a routine, off-hand task to the soldiers in "Flags of Our Fathers" (and which would have remained that way if a photographer had not been present), is only glimpsed obliquely from afar by the Japanese in "Letters from Iwo Jima." Life or death, heroism or folly: It all comes down to which side you're on, and which piece of ground you're occupying, at any given moment in the battle."

If it hadn't been for the 1981 Village Voice Pazz & Jop Poll, I would never have discovered one of my all-time favorite albums: Human Switchboard's "Who's Landing in My Hangar?" It's the only studio LP by a Velvet Underground-influenced band from Ohio (Bob Pfeifer, Myrna Macarian and Ron Metz), released on Faulty Products/IRS Records and, well, it didn't get much advertising or marketing support. (You can still read Robert Christgau's Consumer Guide mini-review here. See if you can find it on LP. It never made it to CD.) It came in at #11 in the poll, and ranked #10 on The Dean's List, between Psychedelic Furs' "Talk Talk Talk" (yes, the one with "Pretty in Pink" on it) and Tom Verlaine's "Dreamtime" (another favorite of mine to this day).

Which is why I find it helpful to scour critics' polls (and individual lists): to alert me to titles I may have overlooked -- and, perhaps, may even come to treasure. (Just beware of those who prize obscurity -- or obtuseness -- for their own sake.) The First Annual LA Weekly Film Poll has a nifty interface, where you can click through by category, see which critics voted for what, or look at individual critics' lists. There's even a Worst Film category, the top four winners (winners?) being:

1) "Lady in the Water"
2) "Babel"
3) "World Trade Center"
4) "Miami Vice"

Everything else averaged two points or fewer. (I really dug watching "Miami Vice" myself. It was an exercise in style, not unlike "The Departed," but it had a spark that, actors aside, I felt Scorsese's picture lacked.)

Other crix polls:

IndieWire Critics Poll
Film Comment Poll

And, of course, the Biggest of Them All: The Master List of Top Ten Lists at Movie City News Awards Watch (now with more than 250 individual critics' lists. Editor David Poland's statistical analysis here.

And don't miss David Bordwell's Best Danish Films I Saw at the End of 2006 List. You may discover something you'll eventually love if you make the effort to see it!

Is there anybody who doesn't want Martin Scorsese to win an Oscar? Even if you don't think "The Departed" approaches his best work? For me, his best films are "Taxi Driver," "GoodFellas," "King of Comedy" and "New York, New York" (and I'm very fond of most of his others, including "After Hours," "The Last Waltz," "The Last Temptation of Christ" and "The Color of Money") -- and I've written at some length about all of them over the years explaining why I think so. If I had to get hierarchical, I'd probably rank "The Departed" somewhere below "Color of Money" and above "Boxcar Bertha" -- mainly because it strikes me as one of his most mechanical, least personal films. I just didn't get the feeling his heart was in it all that much.

But, so what? Unquestionably, Scorsese deserves recognition from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences -- and, as is often the case in Oscar history, he may get it for something that does not represent his finest work. Or even the best of the year. And that's OK. The Oscar doesn't really have anything to do with artistic merit, but Scorsese's a real moviemaker (he thinks in images), a longtime pro, and a movie lover to his core. The Academy should recognize him for everything he's done for movies, not just for "The Departed." (This would be one of those "career Oscars" -- like when Henry Fonda won for "On Golden Pond" -- or Al Pacino for "Scent of a Woman.")

Which brings me to the latest issue of cinema scope (a publication with a web site that's more attractively designed than the print version), in which Managing Editor Andrew Tracy makes an argument about "The Departed" and Scorsese that might be called, oh, I don't know, contrarian, perhaps? Here's the gist:

Do we really need Martin Scorsese? Heresy though it may appear, the question interrogates not so much the man’s work as its reception—and in light of his recent output, the latter is far more interesting than the former. As Scorsese’s ambitions continue to wane in the belatedly careerist, Oscar-seeking course upon which he has set himself, there is a manifest refusal to let him go the way of other filmmakers whose efforts no longer match their ability. Good filmmakers naturally inspire proprietary feelings, but Scorsese has become less a going concern than a public trust, his secular sainthood guaranteed even further by his laudable contributions to film preservation and restoration. At stake here, it seems, is not simply the fate of one director but of the cinema entire—or at least of American cinema, which in this particular discourse amounts to the same thing.

We heard a lot in 2006, as we do every year, about nasty filmmakers who were said to have viewed their characters (and, hence, their audiences) with contempt, or who "made fun of" them, or treated them with condescension, or who just don't seem to like them very much. Across time, such charges have been leveled at Stanley Kubrick, Robert Altman, Christopher Guest, the Coen Bros., Todd Solondz, Sacha Baron Cohen, and many other artists -- especially those whose work has tended toward the comic or caricaturish. And then there's all of film noir to consider, a whole kind of moviemaking that does not view the human animal with kindness or affection.

In answer to specific allegations of of alleged contempt (such as Jonathan Rosenbaum's characterization of Altman's attitude toward Lady Pearl in "Nashville"), I have tried to explain why I think such charges are false, or at least misguided. It seems to me, in these cases, that the contempt being expressed is more likely to be that of the critic for the director or film (or reader) than that of the director for the character or the audience (unless we're talking about a movie by, say, Alan Parker). But it's impossible (and futile) to argue with a blanket statement like: "The Coens mock everybody. They're laughing at the audience!" -- meaning, of course: "They're laughing at me!" (please read in the voice of Piper Laurie in "Carrie"). My response is: 1) that's a rather vague aspersion; 2) if you got the joke you wouldn't feel like you were being laughed at; and, 3) yeah, it's true. Many forms of comedy -- satire, parody, etc. -- contain an element of mockery. Even contempt.

So, I'm here to speak up for contempt! (How very contrarian of me!)

The rich, powerful and pretentious are obvious (and ripe) targets for humor and derision. Their problem is that they're just people, with flaws like everybody else, only magnified (and made more irritating and dangerous) by their position in society. They deserve to be knocked down a few notches. But you don't have to be rich, powerful or pretentious to be a hypocrite, or a boor, or a twit, or an oaf, or a cretin. You don't have to possess great wealth or celebrity or influence to be smug, stupid, petty, ignorant, pathetic, tasteless, crass, callous, crude, or just downright annoying -- and, thus, worthy of comic derision. Such people really exist! I've seen them with my own eyes! What's more, I've been them!

"Hey, look at those assholes over there. Ordinary f----in' people. I hate 'em."
-- Bud (Harry Dean Stanton), "Repo Man" (1984)

"Hell is other people."
-- Jean-Paul Sartre, "No Exit" (1944)

I sometimes wonder if those who worry about expressions of contempt for characters (particularly "ordinary people") in movies have ever had jobs in which they had to deal with the general public. Or have ever attended some kind of party or social function at which they have met some people they would rather not have met. Is this not part of the human experience? Don't most people have some pretty awful qualities? Why should an artist be expected concentrate on their benign or "sympathetic" traits -- or to come up with some kind of artificially "fair and balanced" view of them? Some people's most interesting characteristic is that they are idiots. Or worse. Did you like "Seinfeld"? Those characters were despicable in every way. Some people thought that was why they were funny.

Is misanthropy not the most universal and understandable of all sins? For all our achievements and evolutionary refinements, we are a pretty damnable species. And, as the only one capable of (and perhaps unwittingly committed to) destroying all life on our own planet, we are also the richest, most powerful and pretentious. Don't we deserve to have a laugh at ourselves -- or, at least, at those idiots right over there?

P.S. I am reminded of the words of Luther Ingram and Mack Rice, as sung by the incomparable Mavis Staples (and, yes, I'm going through one of my periodic obsessive Stax phases, so get used to it):

Keep talkin' 'bout the president won't stop air pollution
Put your hand over your mouth when you cough, that'll help the solution

Mavis means you. And she's singing in the context of a Christian family gospel/soul group. Good gosh a'mighty, now -- even the Staple Singers aren't afraid to make the average person the butt of an occasional, rather contemptuous, joke. Amen to that.

Latest Contrarian Week News:

In his New York Observer year-end wrap-up (and ten-best list), Andrew Sarris attempts to steal the thunder of one of his New York "alternative weekly" rivals.

Sarris writes:

Fortunately, modern technology makes it almost impossible for a good movie to get “lost” because of end-of-the-year mental exhaustion. So, with the proviso that I still have a great deal of catching up to do, here are my considered choices for the various 10-best categories, and one of my patented 10-worst lists under the provocative heading of “Movies Other People Liked and I Didn’t.” I am not at all deterred in dishing out my annual supply of negativity by the correspondent who informed me last year that he preferred all the films on my 10-worst list to all the films on my 10-best list. I have long ago become resigned to my fate as a reviled revisionist ever since my first column in The Village Voice in 1960 hailed Alfred Hitchcock as a major artist for "Psycho," and inspired more hate mail than any Voice column had received up to that time. That clinched my job at the ever-contrarian Voice, and I have simply gone on from there.

So, how contrarian is the "reviled revisionist" 46 years later? Let's see:

"The Departed" as best film of the year. (Only in New York!)

"Blood Diamond" as #5.

Best Supporting Actresses:
1) Jennifer Connelly, "Blood Diamond"
2) Gong Li, "Miami Vice"
3) Maggie Gyllenhaal, "World Trade Center"

And then there's this:

Other striking male performances were provided by: Leonardo DiCaprio, Matt Damon, Mark Wahlberg, Martin Sheen, Ray Winstone, Alec Baldwin and Anthony Anderson in The Departed; Edward Norton, Liev Schreiber and Toby Jones in The Painted Veil; Wim Willaert in When the Sea Rises; Leslie Phillips and Richard Griffiths in Venus; Clive Owen, Denzel Washington, Christopher Plummer, Willem Dafoe, and Chiwetel Ejiofor in Inside Man; Ken Watanabe, Kazunari Ninomiya, Tsuyoshi Ihara, Ryo Kase and Shido Nakamura in Letters from Iwo Jima; Greg Kinnear, Steve Carell, Alan Arkin and Paul Dano in Little Miss Sunshine; Edward Norton, Paul Giamatti and Rufus Sewell in The Illusionist; Patrick Wilson, Jackie Earle Haley, Noah Emmerich, Gregg Edelman and Ty Simpkins in Little Children; Keanu Reeves, Christopher Plummer and Dylan Walsh in The Lake House; Nicolas Cage, Michael Pena and Stephen Dorff in World Trade Center; Tim Blake Nelson, Pat Corley, Jeffrey Donovan, Stacy Keach and Scott Wilson in Come Early Morning; Ryan Gosling and Anthony Mackie in Half Nelson; Jason Schwartzman, Rip Torn, and Danny Huston in Marie Antoinette; Matt Damon, Michael Gambon, Alec Baldwin, William Hurt, Billy Crudup, Robert De Niro, Keir Dullea, Timothy Hutton, Eddie Redmayne, Mark Ivanir and Joe Pesci in The Good Shepherd; Hugh Jackman, Patrick Stewart, Ian McKellen, Kelsey Grammer, James Marsden, Shawn Ashmore, Aaron Stanford, Vinnie Jones and Ben Foster in X-Men: The Last Stand; Mads Mikkelsen, Jeffrey Wright, Giancarlo Giannini, Simon Abkarian, Sebastien Foucan, Jesper Christensen and Tobias Menzies in Casino Royale; Ebru Ceylan and Mehmet Eryilmaz in Climates; Adrien Brody, Ben Affleck and Bob Hoskins in Hollywoodland; Jamie Foxx, Danny Glover, Keith Robinson and Hinton Battle in Dreamgirls; Brian O’Halloran, Jeff Anderson, Jason Mewes, Trevor Fehrman, Kevin Smith and Jason Lee in Clerks II; Justin Kirk and Jamie Harrold in Flannel Pajamas; Stanley Tucci, Simon Baker and Adrian Grenier in The Devil Wears Prada; Will Ferrell, Dustin Hoffman and Tom Hulce in Stranger Than Fiction; Samuel L. Jackson, Curtis Jackson, Chad Michael Murray, Sam Jones III and Brian Presley in Home of the Brave; Harris Yulin, Ty Burrell and Boris McGiver in Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus; Max Minghella, John Malkovich, Jim Broadbent, Matt Keeslar, Ethan Suplee, Joel David Moore and Nick Swardson in Art School Confidential; Joseph Cross, Brian Cox, Joseph Fiennes and Alec Baldwin in Running with Scissors; Jamie Foxx, Colin Farrell, Ciarán Hinds, Justin Theroux, Barry Shabaka Henley, Luis Tosar and John Ortiz in Miami Vice; Michael Sheen, James Cromwell, Alex Jennings, Roger Allam and Tim McMullan in The Queen; Samuel L. Jackson, Ron Eldard, William Forsythe, Anthony Mackie, Marlon Sherman and Clarke Peters in Freedomland; Vin Diesel, Peter Dinklage, Linus Roache, Alex Rocco, Ron Silver and Raul Esparza in Find Me Guilty; Josh Hartnett, Bruce Willis, Stanley Tucci, Morgan Freeman and Ben Kingsley in Lucky Number Slevin; Hugh Grant, Dennis Quaid, Chris Klein, Shohreh Aghdashloo, John Cho, Tony Yalda, Sam Golzari and Willem Dafoe in American Dreamz; Keanu Reeves, Robert Downey Jr., Woody Harrelson and Rory Cochrane in A Scanner Darkly; Adam Beach, Ryan A. Phillippe, Jesse Bradford, John Benjamin Hickey, Jon Slattery, Barry Pepper, Jamie Bell, Paul Walker and Robert Patrick in Flags of Our Fathers; Chow Yun-Fat in Curse of the Golden Flower; Sergi López, Doug Jones, Álex Angulo and Federico Luppi in Pan’s Labyrinth; Bill Nighy in Notes on a Scandal.

Take that, A----- W----!

Hey, does this sound at all familiar?

"[This character] was life and hope, as she is the only one carrying a child. This is a society without procreation, so that's why they make such a fuss about finding a girl being pregnant. I got that whole idea by reading about elks in Lapland: suddenly these herds would stop reproducing, and no one could figure out why."

A description of the premise of a certain dystopian thriller now in US theaters? Nope. It's Robert Altman describing his 1979 picture "Quintet," quoted in "Altman on Altman," edited by David Thompson (2005).

I don't think much of Mel Gibson's ultra-literalist directorial sensibility (my main problem with "Passion of the Christ" is that it failed to engage on any symbolic, religious or mythological level), but this piece in the New York Times last week, by archaeologist Craig Childs, piqued my interest in seeing "Apocalypto." Childs sees it as a truer reflection of the historically violent -- and symbolically violent -- nature of Native American tribal life than the popular stereotype of American Indians as passive, stoic, peace-loving peoples. (And that stereotype developed, in part, as a corrective response to the savage portrayals of "Injuns" in so many American movie westerns).

Writes Childs (author of the forthcoming book, “House of Rain: Tracking a Vanished Civilization Across the American Southwest”):

Being told by screenwriters and archaeologists that their ancestors engaged in death cults tends to make many Native Americans uneasy. In Arizona, Hopi elders turn their eyes to the ground when they hear about their own past stained with overt brutality. The name Hopi means people of peace, which is what they strive to be. Meanwhile, excavators keep digging up evidence of cannibalism and ritualized violence among their ancestors.

How do we rectify the age-old perception of noble and peaceful native America with the reality that at times violence was coordinated on a scale never before witnessed by humanity? The answer is simple. We don’t.

Prior to 1492 it was a complex cultural landscape with civilization ebbing and flowing, the spaces in between traversed by ancient lineages of hunters and gatherers. To the religious core of pre-Columbian Mayans, a beating heart ripped from someone’s chest was a thing of supreme sacredness and not prosaic violence.

If “Apocalypto” has a fault, it is not with its brutality, but with us in the audience who cringe, thinking the Mayans little more than a barbaric people. The fault lies in our misunderstanding of a complicated history, thinking we can lump a whole civilization into a single response and walk out of the movie saying, “That was disgusting.”

The Googie landmark Johnie's Broiler in Downey, CA (known as Harvey's Broiler when it opened in 1958), was ground into dust overnight last weekend, to expand a used car lot. Local preservationists were not pleased, and said the demolition was "illegal." As of today, the Johnie's sign is still standing, but the building has been destroyed.

Moviegoers may remember it as Lily Tomlin's place of work in Robert Altman's "Short Cuts." It was also featured in "Reality Bites," "What's Love Got To Do With It" and "Unstrung Heroes."

More reports on the demise of Johnie's at The LA Times and Roadside Peek, which is where I found the picture used here.

Anybody know of other movies in which Johnie's played a role?

"I enjoy the occasional flaying of a sacred cow."
-- anonymous movie critic

Can your monkey do the dog
Can your monkey do the dog
Well, my dog can monkey
just like you
But can your monkey do the do the do the
dog like I do?
-- Rufus Thomas

The first thing you'll notice about an auto-contrarian (or reactionary) piece, whether it's an op-ed column or a movie review, is that it doesn't so much try to build a point-by-point rebuttal or counter-argument. Instead, it prefers to disparage something or someone by association, by making ad hominem attacks on (real or imagined) supporters of whatever it scorns.

So, for instance, when Stephen Metcalf writes a "What's All This, Then?" piece tearing down "The Searchers," he first attributes the film's reputation not to any merits it may or may not possess as a film, but simply to his generalizations about people who like it. Then he derides them as "film geeks," "nerd cultists," "critics whose careers emerged out of the rise of film studies as a discrete and self-respecting academic discipline," and filmmakers such as Martin Scorsese, Paul Schrader, Francis Ford Coppola, John Milius and George Lucas, whom he labels "well-credentialed nerds." So, you get the idea. Rather than make observations about the movie itself, you insult those who admire the movie and use that to smear the movie. It's a schoolyard tactic: If you like "The Searchers," you're a nerd! Notice how the discussion is no longer about the movie, but about who Metcalf thinks is a nerd. (And never mind that "The Searchers" is a "termite" movie : Critically overlooked/dismissed as just another western when it was released, it's a movie that grew in stature over time, as more critics and moviegoers got to see and evaluate it.)

If Metcalf had written a piece that dissected "The Searchers" from a new angle, that demonstrated what the film does (or fails to do) and why he felt that was or was not a worthy achievement, then I might have enjoyed his flailing of a sacred cow, too -- even if it didn't persuade me to change my own view of the cow. Moo. I find this sort of thing happens rather often, where I'll read a critic's take on a movie and think: "Wow, I'd probably feel the same way if I saw that movie, but that's just not the movie I experienced."

There's a brand new dance
That's easy to do
It's called the Contrarian
And it's all about you!

Strike a hipster pose
And admire your reflection
Just be sure you're facing
In an opposite direction!

(apologies to Rufus Thomas)

Is Armond White too easy a target? Does any other movie critic have a blog devoted to "parsing the confounding film criticism" he produces? (See the hilariously titled Armond Dangerous.)

At the risk of sounding contrarian, I want to suggest that White (published on the web via the weekly New York Press) is by no means the worst movie reviewer in the United States. He just pretends to be the baddest.

The all-too-common White review is a reactionary tirade that owes a lot to the angry shtick of aging hipster comedians like Dennis Leary and Dennis Miller back in the 1990s ("hipster" being White's favorite term of disapprobation). White can also be funny, but I wish he thought so, too -- and that his humor arose from his observations about movies rather than his hysterical indignation.

In this sense, White doesn't necessarily practice film criticism, although what he writes is almost always based on his real or imagined characterization of what other critics have already written. The movie itself sometimes gets lost in White's internal monologue as he rages against some chimerical critical consensus.

In the Bizarro World, Armond White is Jeffrey Lyons. He's the negative campaigner's blurbmeister. Just substitute disses for superlatives and you'll find a similar (anti-)promotional blurb mentality at work. This is the most elementary form of so-called "criticism" -- purely heirarchical rather than analytical or exploratory. It's not even "This is why I prefer this to that"; it's just "This is better than that because I choose to say so."

I'm back from break but hopelessly preoccupied because my eldest dog Frances had a couple lumps on her back foot and I had to take her in early this morning for a surgery/biopsy. This talk of "spindle cells" worries me tremendously, but Frances herself has shown no signs of feeling ill. Because I'm a terrible fretter, this has left a big cloud over the end of my year, and made me even more reluctant than usual to keep in touch with the people I care about. Because, basically, I get paralyzed with worry and just want to get into the fetal position until the uncertainty and apprehension is over. I know it's idiotic. I went through the same thing worrying about Roger Ebert's recovery last summer, and am so happy that he's come through and working his way back (even doing occasional reviews when he can).

Plunging ahead into 2007...

Best News of the Year So Far: I was thrilled to see the byline of Matt Zoller Seitz in the New York Times this morning as I was blearily trying to wake up before taking Frances to the vet. (It's DARK at 6 a.m. in January in Seattle. Who knew?) Matt is the founder and editor of one of my favorite movie/TV blogs, The House Next Door. I do not miss the Links for the Day. And Matt himself is a terrific writer. His review of "Children of Men" is the best thing I've read about that film, conveying the excitement of watching it as well as the disappointment that it had nowhere to go. (Some thought the ending was brave and open-ended. To me it felt like a mushy sentimental cop-out -- although there was that flashing red buoy light, perhaps [I hope] to remind us, as in the ending of Nicholas Ray's "Bigger Than Life," that this superficial resolution isn't necessarily what it seems to be. I know, I know: How can this ending be considered overly tidy, pat or a form of commercial condescension when so much of the fate of Humankind itself is left at sea? Well, the movie is about particular characters, not the apocalyptic sci-fi world they live in; it's a matter of foreground vs. background...)