View image On the state of film criticism, yesterday... and today.
An open letter to the Seattle Weekly from Michael Seiwerath of the Northwest Film Forum (posted at GreenCine Daily) should remind us, on the one hand, what's lost when local film critics are replaced by syndicated content, and, on the other, why we are so fortunate not to have to rely exclusively on pulp-and-ink-based movie criticism.
The Seattle Weekly ran a review of the acclaimed documentary "Our Daily Bread" that was credited to J. Hoberman, longtime critic at the Village Voice, another "alternative weekly" in the Voice/New Times chain. But anybody who's ever worked at a newspaper knows what happens to "wire copy" -- it's sliced and diced to fit whatever hole you have to fill. Hoberman's original review combined his takes on Richard Linklater's similarly themed "Fast Food Nation" with "Our Daily Bread," but only part of the latter segment ran in Seattle. The result? Seiwerath describes it as a "botched cut-and-paste truncation":
What ran in the February 21 edition of the Weekly is a recombinant jumble, devoid of time or place. Hacked from the end of the original review, the Weekly piece contains unexplained, unintelligible references to "[Fast Food] Nation." The reader is left confused, with a mess of an article that is only made clear by some internet research into what happened four months ago and 3000 miles away. More than simply an editorial production error, this virtual review is the systemic result of a flawed new business model.
The planned efficiencies of media consolidation by the New Times are failing. Without a film editor and consistent criticism written by local writers, the reviews often contain factual errors and obvious references to openings in other cities. This is a system that is no longer serving either the reader or the advertising base. Borrowing from J Hoberman's description of a fast food hamburger, the individual review has become "the ground residue of many, many messily butchered animals."
Like many chain publications, the Village Voice-owned Seattle Weekly (where Richard T. Jameson wrote in the '70s and '80s) has been running reviews from critics at its fellow papers, such as Hoberman at the Voice and Scott Foundas and Ella Taylor (another Seattle Weekly veteran) at the LA Weekly, ever since even the Voice itself cut back its roster of critics. (Hoberman's the only one left, after Michael Atkinson and Dennis Lim were let go in October.)
The pattern is not unfamiliar: In the late '80s and early '90s, I was the film critic for The Orange County Register, one of the country's 25 top-circulation newspapers and the third largest paper in California (after the LA Times and the San Francisco Chronicle). But, even given its valuable proximity and access to the heart of the movie industry (I lived and worked in Hollywood), a few years ago it chose to drop my successor, Henry Sheehan, in favor of running reviews from another Freedom Newspapers critic -- at the East Valley Tribune in Mesa, AZ. (See story about "content sharing" here.) Hey, they figured, why pay two critics to review the same movies?
At this rate, the idea of "professional-grade" criticism at so-called "alternative weeklies" (which has always been a hit-or-miss proposition, anyway) is pretty much a joke. What is "alternative" about these weeklies if they're running the same syndicated copy their sister papers print in other towns? The diversity, the ambition, the experimentation -- and a whole lot of the crap -- that used to be published by these small local papers is now available on the web, along with reviews by amateurs and professionals at thousands of papers, magazines, blogs and online publications around the world. And in a surprising number of cases, the unpaid bloggers, the ones who are driven by their passion for film and a hunger for knowledge, are doing more solid, penetrating work than the soon-to-retire former sportswriters who are simply cashing paychecks on the movie beat. Just look around (you can start with the blog and zine recommendations in the right column). Newspapers may not be extinct any time soon, but I fear newspaper film critics may be on the endangered species list already.
Martin Scorsese has an Oscar in his hand. It's his Oscar.
For the first time in 30+ years, Roger Ebert watched the Oscars from home instead of from backstage. He writes about the experience here.
Meanwhile, I spent my Oscar night writing a deadline piece for the Chicago Sun-Times, which had to be filed about 45 minutes before the show was over. Here's the (unedited) final version for the web:
The cops-and-mobsters thriller "The Departed," which director Martin Scorsese described as the first movie he's ever done with a plot, took the jackpot prize at the Academy Awards last night. For Scorsese, this was supposed to be a genre picture, not Oscar-bait like "The Aviator" and "Gangs of New York," but it turns out that, even at the Oscars, sometimes you can come out ahead when you don't look like you're trying so hard.
Even though there were several "surprises" during the ceremonies, it still felt kind of like the Acada-"meh" Awards. Since none of the Best Picture nominees inspired much passion (don't expect a "Crash"-lash" this year), and none stood out as a Timeless Achievement in Cinema, one winner was pretty much as good as another. And so, the Academy decided to spread the statuettes around.
Of course, the evening's big disappointment was that Martin Scorsese did not join his fellow great directors -- Howard Hawks, Alfred Hitchcock, Orson Welles, Stanley Kubrick, Ernst Lubitsch, Fritz Lang -- who never won an Oscar in competition. Instead, he joins Norman Taurog, John G. Avildson and Sam Mendes as one of the immortals whose name will always, from this moment on, be preceded by the term "Academy Award-winning" as if it were a prefix. (I kid.)
Now, future generations can look back at Oscar history and say... "What!?!? The director of "Taxi Driver," "Raging Bull," "King of Comedy" and "GoodFellas" won an Oscar for "The Departed"?!? Wasn't that the inferior American remake of "Infernal Affairs"?" Well, look at it this way: John Ford, famous for great American Westerns like "Stagecoach," "My Darling Clementine," "She Wore a Yellow Ribbon," "The Searchers" and "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance," won four Oscars for direction, and not one of them was for a Western.
Some other awards were handed out, too. Helen Mirren, as expected, saluted the Queen (the movie and Elizabeth II) with her award for Best Actress. Al Gore's movie got more Oscars than Best Picture contenders "Babel" or "The Queen" or "Letters From Iwo Jima" and tied with "Little Miss Sunshine."
Forest Whitaker gave the most riveting and memorable speech, winning Best Actor for playing Idi Amin in "The Last King of Scotland." He broke all the rules -- getting so choked up at first that it seemed he might not be able to continue, and then reading his speech off a piece of paper. But the man is a magnetic performer, on screen and off, and once he got going he inspired the crowd with his moving and eloquent words about growing up watching movies at a drive-in from the back seat of a car in Texas.
In a show with too much going on and that was slow to get going, the approach this year seemed to be to create artificial "suspense" by putting off announcing the high-profile awards that traditionally come early in the evening. Perhaps because the winners in the Best Supporting Actor and Best Supporting Actress categories were widely presumed to be "sure things," the sense of anticipation came from wondering when they would get around to handing out an award for someone in front of the camera. At the 45-minute mark, the most glamorous category of the evening had been art direction.
"If there weren't blacks, Jews and gays there would be no Oscars," observed host Ellen Degeneres in her opening monologue. "Or anyone named Oscar, when you think about that." She left out Mexicans. Without "Pan's Labyrinth," "Children of Men" and "Babel," what would Oscar have done? "Pan's Labyrinth" earned the second-highest Oscar tally of the night (3), after "The Departed" (4).
An hour in, it looked like it could have been a sweep for "Pan's Labyrinth" (two awards, for art direction and make-up, with cinematography to come), with "Little Miss Sunshine" (supporting actor Alan Arkin -- at last!) leading the Best Picture race. And then -- bam! -- they're giving out the adapted screenplay award? Wait, did I just fall asleep for two hours? The winner was no surprise: William Monahan for "The Departed," the only Best Picture nominee in the category. One of the screenplay winners is virtually always the Best Picture winner... but the original screenplay award wouldn't be handed out for a little while yet.
When it was, "Babel" was definitively out of the picture, and it would all come down to the cops and crooks from Beantown or the yellow VW bus -- especially when Thelma Schoonmaker took the editing award, which prognosticators have said is the best indicator of the Best Picture winner.
Sometimes the clips are the best part of the show, and this was one of those times. Michael Mann's salute to America through the movies was a highlight -- as was the "In Memorium" tribute, as always. And the montage of Foreign Language Film winners was a knockout, the kind of thing reminds you of why you love movies in the first place. The Ennio Morricone medley was also lovely, although his greatest score (from the greatest movie he ever scored, Sergio Leone's "Once Upon a Time in the West) was missing. (At least a clip from it was used in the sound effects number.)
Then there was Celine Dion. The Oscars usually fail most spectacularly when they stray away from the movies themselves, and taking a great piece of music (from Leone's "Once Upon a Time in America") and putting some lyrics into the mouth of Celine Dion was just a bad idea. It was the low point of the night.
Oh, and so much more. Here's the ideal warm-up for Sunday's Academy Awards festivities: the infamous Allan Carr-produced 1989 Oscar opening number that also features Army Archerd, Merv Griffin, Roy Rogers and Dale Evans, Vincent Price and Coral Browne, Cyd Charisse and Tony Martin, Dorothy Lamour, Alice Faye, Lily Tomlin, and more stars than there are east of Hobart! (Just look at the celebs in the audience trying to conceal their mortification as Snow White touches and bleats to them.) I was just pining for this the other day, and once again YouTube has delivered! This, truly, is the vision of the man behind "Grease," "Grease 2," "Can't Stop the Music" and "Where the Boys are '84" -- all of which he made before the Academy hired him to produce the Oscarcast. No matter what happens Sunday, you can bet it won't top this, although somehow this mega-production-number almost seems quaint and naive by today's standards. Almost.
I had forgotten the new "Proud Mary" lyrics they wrote for Rob to sing to Snow (whose voice is more Billie Burke than Adriana Caselotti, if you ask me):
Now you made it big in the movies
Came to Hollywood, learned to play the game
You became a star
Miss Animated Mama
Earned yourself a place in the Walk of Fame
Klieg lights keep on burnin'
Cameras keep on turnin'
Rollin', rollin'
Keep the cameras rollin'!
They just don't write 'em like that anymore...
What I wouldn't give for Ellen Degeneres to begin the show as Snow White and bring on Rob Lowe for a reprise...
Academy Award-winning Cher in her "serious actress" Oscar ensemble.
Almost every year for the last 20 or so I've had to think seriously about that question. I mean, what is there to write about the Oscars that hasn't already been done? I had a great time with my recent piece for MSN Movies ("Your Oscar speech: How not to blow it"), but I was fully aware I wasn't the first (or even, probably, the 1,000th) to write something similar in approach.
So, let's recap the angles: We can look at it as a horserace [check] and place bets on the odds [check]; as an election or popularity contest [check]; as a poker game [check -- I did that for MSN one year, with each nominee holding a "hand" based on previous awards-season honors]; as the "Gay Super Bowl" [check]; as a fashion show [check]; as Hollywood's version of "American Idol" [check]...
Some people would probably like watching the Academy Awards broadcast better if all the nominees gave speeches and the winner was decided by who gave the best one. (Maybe Academy members could call 900 numbers to vote for their favorites or there could be an Academy-approved panel of judges: say, Halle Berry, Cuba Gooding, Jr., and Roger Moore.) I find the speeches to be generally excruciating. (But, then, I thought the best Oscars ever was the Allan "Can't Stop the Music" Carr-produced one with Rob Lowe and Snow White because it was so astoundingly grotesque that I laughed so hard I cried. The Academy has tried to deep-six all evidence of that one, and Disney even threatened to sue over the use of Snow White. C'mon, YouTube!)
Here's another idea: A former resident of Mexico wrote to me with the following proposal:
In Older Mexican Award Shows, the recipient of the award was not allowed to speak. Each nominee was presented along with a few seconds of their song (or movie clip) and then the winner was named. The winner would walk on stage, accept the award, wave or blow kisses at the audience and then walk off stage. It was fantastic.
The newer Mexican award shows are becoming more “Americanized” now unfortunately. Most now allow the winners to speak which just makes me long for the good old days. So I say Don’t Let Them Speak. We don’t care who you have to thank, who allowed this moment to happen, how much you love God, or how inspiring your parents were. All we care about is that you won…. And what you’re wearing. But that’s it!
I kinda like that. They could stretch out the Red Carpet Walk of Shame if they want, or even require that the major nominees do interviews afterwards, with Rosie O'Donnell or Dr. Phil or Chris Matthews. Sort of like the publicity clauses in actors' contracts that stipulate they must do a certain amount of promotion in exchange for their salary on a given film: If you want an award, you're going to have to submit to a sit-down with Brit Hume or someone similarly slimy and daft (and, preferably, as humorless).
And if they need to make the show itself longer (to sell commercial time), they could make "In Memoriam" last ten minutes or so (more clips!) and do even bigger, more vapid and elaborate musical numbers -- not for the best songs, but for ALL the top nominees!
The Oscars are about the show. It's entertainment, loosely defined. Nominees, it is not about you. It's about we, the millions (not billions) who watch the satellite-cast on TV and have parties with our friends and laugh and cry and sigh and gasp and ridicule. (If we don't have to work.) That's the only approach that matters.
"The hot-pants Queen Victoria of American film criticism, Pauline Kael has now paid the debt of nature, providing the obituarians with the opportunity to finally top off their 35-year outpouring of ardor and awe. Never before has a film critic's living reputation sent so many scrambling for encomiums, and never has a film critic's passing left so many media mouths so verklempt. Don't expect it to ever happen again: Kael reigned supreme as film culture's fiery, maenadic Mrs. Grundy—what will she say?—during that culture's most fecund and dynamic day, which has long gone the way of film clubs, the Monthly Film Bulletin, Luis Buñuel, and the Bleecker Street Cinema."
Michael Atkinson is certainly entitled to hate Pauline Kael's work. But what in the world did the late film critic, who died on September 3 at the age of 82, do to deserve such a gleefully hateful ''obituary'' ''As the Lights Go Down,'' September 18? The late New York Times film critic Vincent Canby wasn't subjected to this sort of slander in his Voice eulogy. Then again, Canby was a man--and it's the fact that Kael was a woman that evidently sticks in Atkinson's craw. How else to explain his descriptions of her as a ''maenadic Mrs. Grundy,'' a ''high priestess,'' ''the wolverine bitch,'' a ''hot-pants Queen Victoria,'' and ''a miniature tigress with gray hair and barbed tongue.'' Or Atkinson's ridiculous contention that Kael's ''relentless eminence'' was, in part, a result of her gender. Does he honestly think that Kael became celebrated because she was a woman? Does anyone?
Manohla Dargis
Los Angeles, California
Michael Atkinson replies: I don't ''gleefully hate'' Kael or her writing, but the national brown-nosing performed upon her at the perpetual expense of much wiser critics has been absurd. Canby never garnered such overripe praise, and saying so doesn't imply he deserved to. As for Kael's sex, guess what: The American media got off on her doughty-dame public profile, as her unprecedented (for a film critic) eulogization demonstrated. Pick a knee-jerk gender fight if you want, but her writing still isn't all it's been cracked up to be.
Lots to consider -- and I say that as a kid who originally got into film criticism (and "deeper into movies," as her National Book Award-winning anthology put it) in no small part because of Kael. Some excerpts from Adler (who for a time alternated with Kael as the New Yorker's film critic in the late 1960s) -- followed by samples from letters the piece generated:
Movies seem to invite particularly broad critical discussion: to begin with, alone among the arts, they count as their audience, their art consumer, everyone. (Television, in this respect, is clearly not an art but an appliance, through which reviewable material is sometimes played.) The staff movie critic's job thus tends to have less in common with the art, or book, or theater critic's, whose audiences are relatively specialized and discrete, than with the work of the political columnist—writing, that is, of daily events in the public domain, in which almost everyone's interest is to some degree engaged, and about which everyone seems inclined to have a view. Film reviewing has always had an ingredient of reportage. Since the Forties, The New York Times has reviewed almost every movie that opened in New York[1] —as it would not consider reviewing every book, exhibit, or other cultural event, or even every account filed from the UN or City Hall. For a long time it seemed conceivable that movies could sustain, if not a great critic, at least a distinguished commentator-critic, on the order, say, of Robert Warshow, with the frequency of Walter Lippmann. In the late Fifties and early Sixties, it seemed likely that such a critic might be Pauline Kael. [...]
Now, "When the Lights Go Down," a collection of her reviews over the past five years, is out; and it is, to my surprise and without Kael- or Simon-like exaggeration, not simply, jarringly, piece by piece, line by line, and without interruption, worthless. It turns out to embody something appalling and widespread in the culture. Over the years, that is, Ms. Kael's quirks, mannerisms, tactics, and excesses have not only taken over her work so thoroughly that hardly anything else, nothing certainly of intelligence or sensibility, remains; they have also proved contagious, so that the content and level of critical discussion, of movies but also of other forms, have been altered astonishingly for the worse. To the spectacle of the staff critic as celebrity in frenzy, about to "do" something "to" a text, Ms. Kael has added an entirely new style of ad hominem brutality and intimidation; the substance of her work has become little more than an attempt, with an odd variant of flak advertising copy, to coerce, actually to force numb acquiescence, in the laying down of a remarkably trivial and authoritarian party line.
She has, in principle, four things she likes: frissons of horror; physical violence depicted in explicit detail; sex scenes, so long as they have an ingredient of cruelty and involve partners who know each other either casually or under perverse circumstances; and fantasies of invasion by, or subjugation of or by, apes, pods, teens, bodysnatchers, and extraterrestrials. Whether or not one shares these predilections—and whether they are in fact more than four, or only one—they do not really lend themselves to critical discussion. It turns out, however, that Ms. Kael does think of them as critical positions, and regards it as an act of courage, of moral courage, to subscribe to them. The reason one cannot simply dismiss them as de gustibus, or even as harmless aberration, is that they have become inseparable from the repertory of devices of which Ms. Kael's writing now, almost wall to wall, consists. [...]
She has an underlying vocabulary of about nine favorite words, which occur several hundred times, and often several times per page, in this book of nearly six hundred pages: "whore" (and its derivatives "whorey," "whorish," "whoriness"), applied in many contexts, but almost never to actual prostitution; "myth," "emblem" (also "mythic," "emblematic"), used with apparent intellectual intent, but without ascertainable meaning; "pop," "comicstrip," "trash" ("trashy"), "pulp" ("pulpy"), all used judgmentally (usually approvingly) but otherwise apparently interchangeable with "mythic"; "urban poetic," meaning marginally more violent than "pulpy"; "soft" (pejorative); "tension," meaning, apparently, any desirable state; "rhythm," used often as a verb, but meaning harmony or speed; "visceral"; and "level." These words may be used in any variant, or in alternation, or strung together in sequence—"visceral poetry of pulp," e.g., or "mythic comic-strip level"—until they become a kind of incantation. She also likes words ending in "ized" ("vegetabilized," "robotized," "aestheticized," "utilized," "mythicized"), and a kind of slang ("twerpy," "dopey," "dumb," "grungy," "horny," "stinky," "drip," "stupes," "crud") which amounts, in prose, to an affectation of straightforwardness. [...]
The writing falls somewhere between huckster copy (paeans to the favored product, diatribes against all other brands and their venal or deluded purchasers) and ideological pamphleteering: denouncings, exhortations, code words, excommunications, programs, threats. Apart from the taste for violence, however, which she takes to be a hard, intellectual position, there is no underlying text or theory. Only the review, virtually divorced from movies, as its own end... [...]
Three last quotations, as another kind of symptom:
It's quite possible that [he]…wasn't fully conscious that in several sequences he was coming mortifyingly close to plagiarism.
It's as crude as if [he] had said, "Things were really bad in Berlin in '23," and, asked "How bad?," he had replied, "They were so bad even a black man couldn't get it up."
(Paul Schrader may like the idea of prostituting himself more than he likes making movies.)…. For Schrader to call himself a whore would be vanity: he doesn't know how to turn a trick.
Now, it doesn't matter whom these quotations are "about"—although the middle one concerns Ingmar Bergman. They are not "about" anything. Each marks a kind of breakthrough in vulgarity and unfairness. Look at the "It's quite possible" in the first, and the "mortifyingly." Look at the "as if" in the second, and the "even." Consider the parenthesis in the third, and the "would be." All three involve a perfectly groundless imputation to another (plagiarism, racism, corruption) and a pious personal recoil (mortifyingly, crude, vain). The strategy is characteristic of Ms. Kael's work. I can hardly imagine a reader who would sit through another line.
Cumulatively and in book form, these reviews have an effect different from anything that was even intimated on a weekly or desultory basis. It occurred to me when I had read a few hundred pages that the book assumes an audience composed partly of people who know nothing about the movies, and partly of people who read only film reviews....
- - - -
From letters to the New York Review of Books in response to Adler's piece:
Erhard K. Dortmund (Monmouth, OR): I want to assure one and all of the obvious: I'm a grown-up and Pauline Kael's reviews don't bully me. She's often wrong in what she says and how she says it—and I've told her so, with glee. I read her precisely because her columns are both reviews and confessionals....
Matthew Wilder, age 13 (Des Planes, IL): How dare she lash out at Kael for using masturbatory slang and "we" or "you" for "I"? Can't the little viper see the beauty, poetry, hilarity, and straight-forwardness in Kael's critiques? Oops. I'm using "Kaeline" rhetorical questions! What a crime! You'd think I or she killed Kennedy or something!
Oh—while R.A.'s at contradictions,…she berates Kael for demanding punishment and crying guilt of her unfavored movie folk when she herself acts as if Kael knifed Gary Coleman—oops! I used a "violent" and "sadistic" metaphor! Okay, heat up the electric chair! So "line for line, 'When the Lights Go Down' is worthless," eh? What about the titles of her critiques of "Seven Beauties" and "Carrie"? I cracked up just reading them. And how about her punchy opening and closing lines, especially her closing line of her critique of Satyajit Ray's "Distant Thunder"?...
Jennifer Dunning (NY, NY): After reeling through pages of phrases ripped—with commendable assiduity—from the context and rhythms of the reviews under discussion, one arrives at summary statements that rival Kael's reported excesses for spite, their tone of disappointed generosity notwithstanding....
Arthur J. Cox (Hollywood, CA): [...] One needn't lay claim to any preternatural shrewdness to see that what lies behind Ms. Adler's (can it really be?) 8,000 words is Kael's disturbing essay, "Fear of Movies," and perhaps also her recent criticisms made in speeches on the West Coast, and I suppose elsewhere, of the crippling gentility of some of the staff of The New Yorker and, by implication, much of its audience. It was in the cards that someone somehow connected with the magazine should reply…and what better choice for that Someone than Renata Adler? I like The New Yorker—I have been reading it even longer than I have the NYR—and I am made uneasy by some of Kael's criticisms; but, nevertheless, the tone and temper of Ms. Adler's Reply—the forced, the fudged, quality of some of her criticisms, as demonstrated above [Cox cites an example of Adler's distortion]; her preoccupation with what she sees as the excessive violence of diction and opinion in Kael, and which she exaggerates both by direct statement and by too-selective quotation; and her nervous shrinking from the very pages of the book she is reviewing […] would seems to confirm the accuracy of Kael's diagnosis.
And, finally (as if in reply to Gary Indiana's Artforum piece), there's this by Kael's friend Craig Seligman, author of "Sontag & Kael":
I didn't want to write a book with a hero and a villain, but Sontag kept making it hard for me. She is not a likable writer-but then she doesn't intend to be. She's elitist and condescending toward those less informed than she is (i.e., everybody) and gratingly unapologetic about it. Intimidation, which I'll grant is an indispensable critical weapon, she uses remorselessly. So does Kael. The difference is that Sontag uses it charmlessly-but then she doesn't intend to be charming. (Charm, she almost seems to feel, is for pipsqueaks.) All that erudition impresses me, though there's a big difference, as anyone who's hung out with academics can tell you, between erudition and insight, erudition and taste. I'm getting off on the wrong foot by even using the phrase "my quarrel with Sontag." She is a critic I revere, a magnificent critic. When I complain about her, you should keep in mind the caveat Nietzsche proffered once at the end of a (much more bitter) attack on Wagner: "When I use harsh words against the cretinism of Bayreuth, the last thing I want to do is start a celebration for any other musicians. Other musicians don't count compared to Wagner." Obviously I can't be that categorical, since for me there is one critic who counts compared to Sontag, and though my aim in putting them side by side is to illuminate the work of each, honesty and ethics command me to admit right here what will be obvious anyway, which is that I don't feel the same way about them. I revere Sontag. I love Kael.
And after reading Fujiwara, I agree with him about Murch's intercutting Susie's first encounter with the Grandi's with a scene between Vargas and Quinlan: "One wonders whether if Welles had been allowed to recut the sequence as he wanted, he might not have struggled with it only to conclude that the Susie scene played better uninterrupted." - Another reason not to like the Murch cut!
The specific changes that were made [from Welles' memo] are detailed by Laurence French -- though oddly no mention is made of the recropping -- which I consider to be the Murch cut's most unforgiveable flaw.
I've read that "Touch of Evil" was shot "open aperture" (as many films are) at the standard "Academy ratio" (of 1.33:1 -- or 1.37:1 for sound films, from about 1932 through 1953) even though the "intended" ratio when projected may have been 1.66:1 (mostly a European standard) or 1.85:1. The latter format was used for the 1998 "Touch of Evil" DVD which, Kutner argues, chops the top and bottom off Welles' carefully composed full-ratio 35mm images. Normally, if a 1.85:1 film is improperly projected at the standard ratio, filling the screen from top to bottom, one usually sees boom microphones protruding into the upper part of the frame and other indications that one is seeing things that weren't intended to be seen. That's how you know it's the projectionist's fault, not the filmmakers'. But this was never the case with "Touch of Evil." (Stanley Kubrick ["Eyes Wide Shut"] and James Cameron ["The Abyss"] are among the directors who, it is claimed, have composed at least some of their video-era films in wide screen and "full screen" ratios simultaneously, so the image would fill pre-16:9, non-HDTV television screens without losing anything.)
Indeed, in a May 24, 1958, letter to the editor of the New Statesman of London (reprinted at the bottom of French's second page), Welles writes:
There was no attempt to approximate reality; the film's entire 'world' being the director's invention. Finally, while the style of TOUCH OF EVIL may be somewhat overly baroque, there are positively no camera tricks. Nowadays the eye is tamed, I think, by the new wide screens. These 'systems' with their rigid technical limitations are in such monopoly that any vigorous use of the old black-and-white, normal aperture camera runs the risk of seeming tricky by comparison. The old camera permits use of a range of visual conventions as removed from 'realism' as grand opera. This is a language not a bag of tricks. If it is now a dead language, as a candid partisan of the old eloquence, I must face the likelihood that I shall not again be able to put it to the service of any theme of my own choosing.
As I read this, Welles states his clear preference for the "old black-and-white normal aperature" over the "new wide screens" that were introduced in the 1950s (along with new widescreen processes such as VistaVision, CinemaScope and the like) -- and with regard to "Touch of Evil" in particular. The question (as one correspondent has posed it) was whether Welles really thought he could get away with making a 1:33:1 picture in the late 1950s. But even if he didn't, he knew the prints would retain that ratio. And the 16mm prints shown by universities and film societies were full-frame. So, he must have known that the film was being seen that way before he died in 1985. I wonder if either of the early versions of "Touch of Evil" was on VHS or laserdisc by then...
UPDATE: Christian Liemke offers some 1:33:1/1.85:1 "Touch of Evil" frame comparisons here.
Waldo Lydecker: "I don't use a pen. I write with a goose quill dipped in venom.... Hand me my towel, would you?"
First, let me again express my gratitude to all those who got into the spirit of the Contrarianism Blog-a-Thon (see new category at right) -- with submissions, comments, and other observations on their own sites. My hope was that this would spin off conversations on other blogs as well, and I've participated in some of them myself (and in e-mail, too). I was especially pleased that some of the contributions were from people with new blogs, or who hadn't participated in blog-a-thons before. This was the first time I've hosted one, and I was thrilled and relieved that I hadn't thrown a party to which no one came.
It was just a little over a year ago, in January of 2006, that some movie bloggers over at girish's were discussing the whole idea of writing about film when the subject of Paul Verhoeven's eminently disreputable "Showgirls" came up and this idea evolved: What if they chose a date and everybody who wanted to participate would post something about "Showgirls" on that date and link to the other postings? (You can witness the idea taking shape here.)That, as legend has it, is how the "blog-a-thon" was born. (Andy Horbal at No More Marriages! has been keeping track of recent ones, and offers an overview with his reservations about them, here.)
The Contrarianism Blog-a-Thon grew spontaneously out of a couple posts I did in January (Do the Contrarian (Part I) and (Part II), which I impulsively turned into what I called "Contrarian Week." None of this was planned when I wrote the first post -- not even Part II. (I went back and added [Part I] to the original title after I'd thought of the second part.) And the whole effort was an attempt to distinguish between genuine contrarian arguments, and what I considered to be the equivalent of "shock jock" statements by some mainstream/print critics, just striking a pose to call attention to themselves without anything of substance to say. You used to actually have to subscribe to their publications in order to read what critics were writing; now you access so many print critics online, and with a blog you can link to them and respond immediately to what they've written.
Anyway, with so much contrarian joy and ambivalence still fresh in my mind, and at the risk of gazing so intently into my own navel (and/or the collective belly button of the blogosphere) that I fall in and am sucked through a black hole from which only lint has been previously known to emerge, I'd like to share with you some of my feelings about the experience....
Probably the scariest thing was hosting what one of my correspondents called (with considerable skepticism) a kind of "open mic." The subject was contrarianism (not, I hasten to point out, about labeling individuals as "contrarians," but about the idea of championing an unpopular point of view -- and whether it was positive or negative was irrelevant). That meant I knew I'd get submissions that I was bound to strongly disagree with. And I did. But, although this blog has always been an attempt to call for critical standards (mostly mine!), I didn't feel that, in this case, I should play the role of the gatekeeper. I've written for traditional (and non-traditional) "gatekeeper" media all my life (well, for the last 35 years or so -- since Junior High School!), where I had to make decisions about what was suitable for publication or not, and I didn't want to play that role this time. And that scared the bejeezus out of me.
There was also the fear (as I alluded to above) that people would either find the subject too vague and uninteresting (though I hoped there would be enough of a range of contributions that anybody interested in movies would find something to engage them), or that (as a few e-mailed me -- facetiously, I hope), the ultimate "contrarian" stance would be to not participate! (Matt Soller Zeitz, proprietor of one of my favorite movie blogs, The House Next Door, commented: "Contrary to everyone else who's posted here, I think this blog-a-thon is a terrible idea. If only you fools could recognize this!" You can see why I like his blog so much. You were joking, right, Matt?)
The limitations of the format were also a bane. I felt there had to be some kind of deadline (although I eventually stretched it over four days), some way to give focus to the thing, but a single weekend couldn't accommodate some people who (strange though it may seem) had other things going on in their lives. (In contrast, Harry Tuttle's Contemplative Cinema Blogathon expanded across the entire month of January.)
And because I was so sincerely grateful for all the contributions, I didn't feel that it was my place to argue with them. I was hoping readers would do that. My function would be to give people a forum to express whatever they wanted to say, and to get feedback from whoever read them. I wanted the posts to stimulate discussion, but didn't have the technology I'd like to have had to make that easier. I wound up with a big list of links to contributions, but didn't have a handy way to let people comment on them individually at Scanners (although they could post their comments on the individual blogs that allowed them). I don't know if my Moveable Type blog software (hosted at the Chicago Sun-Times) has a plug-in that would allow threaded discussions, but I'd sure like to have something like that. If anybody knows how it can be done, please tell me!
I've always liked David Edelstein's Slate Movie Club as a model for what could be done with online film criticism. The oldest one I could find was from 1998, just between Edelstein and Jonathan Rosenbaum. And after some of my specific criticisms of Rosenbaum's reviews of late, I thought Edelstein's introduction captured just the spirit I was looking for with the Contrarianism Blog-a-Thon:
"I am honored, Jonathan, to have you as my correspondent. Although I sometimes find your opinions wacko and your style unduly belligerent, you're one of a handful of critics in this country of real stature, and one of the few perennial antagonists for whom I can muster a lick of respect. Not to mention that you're partly responsible for one of the cinematic highlights of 1998, the restoration of Orson Welles' 'Touch of Evil': a different and significantly greater film than the studio-mandated recut released over Welles' weary objections."
I feel the same way (re: the first part of the second sentence) -- not just about Rosenbaum (one of our best critics), but about most critics at some time or another. (Including myself.) Oh, and by the way, one of the Contrarian Blog-a-Thon contributions rips apart that 1998 version of "Touch of Evil" as a travesty of Welles' work! I don't know what to think. Now I'm going to have to go back and watch the 1998 version, then compare with my laserdisc of the second studio version (with a copy of Welles' memo in hand) to get a better idea of the changes.
So, I would very much like to hear what readers and contributors have to say. What do you think are the strengths and weaknesses of the "blog-a-thon" format I used last weekend (or the blog format in general)? How could it be improved -- technologically or otherwise? What did you appreciate or not appreciate about the Contrarianism 'thon itself? How much of it did you read? Should I have taken issue with some of the postings in order to help stimulate discussion? Or is it better that I just shut up? And you could comment on the individual submissions too, you know...
I don't like the idea of having a centralized system either.
Blog-a-thon ideas should be spontaneous, growing organically (or dying organically, which will also happen), and can and should come from anywhere and anyone.
Some ideas will catch fire and attract many bloggers, others won't, and that's fine too.
Let a thousand blog-a-thons bloom, free and unfettered from constraints, approval procedures, and other Kremlin-ian (word?) bureaucracy.
And I love Aaron's passage that you excerpted. Those are the kinds of films I would love to write about (but not exclusively, not anything exclusively--any and every movie, however "high" or "low", should be game).
Spontaneity. Freedom. And Mutual Respect For Each Other's Choices.
When Artforum invited me to write 800 words on Pauline Kael, I asked the editor why we couldn't dispense with 799 of them, as I could certainly summarize my opinion of Ms. Kael with even greater economy than that with which her opinions had for so many years been splashed across movie ads and even, for a time, theater marquees. Besides, the definitive autopsy on Ms. Kael's oeuvre had already been performed, twenty-one years earlier, in the pages of the New York Review of Books, by Renata Adler ("The Perils of Pauline"), and I consider Adler's an impossible act to follow. I have a fond memory of devouring that essay with Susan Sontag, peering over each other's shoulder, in the donut shop that used to occupy the corner of Third Avenue and Fourteenth Street, both of us nearly gagging with laughter at the sly, inexorable trajectory of every sentence, the devastating conclusion of every paragraph, the utterly damning thoroughness with which Ms. Kael's grotesquely inflated, even sacrosanct reputation had been laid out like a corpse for burial. [...]
The coercive effect of Kael's technique was not simply contrarian, which might have had its praiseworthy aspects; "For Keeps" makes it clear, as Adler noted years ago, that this is a critic who brooks no contradiction and turns herself into a pretzel to stun the reader into agreement that a worthless film has moments that outshine, and outmerit, actual masterpieces, if for no better reason than that the film was made by one of the directors she routinely fawned over, like De Palma. When it suits her, Kael does a complete volte-face and fetishizes the transcendent artistry of De Sica's "Shoeshine," for example, or treats us to an extremely long, extremely ill-informed analysis of how things work in Hollywood to explain "why today's movies are so bad." It is, perhaps, the absence of any real sensibility rooted in any consistent method of analysis that makes Pauline Kael's collections of reviews the kinds of books I don't like having in my house. She's not a real voice but more like a suet of arbitrary, extemporized pronouncements. She is Gertrude Stein's Oakland; There's no there there.
Paul Schrader:
Pauline changed criticism in a number of ways:
... Taking film criticism to the average filmgoer. She wrote for people who went to movies, not for those who read magazines--a technical distinction, but an important one. [...]
She validated film reviewing. Difficult as it is to believe today, at the height of America's countercultural upheaval movies truly mattered: It mattered which movies were made, which movies audiences saw, and what they thought of the movies they did see. Godard was important, Bunuel was important, Paul Mazursky and Hal Ashby were important. Art was not happening in the museums; it was in the streets and movie houses. Kael was the pied piper of reviewers who made readers believe that movies, even disreputable movies, were important. If movies were important, it followed that movie reviewing was important.
A considerable achievement, and I wish I could say a wholly beneficial one. Cultural history has not been kind to Pauline. She was able to rail against critical snobbery and High Art, defend mass-audience taste and extol "trash" because she never feared for culture. She knew that there would always be standards. Because she had standards. She appreciated great art and literature and opera; no amount of "trash" could change that.
Not long before she died, Pauline remarked to a friend, "When we championed trash culture we had no idea it would become the only culture." That's exactly the point. She and her foot soldiers won the battle but lost the war. Mass taste has become acceptable taste, box-office receipts the ultimate measure of a film's worth. The pop films Kael most loved, such as "Hud" (1963), if made today, would be considered art-house fare.
Geoffrey O'Brien:
Returning to her writing after so many years, I'm still puzzled by a central ambivalence in her judgments that seems to gravitate around the notions of "art" and "trash." In her celebrated essay "Trash, Art, and the Movies" (Harper's, February 1969)--the closest she came to a general statement of intentions--she wants to celebrate the gaudy pleasures of cinematic vulgarity: "I don't trust anyone who doesn't admit having at some time in his life enjoyed trashy American movies.... Why should pleasure need justification?" She directs withering scorn at those stuffed-shirt humanists who admire "Judgment at Nuremberg" or "Wild Strawberries" but can't appreciate "The Thomas Crown Affair" (1968). But she's equally at odds with anyone who likes trash a little bit too much, likes it enough to think that "trash" is perhaps a term of doubtful use: "If an older generation was persuaded to dismiss trash, now a younger generation, with the press and schools in hot pursuit, has begun to talk about trash as if it were really very serious art." It doesn't help that her examples of yesterday's kitsch now mistaken for art are "Shanghai Express" and -- amazingly for someone who would go on to grossly overpraise the Hitchcock imitations of Brian De Palma -- "Notorious." She goes in circles on this theme, churning up perplexities about pleasure and puritanism, bourgeois complacency and radical transgression, without ever coming to a comfortable resting point. What is clear is that there is no party of which she wishes to be a member; if she has to declare for anything it will be the sovereignty of her own taste.
Contrarianism Blog-a-Thon: Let the perversity begin!
JJ Hunsecker is calling YOU to participate in the Contrarianism Blog-a-Thon!
Presidents' Day Special:What the heck, it's a three-day weekend for some of us in the States. Now you have an extra day to contribute your contrarian wisdom -- through Monday!
And thanks to all those who have already contributed and helped to spread the word. We've had submissions from all over the US -- and Canada, France, the UK, Ireland, the Netherlands, the Philippines...
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This weekend we're saying to hell with the conventional wisdom. We usually say that anyway, but consider the Contrarianism Blog-a-Thon (Friday through Sunday Monday) an excuse to express how you really feel. You know, like Valentine's Day is supposed to be, only more perverse. (Yes, more perverse!) So, I hope you're feeling cranky.
Check back here for contributions that are sure to get you riled up or make your head explode with satisfaction as you appreciate the inherent wisdom of the cases made by cine-sthetes from across the blogosphere. Please send your contributions to me at the e-mail link above (jim at scannersblog dot com).
And please feel free to COMMENT on the submissions below. This endeavor requires some back-and-forth, don't you think?
"For serious critics ... the second-best thing to perfection is often the near-miss, the disreputable and even the despised. Next to discovering a new director, planting a flag in an uncharted national cinema or sitting next to Zooey Deschanel at an event, few things please a critic more than polishing a tarnished career or taking on a dubious cause, particularly if everyone else really hated it."
-- Manohla Dargis, New York Times, February 14, 2007
"I deeply believe that taste is a kind of prison for oneself – when a critic finds himself or herself always rigidly repeating the same opinions, the same positions, the same likes and dislikes (that is the kind of bad posture which Pauline Kael bequeathed to criticism). Critics should feel free to bring in their own emotional reactions to films – it is hard to keep them out of writing – but the phenomenon known as the ‘gut feeling’ or gut reaction can become a terrible end in itself: ‘this film makes me angry or it makes me happy, so it's a rotten film or a great film, and I’m not going to discuss it any further.’ The important thing is always argument, analysis, logic. I have an irrational side (critics need it), but my rational side believes in logical demonstration: if you can prove to me that what are saying about a film makes internal sense, if you can marshal the evidence from the film itself to back up what you say, then I too can be persuaded to disregard my own first gut reaction and explore that film again in a new, more open way." -- Adrian Martin, Cinemascope, January - April, 2007
"There's nothing I like less than bad arguments for a view that I hold dear."
-- Daniel Dennett
flickhead: It's boring, but is it art?
"Last November I was sent a DVD screener of Theo Angelopoulos’s 'The Weeping Meadow,' and was so horrifyingly bored that I felt that all film in general was no longer worth writing about."
Piper @ Lazy Eye Theatre:Grandpa Joe The Imposter
"Contrary to what everyone has come to believe, Grandpa Joe is not the sweet, lovable old-man everyone thought he was."
Squish @ filmsquish.com (The Film Vituperatem):"L' Age d'or": Weird & Wacky
"There's the kind of film that deserves the highest of praise, and there's the kind that needs to be strung up and beat like a piñata until its guts give its treasures.... but sadly this movie isn't worth any of these intense emotions."
Peet Gelderblom @ Lost in Negative Space (encore!): Boys like Peet are not afraid of wolves
"The best animated picture of 2006 wasn’t made by Pixar, Disney, DreamWorks, Blue Sky, Warner Bros. or Sony Pictures.... Hell, it wasn’t even released in the US last year."
Oggs Cruz @ Oggs' Movie Thoughts:"The Fountain"
"I viewed the three storylines of 'The Fountain' as existing in different dimensions..."
Brian Thomson @ stereoroid.com:Jackassism
"The shopping cart, a harmless symbol of domestic consumption, becomes a
conveyance; delivering its contents to the terminal checkout..."
C. Jerry Kutner @ Bright Lights After Dark: Why Murch's "Touch of Evil" Doesn't Make the Cut!
"I can’t imagine that Welles would have approved this evisceration of his work.... If you want to see the superior Second Studio Cut, you would have to know someone who has it on videotape or laserdisc."
Bob Westal @ Forward to Yesterday:The Big Sleep -- A Confession
"I am a filmnambulist. And it’s not just austere minimalists who can lull me into one of my cinematic siestas. If I’m tired enough, I can sleep through any universally acclaimed auteur."
Jeremy Mathews @ The Same Dame:Contradicting the Contrarian
"If nothing else, the contrarian serves to push those in the majority to really express themselves, instead of standing around agreeing with one another."
Kenneth R. Morefield @ the matthew's house project: Contrarianism, "Munich" and Effective Arguments
"...I think that the usefulness of a contrarian review depends more upon the ethos of the reviewer than the rhetorical style or technique of his or her argument."
Kenneth R. Morefield (redux!) @ All Things Ken:MacGuffins of Men
"In this day of marketing hype and review saturation, the difference between a contrarian review and an assenting review is often little more than a matter of which the viewer trusts more -- the consensus opinion or his or her own two eyes."
Campaspe @ Self-Styled Siren: Do the Contrarian: "Once Upon a Time in the West"
"... Leone's camera doesn't seem to care if we ever get interested or not. Again and again we return to the basic pattern of long shot (flat, sun-bleached, not terribly interesting desert) to close-up (flat, sun-creased, not terribly expressive face), close-up to long shot."
Dennis Cozzalio @ Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule: Nuts to "Brazil"
"... [T]oo much the showman, or the eager kid who wants to shock his parents by playing with poop and get pats on the back for it, Gilliam wears his depressive inclinations on his court jester’s sleeve. He wants credit for being a scatological imp and a serious buzz-kill at the same time."
Harry Tuttle @ Screenville: Outlandish Dargis Empire
"This is a gameplay of course, as Dargis is a great critic and my tentative analysis is pretentious. Nitpicky mode intentionally exaggerated. For the fun of being contrarian, at least let's not bash a little helpless reviewer, let's go for the best and see where it takes us."
Ted Pigeon @ The Cinematic Art: Transcending Time and Space: The Guilty Pleasure and the Problem With Film Criticism
"Which brings me back to the "Guilty Pleasure." Such an idea only exists within an understanding of cinema as plot, and "content." We then become conditioned to like certain genres and dislike others on the grounds of the kind of narrative they may embody. Coming from the approach that form creates content, we can open ourselves up to understanding that any plot or narrative can be executed effectively and interestingly in the medium of moving images we know as cinema. Viewers should not feel guilty for enjoying something."
GD Williamson @ Where the Green Ants Dream: An Odyssey Through Contrarianism in Society
"This is why an American Contrarian, whether that's Chomsky or White, is usually so angry and so fearful of dark conspiracies who push 'their' influence on the general public (and thereby reduce the influence of whichever Contrarian is complaining about it?). Britain, meanwhile, breeds people like Xan Brooks and the anonymous author of '101 Movies To Avoid'; people who can barely muster the energy to raise their eyelids, but want you to know that they're dangerous and controversial all the same."
Reilly Owens: Sancho Panza at the Wedding Feast: Last Action Hero
"Among the many amazing things Alfonso Cuarón’s 'Children Of Men' does is hang its story on the acts of an antihero. Not antihero in the classic Bogart sense -- although Theo Faron seems to fit that mold: rumpled trench coat, hangdog expression, 'I stick my neck out for nobody' attitude. No, this character is something different, a new breed. He goes against the grain of the common action hero; he is a passive hero."
Robert Humaneck @ The House Next Door: The Unscrupulous Side of Kubrick: "A Clockwork Orange"
"Real horrorshow, yes, but Kubrick’s orchestration of so much mayhem is lacking a much-needed ideological backbone.... Kubrick never takes the necessary next step in subverting the violence he engages us with."
Tom Shipp (Comment): "Sunset Boulevard": A Stylish Load of Hooey (My Contrarian Opinion)
"'Sunset Boulevard' is a cheap shot exploitation film wrapped in sheep's clothing. Norma Desmond is a one note caricature beginning and ending the film cartoonish, one dimesional, and completely to blame for everything."
Steve Carlson @ Blogcritics: "I Spit on Your Grave"
"As it turns out, 'I Spit on Your Grave' is not the hateful nadir of cinema. It is, instead, the 'Unforgiven' of the rape-revenge genre, in that it is simultaneously the perfect expression of and the eulogy for the genre. It's as brutal and confrontational a cinematic work as I've yet seen; Zarchi reduces the genre ito its barest elements and in doing so asks the audience to consider why they are there in the first place."
Dan Eisenberg @ Cinemathematics:More Like the Big Snoozefest
"I must have seen 'The Big Sleep' at least three times, trying to find out what is so good about it.... And so far I've come up empty handed. It doesn't work as a noir or as a romance. And I've tried to make it work. I've looked at praises for it to see what I'm missing. Or maybe it's what they're missing."
Neil @ The Bleeding Tree:"The Exorcist"
"Ultimately, the most reprehensible aspect of the movie is its unsubtle metaphor for a single mother raising an out of control child and her responsibility for allowing the Devil as well as 'the devil' to take her child's mind and soul."
Nobody @ Any Eventuality: Deconstructing "Babel": "Epic Movie" and the Illusion of Continuity
"I can think of no more pretentious and self-important film than "Babel," and "Epic Movie" is a devastating critique of the illusion of continuity attempted by Inarritu and Arriaga."
Jeff Ignatius @ Culture Snob: Conventional Contrarianism: A Practical Guide
"A good contrarian will anticipate the buzz-and-backlash cycle of popular culture and must carefully position an opinion for maximum contrarian durability. Yesterday’s contrarian can quickly become today’s peddler of safe opinions."
Noel Vera @ Critic After Dark "The Exorcist": Scary Movie?
"... [After] after all is said and done, 'The Exorcist' isn't exactly the great horror classic it's all pumped up to be -- certainly not one that can't stand a little revision, and I'll tell you why: It just isn't evil enough."
Andy Horbal @ No More Marriages! Some Possibly "Contrarian" Thoughts On Blogging and Blog-a-Thons
"They're more valuable for collecting a variety of extant positions on a subject than they are for promoting a discussion on a subject, for moving towards a reconception of that subject. For someone who prides himself on being part of a community focused on conversation this upsets me to a certain degree."
Andy Horbal @ No More Marriages! (x2!) Why I Like Jonathan Rosenbaum and Armond White
"I did not come here to defend these critics--that would, again, require legwork I haven't done--but instead to talk about why I'm always interested in their criticism and suggest a possible approach for identifying (or not identifying) them as bona fide contrarians."
Andy Horbal @ No More Marriages! (x3!) The Black Maria Film Festival
"I've been itching to write about the Black Maria Film Festival since I returned from the Pittsburgh screening of their touring program this Saturday, and I offer this post now in the "contrarian" spirit of championing contemporary "unseen cinema."
Steve Carlson (the sequel!) @ The Ongoing Cinematic Education of Steven Carlson "Freddy Got Fingered," or: Daddy, Would You Like Some Dada?
"In 1917, Marcel Duchamp signed a urinal and called it art. In 2001, Tom Green waggled a horse's penis and called it a movie. The line of separation between the two actions is a lot thinner than would seem apparent."
Pacheco @ bohemiancinema (he's back!):"Any Given Sunday": In Defense Of..."
"'Any Given Sunday' didn't polarize the way 'Natural Born Killers' did, and after Oliver Stone made Alexander, the public's new punching bag, his football opus seemed to fall off the radar, which I would argue is an even worse place to be."
Pyko Moose @ Confessions of a Flick Junkie:A Pervert's Guide to Faith: "The Good, The Bad, & The Ugly
"But the film does not so much function as a criticism of faith as a meditation on its nature. In the opening shot we witness the creation of Man: First a landscape, still and silent in its endless deadness. A dog howls somewhere beyond our range of perception, calling into existence (and into frame) an ugly, twisted face...."
Counter-arguments & subjects for further investigation: (These pieces weren't necessarily written in response to Contrarianism Blog-a-Thon posts, but nevertheless contribute to further exploration of some of the posts above...)
Chris Cagle @ Category D: A Film and Media Studies Blog:Post-Classicism A response to Kristin Thompson's post, above.
CK Dexter, Scanners Comment:Re: Taste into Theory & "You've Got Mail"
"Of course there are good and bad movies.... Those who say otherwise do so in bad faith, as part of a pragmatic social contract in which I graciously grant you your own private You've-Got-Mail's so that you, in return, will grant my own egregious lapses in taste an equal amount of tolerance."
Matt Zoller Seitz @ The House Next Door: Theo Angelopoulos' "The Weeping Meadow" (For HarryTuttle's Contemplative Cinema Blog-a-Thon, January 2007)
"It finds a cool-headed but empathetic visual analogy for the way we tend to envision history: as anecdotes about masses of unknown people moving from place to place, enduring unimaginable suffering, then shaking off the pain, reinventing themselves and moving on."
girish:On Film Criticism A terrific ongoing discussion in response to the Adrian Martin piece quoted above.
jmac @ girishshambu.com/blog:Comment
"There is such CONFORMITY in writing movie reviews, and furthermore, most people seem to ACCEPT this PROSAIC approach to WRITING a review. It's horrible!!!... Manohla Dargis's review was the first step in introducing some CREATIVITY to the NYT movie section.... I actually think that Manohla Dargis's review of 'Inland Empire' was beautiful."
J. Hoberman, Village Voice:L'Age d'or
"Thanks to his mastery of montage, Buñuel naturalizes Dalí's images into a duplicitous rhythm of normality and outrage. The film suggests instances of sex and violence far more extreme than any actually represented while contriving effronteries so offhanded you can't believe you've actually seen them."
Kim Newman, Empire Magazine (UK):"Once Upon a Time in the West"
"Leone showed with 'Once Upon a Time in the West' that it was possible to honour the Western tradition while raising the artistic bar to such a level that nobody has made a better Western since. In fact, nobody has made a better Western, period."
As part of the Contrarian Blog-a-Thon, here's a chance to really vent your spleen (in a rational and persuasive way). Please cast your vote below, and then elaborate on your selection in Comments. Give your reasons. Try to change our minds. I happen to have a great deal of affection for all of the below, but I chose these because they have passionate partisans and detractors. (And, besides, nobody doesn't like Howard Hawks... RIGHT?!?!) Defend your favorites -- or explain why you'd choose a filmmaker who's not on this abbreviated list. (BTW, although a valid e-mail address is required to post a comment, it won't be visible to the public and nobody will send you any mail as a consequence. It's just a way to help filter out some of the vast quantities of comment spam that comes in.)
P.S. Do you know which of the above is still alive?
UPDATE (3/19/07): I can't believe I forgot to include Ingmar Bergman, once considered the greatest living filmmaker by so many. I'm not so sure I know where his reputation stands at the moment...
It feels like science fiction -- "Fahrenheit 451" or "THX-1138" or "Brazil," with roots in Kafka and Orwell -- but the chilling and chilly dystopian world of writer-director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck's "The Lives of Others" existed. The film, which begins in 1984, is a depiction of historical reality, not a cautionary fiction. It's set in East Germany, the German Democratic Republic, then a Soviet bloc communist-totalitarian state. Think of it as "The Conversation" behind the Iron Curtain.
The air is alive in Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylon's "Climates" -- more alive than the characters, who are like inert lumps of rock or sand. But that's the point. In this movie, so finely attuned to frequencies of light and sound, it's the invisible space around the characters that swarms with life and possibility. Their interior lives are muddled, opaque even to themselves, and they can't express anything directly, not even their own anguish and dissatisfaction.
Selznick, Rossellini & Fellini, by Rossellini & Maddin.
Brad Damaré of Ann Arbor, MI, was kind enough to point me to a marvelous YouTube post of the entire 16-minute 2005 collaboration between Guy Maddin ("The Saddest Music in the World") and Isabella Rossellini: "My Dad Is 100 Years Old" (in English, with Italian subtitles). In this personal tribute to Roberto Rossellini, the subject of recent retrospectives and the father of neorealism (and more), Isabella creates imaginary conversations between herself, her papa, producer David O. Selznick, Federico Fellini, Alfred Hitchcock, Charlie Chaplin and her mother, Ingrid Bergman -- with the actress/daughter playing all the parts. (My delight in her performances is only enhanced by Isabella's recent appearances as Alec Baldwin's volatile ex-wife on "30 Rock.")
Through his daughter, papa Rossellini expounds on his contrarian theories of film -- not as dreams or distractions, manipulations or entertainments, but as works that engage the viewer's conscience. As is often the case on YouTube, the soundtrack slips out of synch partway through, but it's not all that distracting. In some ways it's perfectly appropriate (I wouldn't put it past Maddin to have come up with the effect deliberately), since Italian films were shot without sound (MOS) into the 1960s, with little attention to precisely matching looped dialogue to lip movements.
View image John Candy as Steve Roman as Juan Cortez -- now that spells good acting.
Ever since December, when Kristin Thompson posted this ("Good Actors Spell Good Acting") on the blog she shares with her husband and co-author David Bordwell, I've been meaning to link to it. This is my favorite kind of article, leading you fluidly from one intriguing idea to another -- and you never quite know where it's going to take you. Not only does it begin with an account of how bits of movie dialogue (from "Rio Bravo," "His Girl Friday") have entered her life, and the lives of her friends and colleagues, but it then segues into a great quotation from Steve Roman on SCTV (playing Juan Cortez, the first Puerto Rican Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court in the dramatic television series, "There's Justice for Everybody") : “It’s got good actors, and that spells good acting.” And, from there, to this:
Almost invariably we use this line when we come across one of those films that receive highly positive reviews largely because of one great performance. You know the kind: Charlize Theron in "Monster," Halle Berry in "Monster’s Ball," Hillary Swank in "Boys Don’t Cry," and more recently Forest Whitaker in "The Last King of Scotland" and Helen Mirren in "The Queen."
Usually I avoid such films, because the reviews tend to plant the idea that they are primarily actors’ vehicles. I enjoy good acting as much as the next person, but I want the rest of the film to be interesting as well.
Are there any film classics that are truly great solely for the acting? It’s hard to think of any. Maybe "The Gold Rush," which is stylistically fairly pedestrian but which is redeemed by Chaplin’s inspired performance. Maybe "Duck Soup," also quite undistinguished for much of anything other than the Marx Brothers cutting loose without being saddled with the sort of plots involving young, singing lovers that MGM would soon foist upon them. Maybe a few others. Usually, though, we tend not to think of a performance, however dazzling, as adding up to a great film.
That's a good point to keep in mind during Oscar season, when "best acting" is often confused with "most acting." The performances that win awards tend to have as much to do with the roles as they do the actors. Sure, the player has to deliver, but give a decent actor a juicy character (and a sympathetic director) and you're talking Oscar bait. If just about anyone had played Jennifer Hudson's mistreated chunky diva in "Dreamgirls," an emotive-showpiece part if there ever was one, and had not gotten an Oscar nomination, that alone would have made the film a miserable failure. Fortunately for the investors, Hudson was able to do what she was hired to do. (Twenty years ago on Broadway, it was another Jennifer H. -- Holliday -- who became a star playing the same role and singing the same showstopper song.) Robert Altman liked to say that casting was the most important part of making a movie, but nobody would say that his movies are interesting just for the performances. It's how he captures and presents them that matters just as much.
View image Helen Mirren, as the Queen, doesn't have to check her crossword dictionary to spell good acting.
And from there, Thompson moves into a stylistic analysis of Stephen Frears' "The Queen" -- a movie she finds to be more than the sum of Helen Mirren's Elizabeth II and Michael Sheen's Tony Blair:
Frears set out to contrast the two worlds stylistically. The scenes with the royals are shot in a classical, non-intensified style. Distant shots to establish space, two shots for face-to-face conversations, over-the-shoulder shot/reverse shots as the dialogue unfolds. The framing seldom goes in for the tight close-up but stays in medium shot or medium close-up. The cutting is slow relative to the current norm, as befits both the subject and the style. One reason people are so impressed with Mirren’s performance may be that it is not made up of a bunch of different shots stitched together. She has shots that allow her to develop a reaction or attitude slowly. [...]
In contract, the Tony Blair scenes were shot with a handheld camera, to convey the bustle of his staff and the more casual situation. Even so, the camera movement is not obtrusive, and Frears still doesn’t constantly cut in for the tight close-up. Here, too, he keeps his camera back a bit, framing groups as they talk. The lighting tends to be brighter and more diffuse. The contrast works well, and yet Frears never pushes it in our faces and asks us to be impressed. [...]
But good directors spell good directing, and good cinematographers spell … You get the idea. It would be nice to see more rounded reviews. Variety’s reviewers, it must be said, seem to have a mandate to mention style, since every review comments at least briefly on the film’s techniques. But most critics give you no sense of the film as a whole—its narrative construction (apart from a plot synopsis) or its stylistic texture. It would be nice to see more rounded reviews.
Film criticism, as it has been observed, is the rationalization of taste into theory. No matter how involved the argument, writing about the movies almost always comes down to a question of personal taste, to that web of influence through which we filter each new film. In this respect there are no good or bad movies, just good and bad arguments, a thought that serves as a useful introduction to the latest edition of "Film Comment Selects," a giddily idiosyncratic annual series that could only have sprung from feverishly partisan minds. [...]
For serious critics, and the critics who write for Film Comment are nothing if not serious (and at times self-serious), the second-best thing to perfection is often the near-miss, the disreputable and even the despised. Next to discovering a new director, planting a flag in an uncharted national cinema or sitting next to Zooey Deschanel at an event, few things please a critic more than polishing a tarnished career or taking on a dubious cause, particularly if everyone else really hated it.
View image Here is Lil. She indicates that this is one of Gordon's blue rose cases.
When I saw David Lynch's "Inland Empire" for the first time a few weeks ago, I knew I was going to be reviewing it for the Chicago Sun-Times and, given the quintessentially Lynchian, fractal nature of the three-hour film, I didn't know how I was going to do that. It's just not a movie that you can summarize in the usual terms of story, character, cinematography, direction, etc., and still convey a sense of what it's about, and what it's like to watch. The first thing I thought of was a scene near the start of Lynch's radically underestimated "Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me," in which a complex set of coded information is conveyed entirely through pantomime, involving facial expressions, gestures, dance and dressing up. I wish I could have reviewed "Inland Empire" by doing something like what Lil does in "Fire Walk With Me." (If I could, I'd try dressing up like Grace Zabriskie and contorting myself into a writhing human mobius strip...)
Please consider this article my contribution to The Lynch Mob at Vinyl Is Heavy, where this week you'll findt lotsa Lynch links and criticism. What follows is a slightly revised and updated version of a piece I wrote about nine or ten years ago for my Twin Peaks site at cinepad.com.
^ ^
"Break the code, solve the case."
-- Agent Dale Cooper
"Twin Peaks" was conceived as a series (like "The Fugitive" before it) in which the central "mystery" (Who killed Laura Palmer? Who killed Dr. Richard Kimble's wife? And what of the one-armed man?) would spin off new complications, week after week, but would never really be solved -- at least (in the case of "The Fugitive") until the end of the series. (I like to think of it as sort of the TV series version of Buñuel's "The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie," where the characters keep on walking but never seem to get anywhere. Instead of preventing these people from eatinga meal, "Twin Peaks" would continually deny the audience and the characters a solution to the mystery. I still think that's a great idea.)
But soon (or finally, depending on how you look at it), public and network pressure forced the hand of "Twin Peaks" co-creators David Lynch and Mark Frost, and they revealed Laura Palmer's murderer a few weeks into the second season. Lynch said recently (2007) in Seattle that, for him, the series was basically over once identity of Laura's killer was exposed. Ratings dived and creative ennui set in shortly thereafter. But a year later Lynch released a feature film (hissed and booed at the Cannes Film Festival) that promised to go into explicit detail (certainly more so than you could do on network television in the early 1990s) about exactly what happened on the night of Laura Palmer's death.
It was a typically perverse Lynch move -- belatedly rehashing details about a year-old, already-solved murder on a TV show that had been cancelled by the time the movie was released. Even more perversely, Lynch and co-writer Robert Engels began this feature-film prequel with an absurdist prologue that -- in case you hadn't caught on by know -- pretty much explained the spirit, and method you should have invoked to watch "Twin Peaks" in the first place. (The film -- originally sub-titled "Teresa Banks and the Last Seven Days of Laura Palmer" -- was supposedly re-cut before release; Lynch's full shooting script is available online here.)
Lynch himself reprises his role as FBI Bureau Chief Gordon Cole, standing in front of a woodsy photorealistic backdrop in his office that recalls the tropical mural used for trompe l'oeil effects at the house of Dr. Jacoby (Russ Tamblyn) in the series. Gordon, as you may recall, can't hear too well. He is accustomed to communicating in other ways -- through signs, signals, symbols, omens, clues. And he expects his agents to speak his language.
"I've got a surprise for you. Something interesting I would like to show you," Gordon yells into the phone at Special Agent Chester Desmond (Chris Isaac). When Desmond and Sam Stanley from Spokane (Kiefer Sutherland) ("Sam's the man who cracked the Whitman case") meet Gordon at the private Portland airport, they're treated to a peculiar, ritualistic display of body language by a woman in a reddish-orange dress with flaming hair to match. Gordon introduces her as Lil, "my mother's sister's girl." Lil makes faces, blinks, sashays around, and waddles away.
Afterwards, in the car, Sam asks the questions that all good "Twin Peaks" devotees are meant to ask again and again: "What exactly did that mean?" And Desmond matter-of-factly ("I'll explain it to you") deciphers a bizarre series of signs and signals and symbols and omens and clues that Lil's little "dance" conveyed about the case they were about to embark upon.
The details don't really matter much (a sour face indicates trouble with local authorities, one hand in her pocket suggests they're hiding something, walking in place means a lot of legwork, tailored dresses are code for drugs, etc.) -- it's the manner in which this info is coveyed that's important. In its secret heart of hearts, "Twin Peaks" is an epistemological thriller about perception and the ways that we assemble information about the world around us (see Mystery Without End, Amen). We humans may be capable of certain higher brain functions, but Lil's dance conveys information in a sophisticated, ritualized way that isn't that far evolved from, say, the dances of cranes. In "Twin Peaks," dreams and Tibetan rock-throwing rituals are just as vital and valid forms of detective work as forensic science. Maybe more so.
View image Me at the Double R Diner (aka the Mar-T) in the spring of 1990, with a waitress who looks suspiciously like Laura Palmer.
Oh, and the most important sign was that Lil was wearing a blue rose. But, Desmond says, "I can't tell you about that."
"You can't?" asks Stanley.
"No," repeats Desmond. "I can't."
And here we have a little mystery. The conundrums without answers are, of course, the most intriguing of all. Suddenly, all the other stuff evaporates from our consciousness -- OK, drugs, legwork, local authorities, fine. Got it. Let's move on: What about the blue rose?!? All we ever really learn about it in the rest of the movie is a remark Agent Cooper makes to Diane that this is "one of Gordon's 'blue rose' cases" -- whatever that may mean. I can't tell you.
View image Kiefer Sutherland, David Lynch (behind hand) and Chris Isaak in "Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me."
From the original script of "Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me":
STANLEY
That was really something. That dancing girl. (after a beat) What did it mean?
DESMOND
Code. If you work with Gordon you learn that right away.
STANLEY
Code, I've heard a lot about this.
Desmond pulls his arm back so that only his fingers come out of his sleeve.
DESMOND
Sort of shorthand.
STANLEY
(missing the humor)
Shorthand. really?
DESMOND
We're heading into a difficult situation.
STANLEY
How do you figure?
DESMOND
I'll explain it to you. Do you remember Lil's dance?
As Desmond explains we - INTERCUT WITH:
FLASHBACK: LIL'S DANCE In slow motion.
ON LIL'S SOUR FACE
DESMOND
Lil was wearing a sour face.
STANLEY
What do you mean?
DESMOND
Her face had a sour look... that means we're going to have trouble with the local authorities. They are not going to be receptive to the FBI.
ON LIL BLINKING BOTH EYES
DESMOND
Both eyes blinking means there is going to be trouble higher up... the eyes of the local authority. A sheriff and a deputy. That would be my guess. Two of the local law enforcers are going to be a problem.
ON LIL PUTTING ONE HAND IN HER POCKET AND ONE IN A FIST
DESMOND
(continued)
If you noticed she had one hand in her pocket which means they are hiding something, and the other hand made a fist which means they are going to be belligerent.
ON LIL WALKING IN PLACE
DESMOND
(continued)
Lil was walking in place which means there's going to be a lot of legwork involved.
WE SEE COLE PUTTING HIS FINGERS IN FRONT OF HIS FACE AND SAYING LIL IS HIS SISTER'S GIRL.
DESMOND
(continued)
Cole said Lil was "his mother's sister's girl". What is missing in that sentence? The Uncle.
STANLEY
Oh, the uncle is missing.
DESMOND
Not Cole's Uncle but probably the sheriff's uncle in federal prison.
STANLEY
So the sheriff had got an Uncle who's committed a serious crime.
ON LIL'S RED WIG
DESMOND
Right, which is probably why Lil was wearing a red wig meaning we are headed into a dangerous situation. Let me ask you something, Stanley, did you notice anything about the dress?
STANLEY
The dress she was wearing had been altered to fit her. I noticed a different colored thread where the dress had been taken in. It wasn't her dress or she must have lost some weight.
DESMOND
Gordon said you were good. The tailored dress is our code for drugs. Did you notice what was pinned to it?
STANLEY
A blue rose.
DESMOND
Very good, but I can't tell you about that.
Stanley rides along quietly for a while.
STANLEY
What did Gordon's tie mean?
DESMOND
What? That's just Gordon's bad taste.
STANLEY
Why couldn't he have just told you all these things?
I went to one of the first editions of the Portland International Film Festival back in 1978 or 1979 (thanks to Ruth Hayler of Seven Gables Theatres), where I saw Peter Weir's "Picnic at Hanging Rock" for the first time. They were also doing an Alexander Korda retrospective, and it was great fun to see "The Four Feathers," "Thief of Bagdhad" and "The Private Life of Henry VIII" on the big screen.
PIFF is now celebrating its 30th year, and DK Holm reports on the films, the fest -- and the audiences -- at GreenCine Daily:
Portland breeds a different sort of filmgoer. This is the town where its seemingly unemployed Generation Why sit for hours within its numerous coffee houses drinking $5 dollar brews seriatim and typing endlessly into their brand new MacBooks. Everyone in Portland is "in a band." Or they own a brew pub. Or they virtually live in one. Portland Man rides his bike to work (cursing at the Earth-fracking cars the entire route), enters each of the city's monthly foot race marathons, works for the city (probably the Water Bureau), shops at Whole Foods, and to this day thinks back fondly on that wine tour of Provence he and the wife made back in '92. Portland Woman, by contrast, is an independent and independently minded citizen who can't find a worthy male. She is a mirror image of the "Sex in the City" gals but without the clothes. She is obsessed with shopping, eating, her figure, her co-workers and office politics, her favorite celebrities (or her favorite causes), and is either about to enter, is in, or has just departed her Fag Hag stage. They complain about never meeting any good men and then move in with a meth addict. Personals ads here are very popular and highly effective. People in Portland don't "date." They have a date, and then get married.
Within this context, it's a wonder that any films get seen at all. Yet over the years, the festival has expanded from one small venue to its current reach, four auditoria scattered throughout the city (though all of the theaters are confined to the city's downtown area), hosting a dizzying number of offerings.
View image "Citizen Kane": No matter what anybody says, "It's Terrific!"
Edward Copeland had a bunch of questions about anomalies in Oscar history and technicalities in the (ever-changing) rules. So, he went straight to the source, the staff of the Academy's Margaret Herrick Library, and sent them an e-mail with his queries. Now he's got the answers, which you can read at Edward Copeland on Film.
A sample:
Question No. 4.: For years I heard the statistic that Orson Welles was the first person to be nominated as producer, director, actor and writer for a single film for "Citizen Kane" until Warren Beatty repeated the feat twice for "Heaven Can Wait" and "Reds." Later, the Welles stat seemed to be revised under the argument that in 1941, the studio head would have won the Oscar if "Citizen Kane" had taken best picture. Should Welles be considered as having had four nominations for Kane o
