The sins of the critics

I believe the best response to such people comes from our dearly beloved President George W. Bush: "Who cares what you think?"

Or, more politely: "Do you also choose to only listen to songs in the Top 40 on the Billboard charts?"

I'm also reminded of a recent mini-thread I was involved where another self-styled populist observed that "Godard is just one of those directors that only film people like." And my reply was: "Gee, what an awful fate. To only be appreciated by the people who devote most of their time and passion to cinema."

Christopher: Imagine that. A film director that only film people like. That's like, I don't know, a footballer that only football people like -- whereas, if you didn't know anything about football, you might not like him so much. What is the world coming to when you have to know about something in order to deepen your appreciation of it?

It almost seems as if people are more interested in being part of something than they are in the experience of cinema itself. Adopting the majority opinion, and having that opinion reinforced by "authority" figures in the media, gives them a sense of belonging. It's a form of social currency--in the world of Facebook and MySpace, people define themselves by their likes and dislikes. It's not about defending your own views, or trying to understand those of other people, it's about signalling your preferences, and thereby defining your group affiliation.

There is, for me, a deep irony in this. The best films are about connecting to other people, slipping an inch outside your own skin and seeing things from a different, sometimes frighteningly alien, perspective. All too often, while trying to elicit someone's thoughts about a particular film, I find myself confronted by phrases like "I'm not into ____" or "I'm not a ____ film kind of person." Of course, I wasn't asking them what kind of person they are. I was asking them for their thoughts on the film, which too often consist of little more than a blunt expressions of like or dislike.

It seems to me that criticism, at its root, is about openness. You carry all of this personal history into the theater with you, and it interacts in a complex way with whatever's on the screen. Later, you sit down at the keyboard and try to sort out what you thought and felt at the time. It's not just about whether your expectations were satisfied, or what the prevailing opinion happens to be, or the stylistic conventions of the time. It's about being open to new experiences, and grappling in an intellectually honest way with your reaction to those experiences.

As a life-long cinephile, I have an ingrained habit of reading the opinions of several critics whose evaluations I have come to respect whenever I contemplate watching a film. I frequently don't agree with one or more of them (much as they usually do not agree with each other), but I always learn something from them. I always come away feeling that it was worth my time to read those reviews.

I imagine that the people who think that critics should reflect popular opinion are the same people who believe that elected representatives are supposed to enact policies and laws that are a perfect reflection of their own viewpoints and prejudices.

I found Kathleen Murphy's piece to be both deadly accurate and utterly hilarious. Almost as funny were the many comments from people who failed to grasp the fact that the article was satirical in nature!

Did you check out the comments thread for Murphy's list of critic's "sins"? Virtually every one misses the point of the satire and praises Murphy with stuff like this:

"Oh thank you so much for writing this article, it is very much overdue. ... You have done justice to the little people like me that go to see movies to escape reality and enjoy some good old imagination of some great movie makers. Although sad but true most critics that read your article will miss the point entirely and keep doing what they are doing until the only response they hear is crickets chirping in the audience they once had."

The jibe about "missing the point entirely" is particularly delightful.

Whenever I watch both political candidates speak I get the impression that both are trying to appeal to people much stupider than I and 90% of people Ive ever met.

I liked The Dark Knight but I had the same sort of feelings throughout a lot of it.

Mediocrity is excellent to the eyes of mediocre people" - Joseph Joubert

Why the world needs critics? The scholars? That is because everybody needs a Clare Swann. I mean, if somebody really cares. Both the learner and the teacher care, and I guess nobody ought to even pay much attention to the guys who didn’t even bother to fill up the admission form.

The problem with Crash and films of its kind are that they tend to take a judgmental look rather than exploring their subjects. I think when pen made contact with paper for the script, the first word written was racism. And scenes and stories keep cutting from one to another with great obligation almost never paying attention to our question – why?
And then there’s that ending. Two trivial lady characters, one apparently from Japan and one African-American shout over their vehicles crashing into each other. It feels so ridiculous; as if the film is, at the end of it, brushing aside it all in humor, a poor sense of humor.

It seems that films like Crash have replaced the epic as oscar bait

Well first off, I do perfer No Country over Transformers. And I do perfer spinach over a whopper, considering I am a vegitarian. So, ya know, obviously she and I wouldn't get along much.
But anyways, if you only considered movies that the masses like, well that would be a fatal blow to art in general. Since most people enjoy what is easy to enjoy, simple, and acessible, that leaves anyone who wants to evolve in the dust. I don't assume that most people are idiots, just unwilling to evolve, and since humans are a species that constantly morph, that leaves only one option: De-evolution. I know its maybe not yet a word, but pretend that it is.
Just imagine a world, were the only music being made is pop and rap, music you know you've already heard, with lyrics that have already been said, so you don't have to stretch your mind. A world were the only stories being told, are the ones you already know, just with more modern characters. Most people would be content with that. How depressing.

The most interesting thing to me about the comment sited by TCM was: "...the audience they once had." The commenter is apparently assuming the critics, rather than the audience, or the filmmakers, for that matter, have changed. I would be interested in seeing the evidence for that assumption.

This reminds me of Worthington's Law which is "More Money you make=better than other people. Donald Trump was better than Albert Einstein and Mother Teresa." The Dark Knight is better than Star Wars and Titanic is better than The Dark Knight because it made more money and more people went and saw it; So Titanic is better than Star Wars. Carrying this to it's logical conclusion "Date Movie" is better than Citizen Kane. Yes box office democracy truly works!

This reminds me of when some obsessed fan chastised Roger Ebert for not putting The Return of The King on his ten best list of 2003. Jesus Christ, why do the fanboys insist everyone share their opinion! I love the film too but I'm not going to send death threats to critics who think it is the penultimate cinematic achivement of all time!

What truly puzzles me about some of these bone-headed responses to criticism is this: don't people realize that a critic is only human? Don't they understand that even with the most popular movies, there will always be people for whom that movie was not up their alley?

The fact of a critics status as a human (and not a mouthpiece for the masses) goes hand in glove with the fact that a critic, by necessity, knows more about movies than the average person will. Once you've seen heaps and heaps of movies, you're standards begin to get higher. It can be harder to accept a mediocre movie as something wonderful. The deeper you get into anything, the higher your standards become.

And it seems that critics, and movie lovers, feel at times that they have to be a voice of reason. "The Dark Knight" is a great example of this. It's not that I, or you, or anyone else, necessarily thought TDK was truly horrible. It's just that someone has to provide the checks and balances. I think that's a good thing. Personally, I love it when someone challenges my conception of a movie. When they force me to think it over again, and consider it from a different angle. If you don't like that, then don't read critics. And don't complain about them.

The problem is, I think the sarcasm clouds legitimate debate on some points. (And the "Cinema 101" bullet point seems to deride the idea of formalism, something I've always felt is worth aspiring to.) I think it's possible to argue that film critics can have a narrow view of some genres or have certain biases- the dark and pessimistic seems to get a lot more attention (WALL-E and NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN got similarly raving reviews, but which one got more analysis?) THE DARK KNIGHT has gotten more prestige than the average superhero movie, but again, it's really grim fare. Lighter material tends to get tagged as less "mature", less worthy.

To Satish Naidu: Roger Ebert, in his blog, writes that too few people understand the reasons that they hold certain opinions. Crash is about many such people. The film doesn't make it explicit, but the idea is that people have subsumed racially antagonistic attitudes through various sources (of which the media and the people around them are predominant), and these attitudes, consciously or not, are continually being exhibited in their behavior. Crash may seem judgmental because its characters are judgmental. (If not for that reason, what is the movie being judgmental of? Racists?) And about "that ending." The ending is the beginning, suggesting that racial tension no sooner ends than it begins all over again.

To anyone: It's interesting that the general public have subsumed similar attitudes towards movies (once again gotten through the media and the people around them), and these attitudes are continually being exhibited in their movie watching habits and their reactions to critics. The most common excuse I've heard for not listening to critics is that people don't want to be told what to like. They want to make up their own minds. Which is exactly why they decide they like what everyone else does.

I don't think the problem is so much that it's judgmental. It's that it's trying to get at the reality of racism through a series of extremely contrived circumstances. I can't help but think of it in contrast to DO THE RIGHT THING, which took a slightly more stylized approach but managed to reveal how racism spreads and escalates and permeates society much more believably.

As for the ending- I actually have a problem with it just on the logical level. If you're engaged in the shameful practice of human trafficking, is it really a good idea to have your forbidden cargo sitting in the back of a van as you drive around town? Would it not make more sense to house your mistreated and exploited would-be immigrants at a central location? The final twist raises questions that the film doesn't have time to answer.

I’m not sure Crash was about people, because I didn’t feel like I was getting to know one. The characters written to me felt just that, written, neatly assorted with the help of clichés. It felt that to create personalities, the writers picked up a handful of contrivances, and that allowed them to further carry on with their idea of making each of them a mouthpiece to hurl racist related jargon against each other. This bunch in here doesn’t seem to have any other trait to their character apart from exchanging racial pleasantries. Yes, I agree, the acting is woeful, but everything in it felt so uncomfortably artificial to me.
I believe there’re certain tricks that betray the inherent dishonesty and artificiality of a film. In Crash, there’s one such sequence where the man raises his gun against the Michael Pena character when his daughter runs down rushing into his arms, and the film leaves that thread in a cliffhanger ala some television soap, and cuts to some other place. Only to return later, not satisfied with created melodrama, and to milk out more of our emotions, saying everything is safe. I don’t know why, but it feels kinda exploitative in my opinion.

I believe when a film is made about humans, about people, it should throb. Subject ought not to be the central aim because it then limits the world. It should be the people first. The film shouldn’t strive to exist as a one note creation, but one that has a life of its own. One can never capture Magnolia, because it is wild, not designed, and Crash feels thus. I think that is the problem with Crash .Even designed films on people can work brilliantly, like the recent The Edge of Heaven, which reminded me of Barry Lyndon with its pre-ordained nature. But it was made with great insight, and Crash didn’t seem to have it. All of the people here unfortunately feel like an extension, given cosmetic changes to be able to be distinguished.

"Crash" was a pretty typical "cart before the horse" movie. It seemed that Paul Haggis came up with the message he wanted to get across first, and then came up with the plot & characters in order to get the message across. That almost never works for me.

I'm surprised it's considered a populist movie, though. Most people I know absolutely hated it, and it didn't exactly set the box office on fire (although it did quite well for a smaller picture).

I'm in the minority, I guess (for people reading this blog, at least). But on IMDB, Crash has an 8.1 and is #180 on the top #250. That's not too bad (though there are other movies on the list that have no business being there). Read the trivia section on IMDB and you'll see that Haggis first thought of the film after he was carjacked. The carjacking presumably had nothing to do with race.

Satish Naidu:
I watched the movie again earlier to see if I could see what you were saying, but I couldn't. I thought of Sidney Lumet's contrast of drama and melodrama in Making Movies. It goes something like this: Drama happens when the characters drive the story; melodrama happens when the story drives the characters. There is no story in this movie at all without the characters, no plot to string everyone along on. Everything happens because the characters act. This is true of the scene in which Farhad (the Persian store owner) "shoots" the daughter of Michael Pena's locksmith. If you go back and watch it, the scene doesn't just cut away after the the shot. It lingers. Both the locksmith and the wife fear the worst, and then the little girl says, "It's okay, daddy. I'll protect you." And the locksmith inspects her, finds no bullet holes, and he and his wife run into their house, leaving Farhad (simultaneously dismayed and relieved) standing on the sidewalk with the gun. He looks around to see if anyone has seen him. Only then does the film cut to Sandra Bullock on the phone. A little later, the film comes back to Farhad's shop and we see a close up of the bullets his daughter loaded in the gun the day before: blanks. This scene was set up way back at the beginning of the movie when Farhad and his daughter Dorri buy the gun and the bullets, without much knowledge of what they are buying. They buy because they think they need protection, not just because the plot requires them too or because the scenes were "designed" in a certain fashion.

Evan Waters:
Watching the movie again, I don't think the trafficker intended to drive around the city with his cargo. He was probably about to deliver it. How could he have known he was about to be hit and dragged by a black Navigator?

Also, while Crash is probably not the best movie ever made about racism, it does at least manage to address it from the perspectives of several different cultures. Most films about racism only focus on black and white.

Jim, you use "well" to much in that eye-roll, don't-you-know-what-I-mean-sort-of-way. I teach college English. Just a note.

p.s. Crash blows.

"Jim, you use "well" to much..."

"I teach college English. Just a note."

Do you find that your students tend to fail, generally speaking?