"It is not enough to like a film. One must like it for the right reasons."
-- Pierre Rissient
This is entirely coincidental, so consider it a fortuitous double-bill. Just as I posted the item below ("The sins of the critic"), Roger Ebert posted a blog essay on the subject: "'Critic' is a four-letter word." Here's a taste:
Too many simply absorb. They are depositories for input. They can hardly be expected to be critical of their own tastes, can they? Of course they can. It is not enough simply to be a "Cubs fan," although I confess I am one. It is necessary to feel the philosophy, the history, and even the poetry about the activity called "baseball." It is helpful to step outside a little, and see that sports teams are surrogates for our own desires to conquer, and expressions of our xenophobia. For some, they are even the best way ever invented to drink beer outdoors. If you are only a Cubs fan, you are a willing automaton in a business venture. Join me in being a Cubs fan, but know why you do it. What is my most fundamental reason? I am a fan because they are always the underdogs. That may be why I bought a Studebaker 30 years after the company went out of business.
Read the entire piece here.
I believe Roger Ebert states so much more eloquently and precisely the stature of a critic and a scholar. Kathleen Murphy’s essay was funny, but reading it one felt the sense that the writer is trying, desperately I might add, to validate one’s position.
Ebert on the other hand displays the nonchalance, and the respect he almost always gives to films and audiences alike.
I really liked Roger's French spelling of 'poseur' (I just can't do italics, even when I cut and paste!) in this sentence: "They use foreign words to show off. They're terrified of being exposed as the empty 'poseurs' they are." That's the sort of irony people who read, even as they despise, critics won't get. It seems a common tendency of the everyman poseur to deride vocabulary they don't happen to know as elitism even as they gobble up the jargon of the sports world, business world, computer world, etc. trying to be the first on their block to seem like an insider in those, apparently, sanctioned clubs.
And remember when people believed Siskel and Ebert wanted to kill each other? It seems every other week or so Roger quotes the wit and wisdom of his late "enemy". It's good to see.