Go, Manohla, go!

I realize that this wasn't the main point of your posting, but I think that in the last quotation Dargis may be a bit too dismissive of the achievement of making movies that are emotionally satisfying. Isn't that something that should be celebrated in itself? And doesn't emotional satisfaction come from aesthetics of one kind or another, even if they are designed to be invisible to the naked eye? That said, I can't say that I found Julie and Julia (the only work of either of those directors that I've seen) to be emotionally satisfying and I would concur that the fact that it was directed by a woman didn't make it any more or less pleasant as a viewing experience.

And if women are incapable of directing action movies, why is it that Max Ophuls, Douglas Sirk, and R.W. Fassbinder were so good at making movies called "women's pictures?"

JE: Or, as MD says in the interview: "Flaubert wrote 'Madame Bovary.' That's all we need to say about that." I think what she's saying is along the lines of some issues we've talked about here in the past: A movie doesn't necessarily have to be aesthetically accomplished in order to have an emotional effect on the viewer. Or, turned around the other way: Just because a movie got to you emotionally doesn't necessarily make it a good movie. She's making a valid distinction.

I read Manohla Dargis' reviews pretty often and usually find them to be among the most insightful around. To call her a good "woman critic" would be insulting as she is just as talented and in many cases more talented than many of her male peers.

man, i love dargis. her piece on bigelow earlier this year was such a good profile. and i love bigelow, and have since i saw NEAR DARK and STRANGE DAYS all those years ago. alas, i live in south carolina, and haven't gotten to THE HURT LOCKER yet, as it only played for about a week here, even in the capital city.

anyway, on the topic of emotional satisfaction, rom-coms, etc., i just want to say that i do like nancy meyers, and i am awaiting IT'S COMPLICATED, but dargis is spot on with her distinction of meyers and ephron - point and shoot aesthetics don't really do the material any favors. kevin smith is a fantastic writer, and that's why i end up liking so much of his work - the dialogue is good, etc. - but his style is just very flat, and i think that's what keeps him from being 'great.' ditto ephron and meyers.

It all depends in what's your aproach to movies. In my case "emotional effect" is more important than aesthetics when judging a film. A collection of pretty images that doesn't move you at all is pretty worthless in my opinion.

JE: That's the crux of the argument right there. Kitsch can manipulate and "move" you, but that doesn't make it art. Art can exhibit masterful skill and even genius, but it doesn't necessarily move you.

Woohoo, Dargis! She's been my favorite critic ever sine I read her review of "The Dark Knight," a piece that I still remember and quote to people this day.

And these few quotes only make me like her more.

JE: Me too. Her review of "TDK" was terrific. I don't share her view of the movie (though any criticisms of it, no matter how minor or legit, are apparently dismissed by some as mindless "hatred"), but I appreciated the way she articulated her take on it. Thumbs up, thumbs down -- who cares? A critic's value is in what she sees and what she says.

For the whole "women filmmakers" conundrum, there are a few other women whose work are more interesting than Meyers and Ephron (and I say this as someone who as an impressionable child used to LUUURVE Sleepless in Seattle).

Rebecca Miller
Sofia Coppola
Nicole Holofcenter
Kimberly Pierce
Bigelow
Mira Nair
Lucrezia Martel
Claire Denis
Jane Campion
Catherine Breillat
Agnes Varda

Did you see this article in the NYTimes? What do you think of it?

I took a Feminism Film class in College, and the professor was a great admirer of Agnes Varda, as i believe, is Ebert. Varda is obviously an accomplished filmmaker, and she reminds me of Warner Herzog--making documentaries and fiction with equal enthusiasm, purely for the joy of making films. (Two films that come to mind that only a great filmmaker could make not only interesting but engaging, are "Encounters at the End of the World, and "the Gleaners and I". Who else would make a nature film that became a film about the extremes people go to in the Arctic, or a film about trash scavengers? Neither sounds all that interesting on paper) But what I can't help but think of when i think of Varda is that she is perhaps the most important French New Wave filmmaker, and gets virtually no recognition for it outside of film circles. Indeed, Herzog, while not a fanboy filmmaker, is nevertheless better known.

HAHA, I Just realized that that was the article the comments were referencing. Oh well, so much for a clever first post!

I had a casette called "The Best of Schubert". My relationship to classical music is much the same as my relationship to film - I'm aware of the issues that are important to those who are really into the subject, but I'm not there myself (yet - and may never be).

I listened to this cassette and wondered why everyone thought Schubert was so great. Listening to it a second time, I started to catch on. He would take a motif, a sequence of a few notes, and play with it. Upside down, backwards, a note up or down, passing it back and forth between instruments, and so on.

In my opinion, Schubert was (or, at least he was represented on this cassette as) a composer who wrote technically brilliant and difficult pieces that other experts could appreciate.

But a more casual listener (such as I) would listen to these pieces and decide that they didn't have the whimsy or lyricism of Mozart, or the passion and grandeur of Beethoven, or whatever...and not like them as much.

Schubert was a musician's composer, not a listener's composer.

I suppose it's just as possible to be an actor's director, or a director's director, or a film critic's director, or an audience's director.

M.D is great, plain and simple. This is just further proof. For the record, I don't think she's dismissing emotional satisfaction, in fact she says in the interview that she really liked Somthing's Gotta Give. Only that it isn't enough to make a movie good, or perhaps more precisely, that isn't what does or does not a good film make.

Incidentally, anyone see James Parker's piece on Ephron & Meyers in the December issue of The Atlantic?
Excerpt:
"the films of writer-directors Nora Ephron and Nancy Meyers are dismissed as “chick flicks.” But would the world be a better place if everyone who queued up this summer to see Inglourious Basterds had been treated instead to a surprise screening of Ephron’s Julie & Julia? After the initial bloodletting, I think it probably would."
He never explains why. Even so, the article is pure sociology, not one word about cinematic crafts(wo)manship.

Her comments about Ephron coincide with my own sentiments toward Tyler Perry.

I agree with the sentiment, but still think the PW list is crap.

To start with, top-10 lists for books and film are very different things. As a layperson in both fields, and a very slow reader, I'm mostly interested in them as recommendations. While it's pretty common for both types of list to include a lot of things I haven't seen, generally in the case of films there are at least three movies that I've seen, and I can extrapolate from that whether I can expect to agree with the other selections. A book list, on the other hand, I can generally expect to be completely unfamiliar with, so I'm stuck with the list-makers' descriptions and statistical methods as tools to evaluate the lists (if PW's list included "The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet", I could consider it concrete evidence that it's a bad list, but no such luck). I frankly don't find their blurbs any more compelling than what could be written for hundreds of books every year (especially true for "Jeff in Venice, Death in Veransi", which sounds like it's interesting only if you're on the editorial staff of PW) (sidenote: there sure are a lot of books about writers on their list, aren't there?).

So that brings me to statistical analysis and the second difference I see between books and film. Now, I haven't given much thought to what percentage of books-I-like were written by women, but it doesn't take much to come up with some that are among the best books I've read: "The Bell Jar", "To Kill a Mockingbird", "The Haunting of Hill House", "Powers of Horror". So when I see a best-of list of books and it doesn't have any books written by women, it doesn't look right because it doesn't match my experience of books-worth-reading. Sadly, the same isn't true for film; I can't think of any film directed by a woman that I think of as one of the best films I've seen. I like "The Hurt Locker", "Me & You & Everyone We Know", and "Lost in Translation", but they're around the level of "The Departed": very good, and I'd happily watch them many times, but not what I consider towering achievements. (never seen "Triumph of the Will" though; maybe that would qualify). Anyway, my experience tells me that a best-of list of films with no female directors is not that unusual.

Still, even in film it seems reasonable for women to complain about their underrepresentation in film top-ten lists. But that underrepresentation doesn't necessarily mean that critics are showing favoritism.

Maybe this was commented on in the original PW post and I missed it but, anyway, for whatever it's worth, the NYT Book Review picked 6 books by women out of their top 10 with 4 out of 5 in fiction, including Atwood, Moore, and Munro (all personal favorites) who were mentioned in the earlier post. And I'll just throw in Kelly Reichardt on to Paula's list, if I may. I would just as soon she doesn't get the "promotion" to action films, though. Then again David Gordon Green made "Pineapple Express".

Whoops! My numbers were right but only Lorrie Moore was on the NYT list--not Atwood or Munro . That's what I get for reading two reviews at once and then trusting my memory.