Are Film Critics Really Needed Anymore?

Variety asks the question. Four people answer it. What d'ya think?

As a recovering film critic myself I'd have to say that I often avoid reading reviews by other critics, especially the ones I respect, until after I've seen a film. Which is why, ultimately, I read very few critics these days because only a handful of them -- Dargis, Hoberman, Rosenbaum et al -- are every really worth reading after one has already seen the film. Most people who write about film for the major dailies and an increasing number of weeklies aren't critics with a serious knowledge of film history or aeshtetics. They're just journalists on the film review beat. They could be reassigned to writing about power tools without missing a beat. And why would I want to read a plot synopsis, dully written at that, after I've seen the film?

I tend to agree, then, that the kind of journalist who's cranking out quickie, yay or nay, write ups week-in-week out is a dying breed what with so many other ways for people to get the word on this or that film from their actual peers. That said, two minutes browsing You Tube or any of the movie download sites, always leaves me longing for the return of the cultural Gatekeeper who sifts through all the dross and applies a discerning, historically informed sense of taste to what's out there.

All of which leads me to ask you guys who your favorite critics going (or not going) are. Of critics past, no one beats Manny Farber in my opinion. Does anyone read Andrew Sarris anymore?

An Important Message

I haven't had as much time to post of late, either. But I did want to inform you that this movie is hella funny. I am probably 150,000 brain cells lighter for the experience, but the Mooninites made me laugh as hard as they scared the poo out of Boston.

Critical Media Film Festival This Thursday!

Okay, okay. After not posting anything in a while, the first thing I do is plug myslef. Bad blogger, bad blogger.

Anyway, some of you probably got this in your inboxes but a short critical video essay I made about Citizen Kane, inspired by Gaston Bachelard's Poetics of Space, will be playing at a student run film festival in the Bridges Theater this Thursday night. Here's a trailer for the event showing snippets from mine and the other films that will be screening. It should be interesting and maybe we can all go out for drinks or whatever afterward. The fun starts at 7:30 at Bridges with some kind of reception proceeding.

(I promise to return to regular posting/commenting this week -- I know you missed me -- although you guys have been totally rocking it. Lot's of great stuff below!)

Tarantino and the Woman's Film

(SOME SPOILERS)
(NOTE: "first half" and "second half" in the following refer to the first and second half of Tarantino's DEATH PROOF. I do not discuss PLANET TERROR.)

The title of this post refers initially - perhaps only - to the fact that most Tarantino features have women as their central protagonists.

Still, many of the iconic images of Tarantino's films are of men. Further, Tarantino'searly career was largely built on (a) violent spectacle between MEN and (b) dialogue scenes in which MEN TALK (about Madonna, about hamburgers and foot rubs).

Since Jackie Brown, however, Tarantino's representations of women develop along two vectors:
* to reconcile the female protagonist with the spectacle of violence (KILL BILL); and
* to reconcile the female protagonist with the scenes of dialogue (DEATH PROOF).
Thus it is the fact that WOMEN TALK in DEATH PROOF that brings his career full circle; completing the wholesale REGENDERING of the auteur persona first announced in the all-male world of RESERVOIR DOGS.

A key issue here is SOCIABILITY which, for Tarantino, is always verbal. Prior to DEATH PROOF the issue of female sociability has not been raised: Jackie Brown and Kill Bill involve solitary female protagonists. DEATH PROOF, by contrast, focuses on a group of women (again, a regendering of RESERVOIR DOGS).

Make that two groups. Because what is striking about DEATH PROOF is its doubled narrative. The first half of the film focuses on one group of women: they meet Stuntman Mike and are killed. The second half, we are introduced to a wholly new group, unrelated to the first: they meet Stuntman Mike and kill him. In effect, the same story, twice, only with different endings and characters. (Structurally, this has parallels to PSYCHO.) Each half of the film is formally different; these formal differences, moreover, correspond to two different conceptions of female sociability, as follows:

1. Female interaction as conveyed through montage of individualizing closeups and medium shots (the first group). I would note here that Tarantino's approach to editing is more discontinuous than in any other of his films. Rather than cut between repeat camera setups (e.g., shot-reverse shot), each setup feels discrete - a chain of single images that do not repeat. (This needs another viewing to be verified.) The discontinuity of the film's first half is also seen in the "missing reel" gag, edits that mimic a "bad" reel change, etc.

2. Female interaction as conveyed through camera movement (the second group). This is first evident in the lengthy dialogue sequence that introduces the group, comprised of extremely long single takes, in which the camera is constantly encircling the women. The film's second half, it can also be noted, lacks the pastiche of low-grade exhibition evident in the first (and evident throughout Rodriguez's Planet Terror). Finally, the stylistic trope of encirclement, through camera movement, recurs in the film's final sequence in which the women beat Stuntman Mike to death.

To wrap up here. Approach (1) seems to me definitive of representations of male dialogue in Tarantino's earlier films: witness the opening of RESERVOIR DOGS. Approach (2) is new. The question then would be: to what extent can this stylistic departure be related to the process of regendering that has defined Tarantino's work? To put it in the crudest terms: if approach (1) is to be matched with male interaction (in DOGS), should approach (2) be matched with female interaction (in DEATH PROOF)?

Top 50 Pre-1975 Movies

Okay, I recognize that it may have something to do with my gender that I seem to instigate the explicitly collaborative posts here (see the anti-Valentine’s Day movies post) but I need some assistance with a student request. (Okay, I don’t really “need” the assistance…I could do this on my own, but I thought it would be interesting and decidedly more fun to get your insight and see what discussions/debates ensue).

This student is a film major and asked me to give him a list of the top “must-see” pre-1975 films. Now I don't necessarily subscribe to the AFI school of film history hierarchies but I am not one to turn down a student request or ignore a challenge when I see one. He prefers mostly American films but is not picky, and he didn’t specify a number but I will make things interesting by limiting it to 50.

If you feel bold enough to add your picks as RD, bring it on, and put your initials in parentheses…see how the others respond to your choices. If you want a debate, add it to the comments. We can add and delete things based on consensus. I will get us started… (BTW, these are in no particular order).

Citizen Kane (MS)
Vertigo (MS)
Psycho (MS)
Double Indemnity (MS)
All About Eve (LW)
The Sound of Music (LW)
A Streetcar Named Desire (LW)
Blazing Saddles (LW)
The Godfather, Parts One and Two (MO)
La Dolce Vita (MO)
Il Vangelo secondo Mateo (The Gospel According to St. Matthew) (MO)
2001: A Space Odyssey (MO)
La Grande Illusion (MO)
Rashomon (MO)
The Searchers (MO)
Easy Rider (MO)
Don't Look Now (BC)
Crisis (MO)
Shadows (MS)
The Conversation (MS)
A bout de souffle (Breathless) (MS)
Das Kabinett des Dr. Caligari (The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari) (MO)
Ali: Angst essen Seele auf (Ali: Fear Eats the Soul) (MO)
Umberto D. (MO)
Roma: Citta aperta (Rome, Open City)(MO)
Nanook of the North (MO)
Hearts and Minds (MO)
Gone With the Wind (MS)
The Best Years of Our Lives (MS)
Sunset Boulevard (MS)
All That Heaven Allows (MS)
Casablanca (MO)
Peeping Tom (MO)
If (MO)
City Lights (MO)
Birth of a Nation (MO)
Sunrise (MO)
Duck Soup (PM)
Il Conformista (The Conformist) (PM)
M (PM)
Persona (MO)
Cleo from 5 to 7 (MO)
Battleship Potemkin (MO)
Lawrence of Arabia (MS)
Pather Panchali (MO)
Meshes of the Afternoon (MS)
Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song (MO)
Xala (MO)
Dance, Girl, Dance (MS)
Within Our Gates (MS)

THAT'S IT! WE'RE DONE!

They almost made it...but not quite...
Der Junge Torless (Young Torless) (MO)
8 ½ (MS)
Metropolis (PM)
I ladri di biciclette (The Bicycle Thief) (MO)
Pierrot le fou (MO)
It's a Wonderful Life (MS)
Nosferatu (MO)
Primary (MS)
From Here to Eternity (MS)
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (LW)
Traffic in Souls (PM)
The Barefoot Contessa (BC)
La Jetée (MS)

Comic Societies

1. Blades of Glory is a very funny film; John Heder, in particular, is good. In this respect, the picture culminates a trajectory in Will Ferrell movies, toward giving more and more time to comic co-stars. Compare one of his earlier starring films, Elf - where, outside of the North Pole scenes, Ferrell was really the only "comedian" in the picture - to the trilogy of Anchorman, Talladega Nights, and Blades of Glory - all full of supporting comics (Steve Carrell, David Koechner in Anchorman; John C. REilly, Sacha Baron Cohen in Talladega Nights; Heder, Poehler, Arnett, and others in Blades of Glory).
2. Why so many comedians? Not, I think, because Ferrel can't carry a film, but because of a significant shift here in the structure of comedian comedy. In the "classic" structure of comedian comedy - evident in Elf, and virtually omnipresent in the genre - a comedian, qua misfit, is pitted against society, and must either (i) set aside/compromise upon his/her oddities (settling down to a "regular" life as Ferrell does in Elf) or (ii) leave the society that s/he cannot assimilate to (think of Chaplin waddling off down the road at the end of Modern Times).
3. This is not true of post-Elf Ferrell films. In place of the comedian/misfit vs. "normal" society structure, each of his films presents an ENTIRE SOCIETY OF MISFIT COMEDIANS - the oddballs in the San Diego newsroom, the dimwit macho men of racing, and the schizoid sexuality of ice skaters - all social groups presented as objects of laughter for the audience. As such, the relevant structure would seem to be not "misfit comedian vs. society" (the "classic" structure) but "audience vs. comic society" (which we could call a "post-social" structure). Put another way, the binary that structures a Ferrell movie is not the misfit's comic relation to the society in which s/he attempts to function, but the audience's ironic relation to the misfit society represented on the screen. (In this respect, the difference between a Will Ferrell movie and a Christopher Guest film is less than might first appear.)
4. What, then, about our ability to imagine what it means to be a community? Can western audiences only imagine community in a mode of irony? Is Will Ferrell symptom or cause of the end of democracy?

Comic books and comic book movies

In response to Michele's question in my summer-movie geek post, Lori posited that superheros appeal to an audience (mostly male) that desires to be the powerful superhero, a desire that stems from a desire to return to a childhood fantasy of omnipotence. I think Lori is right -- though I wouldn't phrase it as she does.

A good superhero comic book and/or movie allows the audience to feel like a superhero for the duration of the film, to know that, for once, one fights on the side of good against evil, with more abilities than one would possess in the real world. It might be a fantasy we are learn at an early age, but I don't know that it's infantile, as Lori suggests. It's a desire for a less complicated world, and in a sense is narcissistic, no doubt; the superhero/audience is always in the right, and will prevail by the end of the film.

That said, I would also argue that a good comic book film isn't simplistic -- that it presents a complicated (emotionally and logically) thematic structure. In effect, the story's structure is something that the superhero must fight through/with for the narcissistic identification with good to be realized. In Spiderman and Spiderman 2, the villains are born of their own narcissism -- the desire to be special, to receive fame and wealth, to have the good forcibly aligned with them. Peter Parker/Spiderman must learn to align himself with good. His troubled relationships with his Uncle Ben, Aunt May and girlfriend, Mary Jane, lead him away from a desire to do what is right (to behave selfishly) until the bad-narcissist villain appears to force him to battle. In other words, Spiderman is good because he accepts that his values must align with an exterior good, one that does not rely on him for validation, although it does rely on him for protection. Thus, the narcissistic identification with Spiderman is always conditioned by his relationship t his power. Spiderman is on our side/is us, and always wins no matter what -- so we always win, no matter what.

The Hulk is another character that can be seen as a childhood or infantile fantasy, and both the comic book and movie make this clear. Bruce Banner was an abused child, and in the comic book actually developed dissociative identity disorder, also known as multiple personality disorder, as a young boy. The Hulk is one of his alter personae, given enormous power by gamma radiation. In the film, he doesn't have DID, but he is emotionally reserved as a result of his childhood trauma, and pushes those who love him away while allowing those he dislikes to bully him. The film Hulk character is based on one of the comic book Hulks (Banner has different Hulk personalities in the comic book) known as the Savage Hulk, who is childlike, expresses a desire to be left alone (though he frequently puts himself in situations where he has to encounter other people, and develops attachments to special people), and has the ability to grow stronger than any of his nemeses. In short, Hulk is a case of arrested development, stuck at a pre-adolescent emotional age, the embodiment of the conflicted desire to be loved and to be strong enough to survive alone because people are untrustworthy. Thus, Hulk's earliest foes in the comic book and in the movie are society (the military and defense contractors) and ultimately his abusive father.

Partially thanks to the growth of computer generated imagery, comic books have become prime fodder for movies -- their spectacular feats are difficult to render with traditional special effects, and Lou Ferrigno in a green fright wig was never a particularly good adaptation of the gargantuan comic book Hulk. But I think comic books also make good films because of the narcissistic themes outlined above. Much ink has been spilled theorizing how cinema encourages narcissism in viewers -- or at least, how the classical Hollywood system does, with its emphasis on clear narratives, action-oriented heroes with obvious psychological goals, Oedipal narratives, and editing patterns that suture audience members into identification with a film's protagonist. What better examples of this than superhero films, with their almost transparently narcissistic heroes and villains?

Summer is just around the corner, y'know.

This is the one summer movie I very badly want to see. Because I am a geek.








But not so much of a geek that I want to see this piece of poop.