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A Roger Ebert blog post about critiques of him and my usual low-level continuous line of thought about film writing combined to make me want to get my thoughts straight about my personal favorite critics. (Note that I specifically mean print critics; if we include the net ones, we'll be here all day.) They are as follows:
I am forever indebted to that very same Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times for what, over at least thirteen years of reading his reviews every Thursday, amounts to not just a remote mentorship in film appreciation but an extended article-writing master class. His influence has undoubtedly crept into my own prose style in thousands of subtle, hard-to-detect ways; classic Ebert lines pop into my head on a daily basis. His thinking has shaped me too; not for nothing do I often quote his dictum about a movie not being about what it is about but how it is about it.
I do find, however, that, like any quantitative rating, the "stars" he assigns pollute his signal with noise. (To be fair, he himself rails against them on occasion.) I feel they also contribute to a genre-relativist slant that I don't quite understand. He's often quoted as writing that "when you ask a friend if Hellboy is any good, you're not asking if it's any good compared to Mystic River, you're asking if it's any good compared to The Punisher." Except that I probably am asking if it's any good compared to Mystic River — or more like compared to Ran, Solaris, Maborosi, and so on.
I meta-applaud Ebert's undying championship of Werner Herzog and of all the rich, unusual films he so often stands for, though I can't help but feel troubled at the suspiciously high praise he's been giving the average release lately. And I could not forgive a mere mortal's dismissal of Abbas Kiarostami, Jim Jarmusch's Dead Man and most of David Lynch's career. But Ebert is no mere mortal.
I wish the Chicago Reader's Jonathan Rosenbaum wasn't in semi-retirement, because he's got some of the finest cinematic tastes I've ever seen. His top hundred list comprises, in equal measure, films I would be unlikely to have heard of otherwise with ones I've seen and found life-changing. Close-Up, Stalker, Barry Lyndon, F for Fake, Playtime: they're all there. And if that's not enough, he's got an essential thousand for you to chew on.
In contrast to Ebert, Rosenbaum not only loves Kiarostami and Dead Man but has written freakin' books on them. Unfortunately, I also recall him being pretty down on Herzog, so he's kind of Ebert's negative. Read them both and you'll stay on an even keel, I suppose.
Almost every time I discover a film that I love and consider underseen, the New York Times' Manohla Dargis turns out to have gotten there first. When I got turned on to Kelly Reichardt's Old Joy, I found she'd reviewed and loved it too:
There are roughly 90 viewing days left till Christmas. By that point most of the big studio movies will have opened for the consideration of the paying public and Academy Award voters, and untold numbers of words will have been spilled about the same handful of serviceable or perhaps even brilliant films of the sort that dominate the discourse every fall. Odds are that none of those contenders will capture the tenor of these difficult times with more sensitivity or greater attention to beauty than Kelly Reichardt’s “Old Joy,” a triumph of modesty and of seriousness that also happens to be one of the finest American films of the year.Same deal with Aleksandr Sokurov's The Sun:
Even so, Mr. Sokurov seems to me far less interested in Japanese history than in creating a world that in its perverted and closed logic conveys the psychology of power, a reasonable endeavor for a filmmaker born under Soviet totalitarianism. The sense of imperial decay is exquisitely conveyed by the eerie and sui generis beauty of Mr. Sokurov’s images — here he serves as his own cinematographer — which at times suggest the soft-focus style of some 19th-century photography. At other times, however, you might as well be staring at a neglected exhibition in a natural history museum, a vision of life shrouded in dust and cobwebs. What strange world is this, you might wonder, even as the all-too-human figures, the horrible facts and catastrophic battles gradually come into focus.Same deal again with Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Blissfully Yours:
As the filmmaker freely indulges in the forest's voluptuousness and his own feel for composition, his characters — freed from work, the city and everyday life — shed their clothes and tentatively bump against one another with both pleasure and frustration. In this secret place, where even the smallest gesture becomes an epic of emotion, these three people finally find a moment of quiet by letting the earth swallow them whole.I'm quite tempted to call Dargis the smartest working film critic, although she's subject to odd false positives, as with Richard "Darko" Kelly's Southland Tales. Despite such indiscretions, it remains that, if I wasn't spoken for, I'd be all, plz marry me manohla, k thx
The Boston Globe's Wesley Morris seems to be to be way, way underappreciated. Every one of his reviews that I've read makes me think, "Hey, this guy Gets It." He gets Ming-liang Tsai:
The send-off is King Hu's 1966 swordplay epic ''Dragon Inn," which on the night we see it screened plays to a crowd whose density seems, mysteriously, to swell then shrink. The man behind ''Goodbye Dragon Inn" is the Taiwan-based director Tsai Ming-Liang, who's one of the coolest things going in the movies (in Asia or anywhere else), and he's arranged the whole picture in the Fu-Ho theater, a vast, leaky behemoth that's part dungeon, part Dickensian mansion, part armory, and, as far as I'm concerned, completely alive.He gets Charles Burnett:
[Killer of Sheep] is a major landmark in American moviemaking: a vivid ballad for life as it was lived by people whom movie cameras could rarely seem to find. Pam Grier's house wasn't terribly far from this place, but she may as well have been living on Pluto.He gets Gus Van Sant:
[Elephant's] lingering question is why. Also up for consideration is what Van Sant intends in his refusal (or is it his inability?) to tell us. We spend time with Alex and Eric as they sit around Alex's bedroom, which we're tempted to canvass for the Marilyn Manson posters or the drug paraphernalia. They're not there. These boys are clean. Still, Van Sant tempts us to assign a motive to their crime. Is it the target-practice videogame Eric plays? Is it the instructive Nazi documentary that the boys passively watch? Is it the kids who bully Alex? Or is it his parents, whose heads never make into the camera frame? Could it be the kiss the boys share in the shower on the morning of their spree, or the Beethoven Alex practices on his piano? It's all inconclusive and ultimately irrelevant. With a daring that some will call irresponsible, Van Sant challenges us to lay blame for an act that at its core is absolutely senseless. Nazi, queer, gameboy: It doesn't matter what a killer is, only that he has killed.I wish Morris would write a book or something, 'cause I'd really like to interview him and get a first-hand view — or listen — into the workings of his critical mind. Maybe I'll just ask anyway.
I have already composed a post in praise of the New Yorker's Anthony Lane, but I simply cannot emphasize this enough: the man's the best writer in the game. In the context of film criticism, some of his sentences qualify as superhumanly brilliant. I have re-read certain of his reviews so many times, seeking the possibly mythical wellspring of his prose quality, that they're committed to memory. (I suspect the wellspring has two components: hard work, and a lot of it.)
But we can't ignore the fact that, despite the sheer joy of reading his pieces, Lane regularly takes heat from cinephiles for appearing to lack any kind of critical or theoretical framework. I think this charge sticks, though in some other, greater sense, I feel that it's somehow "cooler" not to have a theory, that he's escaped some sub-realm of weeniedom in refusing to develop one. Perhaps this contributes to the difficulty I have in using him as any sort of guide, but damn, can he ever integrate a joke smoothly.
I also really like where the Village Voice's J. Hoberman comes from, which I suspect owes much to his past as an experimental filmmaker. Also, his first-ever review was of Eraserhead, so, promising start. I don't have a huge amount to say about him, other than that whatever he likes, I feel I must watch. Maybe that's the best compliment I can give a critic.
Hello
This is really a great post about film critics.Its very interesting to read this post.I have heard so much about Jonathan Rosenbaum from my mother.He is really a good film critic.Thank you very much for such informative post.
Posted by: vitamine c | December 11, 2009 at 10:11 PM