You will search Kael’s collected work in vain for a theory, a system, or even a consistent set of principles.—A.O. Scott, “Mad About Her: Pauline Kael, Loved and Loathed” (with Manohla Dargis), The New York Times, October 14, 2011
Kael’s attraction to the art of the mass audience—the audience that includes our family and our neighbors—is about as far as you can get from Sontag’s prostration before the exalted and the disaffection from the mass audience it entails. Kael was wary of anything as humorless as exaltation. She was wary of anyone who took himself too seriously—such as Sontag’s adored Bresson, whom she charged with “inhuman pride.”—Craig Seligman, Sontag and Kael: Opposites Attract Me, Counterpoint, 2004
Bloggers and the writers who turn out well-crafted pieces on their own Web sites are free to write what they want. The best of them, such as Dennis Cozzalio at Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule or Kim Morgan at Sunset Gun or Farran Nehme Smith at The Self-Styled Siren, give public voice to the way movies function as private obsession. Their film knowledge is broad and deep, but they wear that knowledge lightly. They understand that the true appreciation of any art begins in pleasure (and not in the “work” of watching movies). To read them is to read people grounded in the sensual response to movies, in what the presence or look of a certain star, or the way a shot is lit stirs in them. —Charles Taylor, “The Problem With Film Criticism,” Dissent, Fall 2011 (available on the internet to subscribers only)
Reading long, detailed arguments about a difference of millimeters in the aspect ratio of a new Blu-Ray disc, the only shrinking millimeters I’m aware of are those of my open eyes narrowing.— Taylor, Dissent
When the writer Dan Kois advanced the heretical notion in the New York Times that he couldn’t pretend to enjoy movies he found boring, the reaction he got made it seem as if he had said movies could never deviate from convention and audiences should never try anything new. The film historian David Bordwell even used the word “philistinism.”—Taylor, Dissent
In college, a friend demanded to know what kind of idiot I was that I hadn’t yet watched Tarkovsky’s “Solaris.” “It’s so boring,” he said with evident awe. “You have to watch it, but you won’t get it.”
He was right: I had to watch it, and I didn’t get it. I had to watch it — on a laserdisc in the university library — because the intimation that there was a film that connoisseurs knew that I’d never heard of was too much to bear. I didn’t get it because its mesmerizing pace was so far removed from my cinematic metabolism that several times during its 165 minutes, I awoke in a panic, only to find that the same thing was happening onscreen as was happening when I closed my eyes. (Seas roiling; Russians brooding.) After I left the library, my friend asked me what I thought. “That was amazing,” I said. When he asked me what part I liked the best, I picked the five-minute sequence of a car driving down a highway, because it seemed the most boring. He nodded his approval. —Dan Kois, “Eating Your Cultural Vegetables,” The New York Times Magazine, April 29, 2011
The reaction to Kois was a sustained example of bullying masked as erudition.—Taylor, Dissent
What is interesting is the impression of a giddy, widespread abdiction of all time-consuming enterprises, from building an argument to watching a movie, and the accompanying implication that anything beyond an immediate gut-level response is suspect. Sometimes the abdication and the uses to which it is put are “market driven,” sometimes angst-ridden, sometimes politically cunning, and sometimes, as in Kois’s case, gleefully nonchalant. “My taste stubbornly remains my taste,” writes Kois as a summary statement: this is not film criticism, but rather its gleeful renunciation.—Kent Jones, “That was SO THEN, This is TOTALLY NOW,” Film Comment, September/October 2011 (Print only)
[Branded To Kill is] also a movie of rain and shadows, and Mr. Suzuki’s use of angular, minimalist 20th-century-modern interiors to convey blankness and isolation makes you wonder why anyone ever consented to be bored by Michelangelo Antonioni’s coffee-table anomie. —Charles Taylor, “New DVDs To Warm Your Toes By,” The New York Times, October 28, 2011
Images from Blow-Up (with Jeff Beck, 1966), Zabriskie Point (with Daria Halprin, 1970), The Passenger (with Maria Schneider, 1975) and Identification of a Woman (1982), directed by Michelangelo Antonioni.
I haven’t been following the discussion all that closely, but I’d be surprised if anyone tried to suggest that moviegoers change throughout their lives, and the things they once “failed” to get, can still be gotten.
I am not at a place where I find Antonioni and Tarkovsky oblique, inaccessible, or cryptic – but I can remember when I did, and it wasn’t pleasant. So I sympathize with the idea that someone can watch their films and come away thinking, “that was difficult,” which for lots of folks mutates into “that sucked.”
But I’m past that now, and to be honest, if I can get past that stage, anyone can. ‘Cuz I’m as dumb as a box of rocks.
That’s why I tend to give this whole controversy a wide berth. Nothing about people surprises me, after working the jobs that I’ve worked. Given the choice between attaining a result that will satisfy them, or having their current status confirmed as right and correct, most folks will choose the latter. So hey, if Kois doesn’t want to buy SOLARIS, I just think of that magic word they taught us when I was trying to sell cars: “Next!”
Thought provoking post, Glenn. I’m still digesting it, but to paraphrase Mr. Taylor—quoted here both complimentarily and critically, and rightly so, it seems to me—my appreciation of this post begins in pleasure. The Zabriskie stills made me laugh, but I really dig your including the still from Identification of a Woman. Some of us are still suckers for that olé “coffee table” Antoniennui. I am acquainted with Mr. Taylor—whose work I respect, even if I often disagree with him, as I do about Kois—and I have tried to argue Michelangelo’s cause before him. To no avail.
Does anyone know where I can find a physical copy of “Dissent”? I’ve tried a couple of Barnes & Noble stores, but have had no luck. I’ll have more to say on Glenn’s post after I’ve read Taylor’s piece (and the Kael biography, which I’m halfway through).
That’s a whole ‘nother Jaime up there with the 1st comment – yet, eerily enough, quite in sync with my own views. I myself did narrow and roll my eyes WRT the aspect-ratio wars, given my experience with the physical realities of televisions (in the CRT days and flatscreens of both sorts) and the architectural facts of movie theaters wherein, unlike tweaked-to-the-nth degree screening rooms, most people get to watch films.
Christ, I was hoping this debate would die out by now – I’ll just say that Taylor’s remark about Antonioni is film “criticism” at its worst, a cheap putdown that does the critic a huge disservice rather than adding anything to the discussion. The best film critics don’t just espouse their own personal tastes – they actually help the reader understand films better, especially the ones that lie outside of a person’s comfort zone, the ones that take on challenging viewpoints or take you to unfamiliar territory. Cheap dismissals like that just make a writer look thick and unwilling to look beyond what they know.
And Glenn should be commended on his eloquence (excellent choice of shots).
Is that you, John Wayne? Is this me?
[brainsnap]
- A Viet Cong rat attacks. Obviously, he intends to bring my breakfast under the influence of Communism.-
Gus Hasford RIP
There are perils to both sides of this argument: on one hand, one risks liking the movies they are supposed to like and talking about them the way one is supposed to talk about them; on the other, one risks abandoning the worthy and honourable project of expanding one’s taste. My taste remains my taste as well, Mr. Kois, but that taste is growing more inclusive as I watch ever more widely. I just have to find the right connective tissue. I may not be able to jump from The Dark Knight to There Will Be Blood, but I may get there via, in order, Batman Begins, Blade Runner, Die Hard, L.A. Confidential, City of God, American Psycho, A Clockwork Orange, Animal Kingdom, and No Country For Old Men – and that would be MY path only. Yours?
The juxtaposition of the quote excerpts and screen captures forms the kind of dialectic I have come to love and expect from THIS foo-foo film site. Now, Glenn, could you please turn your attention to the new controversy brewing on whether home viewing is “cinematic” (Brody vs. Lane @ The New Yorker)?
To call Dan Kois a Philisitine is not to bully him. He’s not a gay teenager.
He’s simply a Philistine.
Kael was also a Philistine, but of a far more clever variety as I have indicated here –
http://articles.latimes.com/1994–10-09/books/bk-48087_1_pauline-kael-cowboy-boots-new-yorker
http://articles.latimes.com/1994–10-09/books/bk-48087_1_pauline-kael-cowboy-boots-new-yorker/2
http://articles.latimes.com/1994–10-09/books/bk-48087_1_pauline-kael-cowboy-boots-new-yorker/3
There are a couple things in Charley’s article that don’t sit right with me. (Exhibit A: “It doesn’t matter whether you’re defending ‘The Dark Knight’ or ‘The Tree of Life’ if you declare the people who don’t share your enthusiasm incapable of appreciating movies.” Coming from one of the most opinionated critics around–cf. that Antonioni quote–that takes some real balls.) And I can also see how Glenn might take the line about aspect ratios personally (though God knows there are plenty of other sites that worry about ARs, too). But Taylor’s larger point–that the “democratizing” effects of the Internet haven’t been all that great for either our society or our culture–well, *that* I’d have a hard time arguing with. Without the net and Twitter to keep it alive, Sarah Palin’s flirtation with fame would’ve sputtered out two years ago. Michelle Bachmann? We may never have even heard of her. And in film it’s been nothing short of napalm. For every person who dials up the Siren every day, a hundred are checking out Harry Knowles every hour. I don’t know about y’all, but that pretty much bums me out.
Points well taken, Mr. Block. As some of my readers might recall, I was once a print guy, and nobody gags harder on the cheerful Jeff Jarvis “everyone’s a critic” formulation than I did and do. But let’s get real for a second. Charley—I too consider him a friend, and I hope to remain one, despite this airing of substantial differences—knows exactly who he is and exactly what he’s doing. While I don’t take his swipe at aspect ratio discussions personally as such, I truly doubt that he had the likes of Harry Knowles in his sights when he wrote the piece. “Leave Britney alone!” (substitute “Dan Kois” for “Britney” here) followed by “When I slap Antonioni and his admirers, you’ll take it and like it” are essential components of his critical platform, I believe. Because he is convinced, as Kael was, that his taste is, finally, correct.
Kois and his ilk would be a lot more palatable if they came up with gags as funny as labeling the third Zabriskie Point photo “Blow up”.
Harry Knowles followers have no interest in the cinema whatsoever.
They’re Fanboys looking for a “coolness” fix. Nothing more.
The Siren doesn’t offer that. She’s serious about the cinema – as are you Glenn.
word. up.
Well, I think ZABRISKIE POINT is pretty funny on its own. Everyone remembers the shooting of the cop, the orgy, the exploding house – maybe even Rod Taylor. What few remember, what struck me when I saw it – was how loose and funny and sexy it was, almost entirely free of the weight and obfuscation MA’s naysayers seem to think defines his career in toto.
Sort of unrelated to the main point, but that last Charles Taylor quote comes from a “Holiday DVD” column (“New DVDs To Warm Your Toes By,”) of titles more than a month away from release. It appears that he doesn’t even have the discs yet to “review” – so it’s just a sort of heads up? A little bizarre when most readers interested in the films he is writing about would want to know if the discs are any good – particularly something like Nothing Sacred where prior (publc domain) releases have pretty much sucked. Here’s hoping someone like Dave Kehr writes about the acutal discs.
When I was first discovering his work, I absolutely “consented to be bored by Michelangelo Antonioni,” and quite often was. I was also exhilarated. L’Avventura, the first of his I saw, stayed with me for weeks, even though the experience of watching it was, I’ll admit, more than a little tedious. I watched it again, and fell totally in love with it. Now he’s one of my absolute favorite directors.
Also, Zabriskie Point is a blast. Outside of Blow-Up, it’s probably Antonioni’s most frequently eye-catching movie (and not just because of his subject matter, though hey, a plane like that is any director’s gift, among the film’s other points of interest), it’s gleefully anti-authoritarian, pointedly provocative, and totally free-wheeling. If you haven’t been told what happens in the film, you’d NEVER guess what happens next. Not an instant mark of quality, certainly, but there, Mr. Taylor, is a bit of the pleasure I take in art house cinema.
@ Skelly: You ask: “It appears that he doesn’t even have the discs yet to ‘review’ – so it’s just a sort of heads up?” So it would appear, unless preview discs have been made available awfully early. Given it’s the Times, that’s not out of the question. Given what I know about DVD manufacture relative to release date, it’s highly unlikely. In which case, you know, the write-up is a cherry gig for someone who doesn’t give a fuck about aspect ratios.
“It doesn’t matter whether you’re defending ‘The Dark Knight’ or ‘The Tree of Life’ if you declare the people who don’t share your enthusiasm incapable of appreciating movies.”
Did Taylor, of all people, really say this? I’m going by memory here, but he was always pulling this card out during his Salon days. If I recall correctly, I think that people who disliked Mission to Mars and The Dreamers were utterly incapable of enjoying cinema. Or they didn’t understand the reason for cinema. Or something like that. Taylor has written some great pieces that stuck with me–his Beau Travail review was one of my favorites–but this is one of his worst habits. I’m glad to see that he’s still writing, though. Does he have a regular column somewhere?
For a brief moment I thought the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor had weighed in on these film-critical catfights. It would be bad for an intellectual of that stature to be wrong about Johann Gottfried Herder’s philosophy of language AND Antonioni (while also calling David Bordwell a bully).
NDB: I wouldn’t mind hearing what former Liberian dictator Charles Taylor–or maybe popular style of Converse, Chuck Taylor–thinks about Dan Kois’ article. Perhaps they are also sick of the elites telling them to eat their cultural vegetables.
I rarely comment on any blog/website, but I feel compelled. I loved this. It was akin to comics, the juxtaposition of text and image creates meaning. Thank you.
Glenn’s response to Tom Block’s comment gets it ever-so-slightly wrong: better it read “Because he is convinced, as Kael was, that Kael’s taste is, finally, correct.” All the guy’s ever done is sit around with his hands on the Ouija board trying to conjure up Pauline’s response to whatever he’s supposed to be writing and thinking about.
I think the best, most poignant, and hilarious part of this post is still that final reference to the title of Charley Taylor’s NY Times DVD review piece. “New DVDs to Warm Your Toes By” pretty much says it all, doesn’t it? (And I’m sure that was just an editor picking the title, not CT himself.)
However, I’d like to say that, as someone who finds his share of canonical works “boring” (not the right word, but whatever), I’ve never quite understood Antonioni being regarded as such. He’s certainly, erm, deliberate in his stylistic approach, but there’s also a certain Serie Noire sensibility at work in his films that usually keeps me riveted. You can actually watch an Antonioni film wondering what’s going to happen next.
So if we say Kois is wrong then that is bullying? But if Kois says Takovsky’s films are boring then he is somehow being profound? What a crock.
The only thing I can say to Charles Taylor [and Kois] is there are snobs in the world of film viewing and they aren’t the ones who like Tarkovsky or Antonioni. They are the ones who insist only mainstream Hollywood films should count. For the rest of us who like a wide variety of films from silent to experimental to old and new Hollywood to films from every country on the globe there is a lot to love. Kois will never understand that. His loss.
@ Escher: That’s incredibly true. The Antonioni sneer doesn’t seem felt, just a dutiful bow before the Kael canon. Hence the odd lengths certain Paulettes like Taylor went to find not just “redeeming qualities” in Mission To Mars, but outright greatness. That’s the absolute WORST way to see a critic – not as someone with the time and knowledge to open up YOUR reading of the film via their work, but as someone who lays down unbreakable law.
I used to read Salon pretty regularly back when Taylor wrote there, and I liked a lot of his work, so don’t get me wrong, but at his worst he was pretty bonkers. For example, his review of the decent-but-no-more Ray, which, he thought, could “bring the country together” in the way that Charles fused genres on the C&W record. Maybe it’s just that I’m Australian, but the idea seemed.…INSANE. But that was the other Taylor coming out, I suspect – the Greil Marcus worshipper.
It’d take the (former) Liberian tyrant Charles Taylor, backed up by a legion of amphetamine-fuelled, AK-47-toting child soldiers, to make me sit through ‘Mission to Mars’ again, I know that much.
MISSION TO MARS would be pretty great if it had no dialogue in it. (Unfortunately, it does – lots and lots of almost unspeakably awful dialogue.)
The key difference between many critics is that some of them consider this fact to be a tragedy, whereas others consider it to be Yet Another Sign of De Palma’s Infallible Genius.
“They understand that the true appreciation of any art begins in pleasure”
I was never a fan of Kael let alone Taylor. Yet, I’m always baffled when I hear this logic from critics. Why do we need critics if this is the case? Is their pleasure somehow deeper? Are they born with heightened abilities to feel more than the common man or woman? And of course, most ” pleasure critics” never seem to realize how narrow and proscriptive their ideas of pleasure are. I mean surely there is something wrong with me personally for finding “The Turin Horse” more pleasurable than most films I’ve seen this year.
Poor unfeeling me thinks a critic should articulate taste based on aesthetic judgment grounded in historical knowledge. And perhaps my perspective is warped as a film academic, but I have zero interest in a critic who primarily explains away his/her pleasure even if, like Kael, their prose is good.
I think if it wasn’t for Pauline Kael and her acolytes (I refuse to use that other term) I don’t think people would still be kicking around MISSION TO MARS quite so ruthlessly. Which is my way of saying “I kind of liked it.”
MISSION TO MARS wouldn’t be kicked around quite so ruthlessly by those who resist Kael and her teachings, I should have said.
Back in the olden days, I read a newspaper article saying BLOW UP was the highest grossing movie in the history of Texas drive-ins. Them cowboys just love a glimpse of pubic hair. One can imagine their shouts to Vanessa to move her arms.
Bill, I’ll have to look at “Mission To Mars” again. My most vivid memory of it is the grave-like silence that fell on myself, Kent Jones and J. Hobermas as the credits rolled at the screening at which we were seated together. And it wasn’t as if we had never enjoyed a DePalma film before.
And yes, MA, it’s an inconvenient truth for the Antonioni-hating, “great cinema is popular cinema” Kaelites that “Blow-Up” was a HUGE hit back in the day. Shooing away that fact on account of pubic-hair appeal destroys their whole thesis in a sense, which is a pleasant bonus.
Well now, don’t get your hopes up or anything. I *kind of* liked it, and it’s more that I can’t really understand the vitriol directed towards it. Hell, DePalma himself has done much worse!
ZS, I’m with you. Whatever somebody thinks is “pleasurable” or “fun” or “entertaining” is their business. I’ve always resented the presumptuousness of those who think they have the ability to project their definitions of those terms onto others – whether they’re reviewers or moviegoers who say, “Hey, enjoy it! It’s mindless entertainment!” (As if those two terms should be synonymous.) Kael was ruled by her gut reactions, her taste. That was all that mattered to her. She couldn’t write about directorial style or cinematic technique because she didn’t recognize them and (therefore) didn’t care about them. She had no vocabulary for addressing them. But those are the things that give ME the most pleasure – in watching movies and writing about them.
Nothing wrong with gut reactions or finding something entertaining and it is certainly better to write about something that excites you. However, a good critic doesn’t divorce feeling from systematic analysis. Perhaps more importantly, a good critic evolves his/ her own assumptions about pleasure, which is the opposite of what is implied by that whole Kois nonsense about “my taste remains stubbornly my taste” or Taylor’s deeply problematic notion that pleasure is to be contrasted to the “work” of watching movies. What kind of critic, who presumably watches more movies than the common person, doesn’t change his/her taste as his/her frame of reference expands? Is this the George Bush logic of film criticism: the populist every man you can have a beer with and he never changes his mind?
Any critic or historian of film should work to expand their taste and knowledge. Personally, discovering Andre De Toth’s Westerns have been a great source of cinematic pleasure to me but I had to work to “discover” them.
Certain movies really bring out the pseudo-Lawrentian bullshit in some critics. When “Bring It On” came out, I must’ve heard this line a thousand times: “Kirsten Dunst in a cheerleader’s outfit? What’s not to like!” That there was usually a defensive edge to it made sense–it was almost always a guy in his 40s or 50s who was saying it.
Hahaha. To be fair, that’s about all I remember from “Bring it On”.
@ bill: Agreed, De Palma has done worse, and I don’t particularly dislike Mission To Mars either. I just think it’s occasionally beautiful and occasionally clunky, and, like most films, a mixture of the successful and unsuccessful. It was more the mission from the Paulettes to christen it a misunderstood masterpiece that reeked of misguided effort.
When I go back and read Kael’s rave for Dressed To Kill, the source of her enthusiasm can still (to my eyes) be found in the movie, which holds up brilliantly. I guess it’s about picking the right movie or book or whatever to rally around. Every critic wants their big flag-planting moment, I guess. People still talk about Kael’s opening paragraph of her Last Tango In Paris review. You’ve just got to make sure you don’t pick a middling sci-fi film that can’t carry the weight.
One reason I’m slightly relieved that there’s no digital archive of PREMIERE is that I chose “American Beauty” for my “flag-planting moment.” Boy, did I fuck the monkey there, or what?
Just be lucky you don’t have to grade papers on American Beauty. I’ll be damned if I know why I encounter so many students who love that movie. I’m always tempted to scrawl “WATCH BIGGER THAN LIFE INSTEAD” in red-ink over every page.
Glenn, you flag-planted for American Beauty? Man, that sounds like a monkeyfucking moment if ever there was one.
Or, ZS, you could scrawl “WATCH ‘THE ICE STORM’ INSTEAD”, and persuade them by saying it counts (ever-so-slightly) as a superhero movie.
Unfortunately, THE ICE STORM also counts as an Ang Lee movie.
And as Ang Lee movies go it’s ININITELY better than “He Broke His Back Mounting Him.”
Auteurist alert!
Did anyone else read this re-posting of Martin Scorsese’s 1993 letter to the New York Times? Especially, sadly, prudent.
http://www.cynephile.com/2011/11/why-make-fellini-the-scapegoat-for-new-cultural-intolerance-letter-to-the-new-york-times-25-nov-1993/
From the Criterion Collection essay accompanying ‘The Ice Storm’ DVD:
“Asked by French journalists in a 2001 interview what recent films he most admired, Brian De Palma named Ang Lee’s 1997 ‘The Ice Storm’. It was surprising to hear one of the leaders of a filmmaking revolution that aimed at transforming American cinema in the sixties single out as exemplary a work by a Taiwanese-born director whose first three films were in Mandarin, but De Palma was right.”
Thanks a million for that link Bill!
Holy shit…here’s the Bruce Weber column that Scorsese was responding to.
http://www.nytimes.com/1993/11/07/weekinreview/excuse-me-i-must-have-missed-part-of-the-movie.html?scp=1&sq=%E2%80%9CExcuse%20Me;%20I%20Must%20Have%20Missed%20Part%20of%20the%20Movie%E2%80%9D&st=cse
Scorsese was probably right to focus on the Fellini factor–it *is* a sad fucking statement that the Times would run this a week after he died (or *ever*, for that matter). But as was once said of somebody else’s work, it’s line for line worthless, and it makes Dan Kois look like Andre Gregory.
“Makes Dan Kois look like Andre Gregory,” pretty funny. Well, as Kent Jones, I think, pointed out in one thread, and Luc Sante pointed out on another on my Facebook page, this sorta thing tends to pop up in the Times almost every six months or so. I imagine Kois might be a little surprised that his iteration got all that attention, really. And yeah, Weber WAS a feisty little drip back in the day. But you know, it’s not easy being an in-house or even regular freelance philistine for the Paper of Record; you need good weather-vane reading skills AND rear-view-mirror scanning chops. One decade you get to piss all over Fellini, then years later your Style section is breathlessly expressing its admiration for a SUNY coed whose tortoise-shell specs were chosen in homage to Mastroianni in “La Dolce Vita.” You gotta figure that in his cultural vegetables piece Kois held off on going full retard over Derek Jarman not out of any genuine aesthetic impulse or conscience but from an intuition that it mightn’t be wise to institutionally piss off Tilda Swinton.
Weber’s characterization of Fellini’s work leads me to believe he never saw anything the man made prior to, say, SATYRICON.
Part of Weber’s thesis seems to be something like “it’s okay to be middlebrow if you have ADD.”
And now Kois is pimping Clint Eastwood for the Razzie he so richly “deserves.” As if I needed another reason to be annoyed by this guy (Kois, not Clint): http://www.grantland.com/blog/hollywood-prospectus/post/_/id/36767/razziewatch-clint-eastwood-is-due
“If I recall correctly, [Taylor said] that people who disliked Mission to Mars and The Dreamers were utterly incapable of enjoying cinema.”
Taylor did say this, more or less, but he was actually quoting Armond White: http://www.salon.com/2000/09/29/mission_mars/singleton/
(at least with respect to Mission to Mars)
Fanciful Norwegian: Now that I took a few seconds to look up that Dreamers thing (it was a Top Ten capsule from 2004), I notice that he attributed the remark to a close friend there, as well. He (the friend) said that anyone who doesn’t like The Dreamers doesn’t “deserve” movies. Maybe that was also White?
Must be a weird way to live, believing that anyone who doesn’t share your pleasure has earned your absolute scorn. On the other hand, you know, google-goggle, google-goggle, one of us, etcetera.
And, @jbryant: Yeah, I hear ya, but on the other hand, that whole Kois “Razzie Watch” thing is so sad it’s difficult to get agitated about. Even taking Klosterman into account, seeing it on Grantland is like spotting the “Booger” character from “Revenge of the Nerds” playing triangle with the New York Philharmonic. And on yet another hand, I suppose it…wait for it…PAYS THA DOCTAS BOI!!!!
Given that I winced throughout ‘Mission to Mars’, found ‘Marnie’ a substantial disappointment and haven’t even seen ‘The Dreamers’, I figure I must hate cinema enough to make Mullah Mohammed Omar look like Henri Langois!
I need to learn how to make these “you must hate cinema if you don’t like X arguments.”
If you don’t like “The Garbage Pail Kids Movie then you don’t understand cinema.”
errmmm – is the “Razzie Watch” something to actually GET agitated about? Everyone’s humor MMV, but it reads to me like a deliberate parody of EW-style ‘Oscar Watch’ blather. Then again, right now I’m more down with the classic rock kittens…
Jaime: Yeah, I guess maybe the Razzie Watch thing is a parody after all, but it’s pretty easy to read it and see only the Clint diss, at least the first time through. The only obvious humor to me is the part where it says Kois will be giving a seminar on bad screenwriting at a Lady Foot Locker (which I didn’t see until I re-read it).
So in that case, I’ll revise my annoyance with Kois to include lame humor at the expense of a fine director.
Well, I always arrive late to these parties, fashionably or otherwise.
Revisiting the discussion upthread a piece, somehow “flag-planting” sounds dirtier than “monkey fucking,” and I’m not sure I’d ever want to do either in polite company. Or otherwise. But damned if – in Francis Davis’ sorta slight interview transcription with La Pauline after she retired, AFTERGLOW – La Pauline pretty well aligned with my assessment of both AMERICAN BEAUTY and of critics who extolled that egregiously manipulative swing-and-a-miss at der zeitgeist. That latter assessment, briefly, goes something along the lines of: fuck’s’a matter with you? Though, yes, Ms. Bening was robbed.
I took advantage of my renewed unemployment to run over to Barnes & Noble and read the new Dissent (BTW, WTF’s up with their AWFUL logo? Did Gary Panter’s assistant on Pee-Wee’s Playhouse make it on a Video Toaster in 1989, waiting for the right moment to spring it on Irving Howe?) featuring Mr. Taylor’s essay while ingesting alot of caffeine I couldn’t really afford. I invite you to tell me what he’s on about, much less why Dissent felt the need to run this head-scratcher. Something about the sick soul of film-critical practice with the death of traditional journalistic models in advent of the internet era, a pitched battle between two camps/sensibilities (and two camps, only) – those marching under the banner of noted sensualist and carnivore Dan Kois and the pleasureless goosestepping to the pronouncements of arid meanie, Chairman Boardwell?
It is, as is sometimes said, a notion. I wonder why Mr. Taylor thought it had any bearing on what is actually transpiring on the planet Earth, where, say, Mr. Boardwell’s site and Senses of Cinema aren’t exactly racing up the Alexa charts, even in the narrow cinephile demographic. Sure seems like there’s a whole lotta strata of film critique covered in the flyover between Harry Knowles and Chris Fujiwara – enough, from my cheap seat, to think the overall binary thrust of Taylor’s argument’s crackers, where not deliberately reductionist.
Boy, he sure showed us, though, by finally popping that gaseous Antonioni bubble, didn’t he? Silly, anhedonic sapheads…what WERE we thinking?