We Saw This Movie (Film Critics)

Journal sielwolf's Journal: We Saw This Movie (Film Critics) 17

Journal by sielwolf on Saturday August 26, 2006 @10:55PM

"It is to love when it is not there; it is not there and that same abscess sucks down all the rest of you. The powerless, anxiety, furious white heat to be without- that is where love is kept." -Some Book No One Has Written

King of the Streets

So we are now over two months into the Sans Roger Ebert Era. He went in for some post-cancer work, they found something not quite right and he's been hospitalized/bed-ridden since. At some point he'll be ambulatory. At some point he will be back writing again, then on television then out at festivals. I suspect his hope is to make it to Toronto.

What this period has given us is the true sense of how lacking we are in great cinema voices. Film is different than music. Music is aided but does not need Lester Bangs. Why? Spend five minutes and you have listened to a song. Spend a half an hour doing something else, the music in the background (driving, cleaning, doing sinful things to your body over... and over) and you can have an artist's work encapsulated. Now do you know the whole sum of his work? Can you speak profoundly, deeply as you do of things most cherished? No. But you have the inkling of what it is and if you would bump it again.

Movie's aren't that way. They are a long form. Like books, casual users don't have the luxury to spend plowing through every last movie on the planet. The time to go to a theater and see every multiplex offering. To catch them when *oops!* they're off the screen and now you get to wait four months for it to pop up on DVD (or, ahem, just happen to fish it off of some sort of mutual-exchange network). You can't take Shawshank and summarize it with ten 30 second snippets. It don't work.

So we need critics. Someone to inform us. And, man... far far in the future, when we are done of Roger Ebert... the days look black.

The folks running RogerEbert.com where so nice to point out some of Ebert's favorite critics but just reading those who've stood in for him? *shudder* Watch the show. Roeper's as plastic as ever. The rotating wall of guests is even worse. Jay Leno? Kevin Smith?

Now leading up to Roger's absence I had begun reading the Scanners Blog, the Blog of Ebert's Editor, Jim Emerson. I guess he ran some site before showing up there, does a little more Hollywood high school drama talk, and had worked with Microsoft on some cinema product they once had. It's kind of interesting. He was mentioned on Colbert (if that means anything to any of you). He's doing this "Opening Shots" series of movies. Kind of an interesting idea. Most folks would be hard pressed to tell you what the opening shot of their favorite movie is (mine is easy. It's Nic Cage getting thrown in front of a police photography wall). Something to pass the time between Roger's new reviews on Fridays, his random interviews and Sunday where he either does a Great Movie or the Movie Answer Man.

With Roger gone, Emerson has taken over some of Ebert's reviews on Friday. And they are... hmmm. Let's come back to that.

Reading is for Fuckos

A couple of days ago, Emerson posted an entry about the "Death of Film Criticism". Now there's a lot of this going around, most of the same "Post Crisis on Infinite Eberts" alternative storyline we are living in right now. The whole post starts off by laughing at the stat that "among 18- to 24-year-olds, only 3% said reviews were the most important factor in their movie-going decision making." Emerson makes the good point about how that is a straw man as it doesn't A. make reference to 'is 3% up or down?' and B. where does criticism rank as the second or third and averaged overall? It is quite possible that the #1 factor for most people is what their friends say while criticism turns out to be #2 by like 84%. Who knows. Like all statistics in vacuum, they get sucked into the ether. Emerson then theorizes about how people actually use film criticism. It seems that most people use it post hoc: going back and getting a reading on a movie they just watched. He then goes even further to say that most people who really really read reviews are a more select group who not only love movies (as everyone is a "big movie fan") but love them so much that they want to read about them, discuss them and persue other insights. So that's fine-

But Emerson continues on, and on (into a second long rambling entry) and after a point my eyes start glazing over and my mind starts drifting and I realize:

I don't like this guy's fucking writing.

And then I realize something more:

I really don't read the reviews he writes.

And then a third thought came to me:

This guy doesn't seem to realize where is paycheck comes from.

Now, granted, there is a film literature culture out there. People who like to talk about mis-en-scene, diegetic v. nondiegetic and all sorts of shit. These are the high dialogue people. Meanwhile there is also the bulk of folks who go and watch movies. So let me throw out a question out there:

Which one of those two groups will write to a film critic (say, Roger Ebert) forcing his editor to review them (say, a Jim Emerson type)?

Probably the first, right? Unless the critic says something that riles up the mainstream reader (say like some statement they think is insulting or inflammatory), the mainstream reader probably will read the critics reviews and return the words with silence. Of course, this is just hypothesizing. It is as plausible as Emerson's theory of "only film buffs really read reviews" and until someone actually goes out and does a scientific survey, we are basically pissing right into the wind. But my theory at least explains why Emerson, as Ebert's editor, might have said bias based upon who writes and who doesn't.

But I think the numbers bear out that a lot more people than just the film buffs read Ebert, mostly because so much of Ebert's output is... well, pedestrian. Anyone ever pick up Ebert's big fat books of reviews? Sort of basic. They aren't Leonard Maltin's regurgitation of marketing but they aren't piercing analysis... the sort of piercing analysis a film fan would want. Hmmm, looking at my bags and bags of books on my office floor (note: must hit up IKEA for some Billy bookshelves here soon) I see two dozen film books and not one Ebert book. Even Ebert's Great Movies books I don't have. For one, I can read them online at any time. But more importantly if I want to read about the works of Scorsese I'm going to get a big fucking book on Scorsese. I'm probably going to get three, each with a different angle (say one that is all interviews or one that is written by a psychotic Hungarian mute). Ebert distills whatever he has to say about a movie into 800 words. A film fan is going to want more.

But wait, I said that I read his Great Movie reviews every Sunday, right? So why do I do that?

How Ebert Works, In a Deeply Technical Way (With Graphics)

Well, because there is a difference in this world between the thing call Analysis and the thing called Opinion. And that is the crux that is hidden between all these talk of "what the fuck is a Film Critic?"

Frankly, depending on who you ask, a Film Critic is can either be an Analyst or the Opinionated. And we all know this. We can list off film critics and comfortably push them as being more predominantly in either camp:

The Analysts (who seem to stem from a film criticism pedigree and approach each movie as if part of the great pantheon of Cinema): Dargis, A O Scott, Elvis Mitchell, Roeper, Maltin.

The Opinion-Givers (who are your standard internet/fanboy types who view everything from the scope of being huge geeks on stuff and derive their view of every movie through the spectrum of their own self-viewed movie mythos): Harry Knowles, Kevin Smith.

And this isn't some black and white thing. Everybody has a bit of both objective and subjective in them. But usually what you get is a dose of one or the other. A lot of the film geek sites (say, Filmthreat) will write a review arbitrarily analytically or subjectively. Shit, most alternoweekly reviews are the same way. Usually it is something that a guy is pissing his boot-cuts to talk about or he just wants to use it to flex what he learned in Film 201 last week. That's usually worse. You got no idea what you're getting when you click the link. It's film review via Dr Jekyll and Mr Dumbass.

This is where the genius of Roger Ebert lies: he always writes as a dialectic. Ok, you know he's got the long tooth film criticsm chops. But he wasn't trained in film criticsm. He's got his degree in Literature with experience in Journalism. He was only going to get a doctorate in Film when the Sun-Times critic job opened up.

So we have a Schrodinger's Cat: Ebert is both deep within the film world (30-40 years writing, books, television) and yet an outsider. He's a literate fanboy. And that's what we get from his writing. The fact he has an English and Journalism background just aids him in the task he has at hand: conveying what he thought of a movie.

Coming back to the idea of him being a dialectic, Ebert's reviews always come out as a synthesis between the antithetical Analytical and Opinionated components. You can hear them both between the lines, fighting it out. He only pens who, this time, comes out on top.

So if a movie strikes him as being really well made... but some technical thing sticks out to him? He'll write and grade it on that. However if he sees a movie as a turd... but it has something redeeming, he'll write that too. He'll tell you if he was surprised, underwhelmed, blown away. He'll tell you if he spent his time thinking of something else or if a note was struck in him and it went back to something else that he had read a long while ago... You can read Ebert and the words are inescapably his.

Now he's momentarily out of the picture, and we can see that such writing in movies is a rare rare thing.

What Happened?

Maybe he's just an old salt and doesn't give a damn but... shit, most of the writing out there seems so... desperate. Who wrote this and why? No, no, get off my leg and just leave me alone. I don't want to love you. I'll never love you, not as long as you keep trying to force me to play these insipid games.

Let me give you an example and we'll go back to Jim Emerson's fill-in reviews, specifically his review of Factotum . He didn't like it. But he gave it the weakest sort of star rating: 2.5. That's the bare minimum rating to get a thumbs up on At the Movies. WTF? Grow a goddamn pair!

Of course it will take you to the third to last paragraph to start to get anything other than a basic plot-for-plot reading of the movie. Up until that point Emerson just kind of goes on about what goes on in the movie and who is in it and how they are all kind of good actors and, oh yeah... I didn't like it.

Wha? 800 words and that's it? Talk about the most pitiful missionary thrusting. You could at least eat us out a little bit before rolling off and going to sleep. Too much needless foreplay. We only have 800 words and they have to count.

And for... Bukowski? Shit... ok, here, let me show you how to purr her engine:

Factotum: it's an adaptation of the Charles Bukowski collection of the same name. You know Bukowski right? Bukowski was a slob, scarred by hideous adolescent acne... went from shit job to shit job, drank in dive bars, fucked ugly women, bet too much, lived in the heat and desolation of urban pity... and wrote some of the most beautiful words about it. Ham on Rye, Burning in Water, Drowning in Flame. Bukowski was the best poet of the second half of the century. He talked about banging gash, horrible luck, the victories only a drunk could celebrate 'cause that was the only light that shown into that damned world. Bukowski. My favorite Bukowski, called "Dog":

a single dog walking alone on a hot sidewalk of summer appears to have the power of ten thousand gods. why is this?

See, Emerson? That's how you explain to people why they would make a fucking movie about some drunk-ass poet. You then tell them that Mickey Rourke's film career pivoted on him playing Bukowski in Barfly. You tell them that Bukowski hated it (because Bukowski never got women like Faye Dunaway) and so he wrote about it, in Hollywood. You talk about the fantastic Bukowski documentary Born into This. Shit, you LINK to the FOUR STAR REVIEW of that documentary by THE VERY CRITIC WHO'S AEGIS YOU ARE WRITING UNDER!!!

People make movies about writers and poets because of some fundamental hunger those artists sate in them and others. You give those unfamiliar those words so that they too might be intrigued. How they might go in naked and yet come out fed and clothed. Art sometimes accomplishes that.

But Emerson don't read. Ok, maybe he "does". He might look at books and capture some of their knowledge. But there seems no wisdom. Even if forced to read Bukowski you take that bit away as to, theoretically, why someone would read it. But Emerson doesn't do that. Ebert does. Shit, go read his reviews of Sylvia or The Rules of Attraction . Ebert is a man of letters. He has a life outside of movies, before movies.

Emerson is just a film dork, as all those Analysts and Opinionated are too. And that means he has nothing to say about a movie about a poet.

Until the end: "How many people still read Bukowski in their 30s, 40s and beyond?"

Are you a goddamn bitch? Especially when following it with this sentence: "I sometimes imagine him as a case of arrested development -- as if the Tom Waits of the '70s, who made boozy atmospheric records like 'Closing Time,' 'Nighthawks at the Diner' and 'Small Change,' had never developed the richer, more mature and poetic music of 'Rain Dogs,' 'Alice' and 'Blood Money.'"

Again, did you see Born into This ? In that movie Tom Waits talks about how important Bukowski was and still is to him and reads some of his favorite pieces. Tom Waits... 57 at the time of filming Born into This.

Emerson fundamentally misses any sort of connection between Bukowski and Tom Waits. And he fundamentally misses the mark as to why anyone would read a movie review.

The Home Stretch

The worst sort of information you can get is that which someone thinks you "want to hear". The worst author is one who writes to appease an audience. It might not be his audience but some golden ring of an audience that he pines for.

Analysts... Opinionated all write what people want to hear. The Analysts write to preserve the canon of the Great Film Pantheon. They watch a movie, they are supposed to give an instant analysis as to where in the great scheme of moviedom it belongs. Of course like all hipsters, this leaves them unable to distinguish between fads and truly unique art. The subjective are just as bad, only they try to do it for the basic political clout of their get and genus. TEH STREETS IZ WATCHIN! and all that fake posturing white rapboy talk. They are often the victims of genre and expectations similar but different than those previous more academic types.

Rereading Emerson's review of Factotum you can see how he fails in both aspects. He writes from the start about the movie in rote humble tones. He gives you the movie as it is. He tells you that Matt Dillon is a good actor. We know he is a good actor because the Academy said so. We ignore the fact he is a wooden robot who has been boring and generic in everything that he's done. Lili Taylor and Marisa Tomei are given two sentences. The words: positive... but uncommited. Emerson gives us the nod to Bukowski but his heart isn't in it.

At the end he drops that bit about "How many still read..." and Tom Waits. You can feel the fucking wink-wink-nudge-nudge coming at you. No one really likes this stuff. Don't worry, I can namecheck Tom Waits (wherever that came from) and Burroughs. Of course he doesn't mention one thing that isn't related by one degree from a movie (Burrough's Naked Lunch and Tom Waits is knee-deep in Jim Jarmusch movies as an actor and orchestrator). Frankly, that reading and listening sounds like the reading and listening you do because you saw the movie first. One degree of seperation. Outside the walls of cinema... there is no interest.

So his writing is flat and childish and stupid and, most of all, derivative. And now I understand why I couldn't finish his two part Death of Film Criticsm journal. It is derivative and boring. Reading it and I get the mistaken sense of deja vu. There is humanity there, but it isn't his. No, he's regurgitating some other authors past and cobbled them together like some run around the Turing Test.

And that is why Film Criticism in the mainstream suffers. I wouldn't call up Jim Emerson to find out what he thought about a movie because he's got no goddamn opinion worth anything. Either you're going to get some hacked together film crit spiel or some doggy blogsphere trill. Hang up the phone, no words; there is white static at the other end. Recombining the parts of other people only makes you Frankenstein's monster, not a whole new person. People like this are an absence. Everywhere, they are unstoppable, a great sea of nothing. It is pollution, spilling up, outwards. It tastes like a narcotic: flavorless, chalky, as asprin does. You only want to sleep, sleep. Death and sleep. It's all there is. Echoes of great glaciers once that came down from the North.

We kill for souls, for others, for them to understand us. For understanding, we kill for. That's how it is, to be at sea- drifting. You dip your hand down into the water and drink it. But it does not fortify you. Your spirit rejects it. There is no nourishment, damn whatever they say.

And we don't demand that we are siblings with critics. I don't want them to tell me my opinion. I'm damn fine with the fact that Ebert likes movies made in Chicago or anime. It is because that is his shape. I recognize it. I can look at a movie and look at what he says about it. Great strings tie them together, strings tie us all to them. I can read his review, have him say he loved it, and make damn sure I won't see it. I fucking hate Paul Haggis. Ebert jizzing about Haggis' effect is a strong propholactic against me making the mistake of throwing down hard earned cash. I can see his spirit wrestling with the movie the same way I watch my friends wrestle with them.

That's why we read critics: for a known quantity. A known quantity with a touch of expertise. So he might not like Frat Pack movies. I don't care. But if he gives one a good review... aren't you the bit curious why?

There: the horizon. Ships.

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