Long Facsinating Essay on the Failure of Modern Film Criticism

[Eric P]

I think that's a gay porn star?

looks like a vg journo

[Oblivion]

i have no idea who that is

http://malstrom.50webs.com/theblueoceanarticles.htm

[Fresh Prince]

Usually I just write down what I like about a movie, what I don't like. I'm not getting payed for my shitty reviews, which is why this guy has a leg up on me

This reeks of the 'noble amateur' sentiment that has swept over society in recent years. 

[Phoenix Dark]

Usually I just write down what I like about a movie, what I don't like. I'm not getting payed for my shitty reviews, which is why this guy has a leg up on me

This reeks of the 'noble amateur' sentiment that has swept over society in recent years. 

There's nothing noble about it from my perspective, but I see what you're saying. Everyone is capable of explaining why they liked or didn't like something. It's based off individual perspective.

[TVC15]

I think that's a gay porn star?

looks like a vg journo

That's a shame.  I was picturing a maelstrom of cocks and assholes and semen swirling down restless vortexes.

[Cheebs]

PD doesn't write rave reviews for whatever empty rom-com or adam sandler movie is out at the moment and mock everything else at least. Although he loves Matilda.....

[Phoenix Dark]

Matilda is like the best children's movie of the 90s

[Smooth Groove]

Cheebs is right, but this is still a shoot-the-messenger affair. He may be a shitty critic - in fact he's clearly worse than I am - but that doesn't disqualify him from having a broad opinion on what film criticism is.

That actually does disqualify him.  If he can't tell a good film apart from a bad one, how can I trust what he says about others' perceptions of films?

You can't tell people how to watch a film unless you knew how to do it yourself.  

[Cheebs]

Cheebs is right, but this is still a shoot-the-messenger affair. He may be a shitty critic - in fact he's clearly worse than I am - but that doesn't disqualify him from having a broad opinion on what film criticism is.

That actually does disqualify him.  If he can't tell a good film apart from a bad one, how can I trust what he says about others' perceptions of films?

You can't tell people how to watch a film unless you knew how to do it yourself.  

This is the point I was trying to make, but made far better than I ever could.

[TVC15]

This thread sucks.  Let me save it.

spoiler (click to show/hide)

[close]

[Don Flamenco]

started it, but can't really muster the energy to read this kind of shit anymore. all kinds of media criticism just feels fruitless.  then criticism of criticism is like going into negative fruit.  so that I actually lose fruit by reading it.   not that it isn't important for it to exist.

[Mandark]

I actually wound up reading the whole thing but didn't get around to posting.

It's not all bad.  "Intense pretense at intellectualizing what is basically a hobby" sums up a lot of geek videogame/movie/genre fiction criticism quite nicely.

But I don't like the alternative he's suggesting.  For all the talk of having a "heart-to-heart" and wanting movies to be something "to talk about" that "affirm our humanity" I think he's got another agenda going on.

I mean, yikes:

What we don’t talk about when we talk about movies these days reveals that we have not moved past the crippling social tendency that 1990s sociologists called Denial. The most powerful, politically and morally engaged recent films (The Darjeeling Limited, Private Fears in Public Places, World Trade Center, The Promise, Shortbus, Ask the Dust, Akeelah and the Bee, Bobby, Running Scared, Munich, War of the Worlds, Vera Drake) were all ignored by journalists whose jobs are to bring the (cultural) news to the public. Instead, only movies that are mendacious, pseudo-serious, sometimes immoral or socially retrograde and irresponsible (4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, Army of Shadows, United 93, Marie Antoinette, Zodiac, Last Days, There Will Be Blood, American Gangster, Gone Baby Gone, Letters From Iwo Jima, A History of Violence, Tarnation, Elephant) have received critics’ imprimatur.

That reads like a fatwa, not an opening for a dialogue.

I'm reading this mostly as another case of someone in print media (news reporter, op-ed writer, sports columnist), with academic and professional credentials, bemoaning how the net has allowed self-publishers to ruin everything.

Yeah, most bloggers are for crap.  But it's hard not to read this as someone who used to have a privileged cultural niche who's now demanding that we repair the institutional barriers that kept people from usurping their rightful place in the universe.

That's why he says the online reviewers are "too autodidactic" and chides people for missing the Biblical (and only correct) reading of NCFOM.  He wants deference (the phrase "heroic film cricitism" is downright narcissistic) but instead of winning people over with his superior intellect, empathy, and articulation, he's throwing a bitch fit instead.

[The Fake Shemp]

That reads like a fatwa, not an opening for a dialogue.

I always felt that film critics were people that wanted to make films, but just weren't good enough.

[Bildi]

They should start as actors.  I hear that's a good way to get into directing.

[Flannel Boy]

Print publications restructuring to keep up with the web have dismissed or offered buyouts to noticeable numbers of employees, including critics. Trimming these fatted ranks is a result of basic disrespect for criticism as both a true journalistic profession and a necessary intellectual practice.

Yes, newspaper and magazine publishers are laying off some of his colleagues because they disrespect his noble profession, not because of declining readership and massive financial losses.

TOOL

[Mandark]

That reads like a fatwa, not an opening for a dialogue.

:lol

I always felt that film critics were people that wanted to make films, but just weren't good enough.

They probably want to write, at least.

I was going to write something about how I like criticism but how critics can get insufferable when they demand equal or higher standing than the moviemakers themselves.  Then I realized I was just going to be stealing Peter O'Toole's speech from Ratatouille.  :/

[Don Flamenco]

wow i killed this thread

sorry

just make another post agreeing with the article and everybody = thread revived!

[Tauntaun]

wow i killed this thread

sorry

no worries boo, 

[Don Flamenco]

wow, this article was amazing

I am in agreement.  The rich vocabulary and esoteric observations that are not observable when directly examining the subject matter really gave me the feeling that I simply don't understand the art of telling people whether something is good or bad, which I like.

[Great Rumbler]

Wait, wait, wait...the original article was by Armond White? THE Armond White? The same Armond White that loved Land of the Lost, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, Transformers 2 and Terminator Salvation but hated Iron Man, The Dark Knight, Star Trek, and Hellboy 2? That loved Dance Flick and Bedtime Stories but hated Up, WALL-E and The Hangover? That hated The Wrestler, Gran Torino, Milk, Slumdog Millionaire, Encounters at the End of the World, In Bruges, There Will Be Blood, Sweeney Todd, Before the Devil Knows Your Dead, Zodiac, Gone Baby Gone, Michael Clayton, The Assassination of Jesse James, Eastern Promies, 3:10 to Yuma, Doubt, Stardust, Hairspray, Knocked Up and Sunshine but loved War, I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry, and Fantastic Four 2? THAT Armond White?

 

[Great Rumbler]

 

Land of the Lost:

Instead of shouting, “Eureka!” Rick Marshall (Will Ferrell) exclaims, “Capt. Kirk’s nipples!” Is that enough to ride the coattails of the much-inferior Star Trek movie?

Yet pop-culture affection is felt consistently from Ferrell’s homages— to both A Chorus Line and Cher’s “Believe”—to McBride (the white Mike Epps) enjoying a time-warp benefit that could have come from a classic Hope-Crosby road movie.

Up:

All this deflated cinema and Pixarism mischaracterizes what good animation can be, as in Coraline, Monster House, Chicken Little,Teacher’s Pet,The Iron Giant).

This way, Pixar disgraces and delimits the animated film as a mushy, silly pop form.What used to be ridiculed as sentimental excess in old Disney animation now comes disguised in the latest technology— which excites consumerist audiences who revere technology as the true achievement of capitalism, if not Americanism.

Dark Knight:

We’re way beyond film noir here. The Dark Knight has no black-and-white moral shading. Everything is dark, the tone glibly nihilistic (hip) due to The Joker’s rampage that brings Gotham City to its knees—exhausting the D.A. and nearly wearing-out Batman’s arsenal of expensive gizmos. Nolan isn’t interested in providing James Bond–style gadgetry for its own ingenious wonder; rather, these crime battle accoutrements evoke Zodiac-style “process” (part of the futility and dread exemplified by the constantly outwitted police). This pessimism links Batman to our post-9/11 anxiety by escalating the violence quotient, evoking terrorist threat and urban helplessness. And though the film’s violence is hard, loud and constant, it is never realistic—it fabricates disaster simply to tease millennial death wish and psychosis.

Watching psychic volleys between Batman, Dent and The Joker (there’s even a love quadrangle that includes Maggie Gyllenhaal’s slouchy Assistant D.A., Rachel Dawes) is as fraught and unpleasurable as There Will Be Blood with bat wings. This sociological bloodsport shouldn’t be acceptable to any thinking generation.

There hasn’t been so much pressure to like a Batman movie since street vendors were selling bootleg Batman T-shirts in 1989. If blurbs like “The Dark Knight creates a place where good and evil—expected to do battle—decide instead to get it on and dance” sound desperate, it’s due to the awful tendency to convert criticism into ad copy—constantly pandering to Hollywood’s teen demographic. This not only revamps ideas of escapist entertainment; like Nolan, it corrupts them.

But how great of an actor was Ledger to accept this trite material in the first place?

[recursivelyenumerable]

i always wondered if he was doing a self-conscious parody of contrarian film criticism.  i'm waiting for his giant YHBT declaration.