So, a movie-blogger writing about film criticism is an exercise in "iffy-ness." I've done it in the past and it's usually been to regale some pixel-inanity criticizing a movie that I'm in the opposite camp about. Rather than make my own arguments on my side, I'll ridicule the thinking on the other. That's lazy. It's also spiteful and a bit tribal. But, I do it, anyway. (Because, damn it! "Somebody on the Internet is wrong!")
Yet, film critics DO have a habit of taking other writers in their fields to task for not being as brilliant as they are. In their efforts to make themselves look better, the inevitable result is they make themselves look worse.
Well, here's my opportunity to do just that. Lucky you.
“But when people say of a “big” movie like High Noon that it has dated or that it doesn’t hold up, what they are really saying is that their judgment was faulty or has changed. They may have overresponded to its publicity and reputation or to its attempt to deal with a social problem or an idea, and may have ignored the banalities surrounding that attempt; now that the idea doesn’t seem so daring, they notice the rest. Perhaps it was a traditional drama that was new to them and that they thought was new to the world; everyone’s “golden age of movies” is the period of his first moviegoing and just before—what he just missed or wasn’t allowed to see.”
I've read a lot of Pauline Kael and she's a fine writer and I find her entertaining. The problem comes when she's wrong, just wrong. Kael wrote less about movies, and more about her opinion of movies. This is a nuanced thing. I've often used the quote Roger Ebert cadged from Robert Warshow: "A man goes to a movie. The critic must be honest enough to admit he is that man." That is, there is no way to separate your writing about a movie with your opinion of it, informed or otherwise. You bring your history, your knowledge...and your failings...to every tap of a key. Whether those opinions are pertinent to the discussion, well, that's another matter.
“I would suggest that when a movie so clearly conceived as a new version of a legend is attacked as historically inaccurate, it’s because it shakes people a little. I know this is based on some pretty sneaky psychological suppositions, but I don’t see how else to account for the use only against a good movie of arguments that could be used against almost all movies. When I asked a nineteen-year-old boy who was raging against the movie as “a cliché-ridden fraud” if he got so worked up about other movies, he informed me that that was an argument ad hominem. And it is indeed. To ask why people react so angrily to the best movies and have so little negative reaction to poor ones is to imply that they are so unused to the experience of art in movies that they fight it.”
Kael had her history, but also her prejudices. She would champion the new, but should that film-maker go in a direction she thought they shouldn't, or they up-ended her expectations, she could be savage in her denunciations. The question arises: who's at fault, the film-maker or the reviewer? One thing is objectivity going into a movie; one should not go in pre-prejudiced. That goes with anything, despite the temptations of already knowing the director, genre, or—and this is a tough one—going to see a sequel or a remake. Going in with a prejudice can kill the surprise or the effort placed in a movie. The only prejudice be that you're the one seeing it. To paraphrase Buckaroo Banzai: "No matter what movie you go to, there you are."
Just as one goes in objectively, you will exit subjectively. There should be only one way out and one way in. Don't go through the wrong door.
"Discriminating moviegoers want the placidity of nice art—of movies tamed so that they are no more arousing than what used to be called polite theatre… This is, of course, a rejection of the particular greatness of movies: their power to affect us on so many sensory levels that we become emotionally accessible, in spite of our thinking selves. Movies get around our cleverness and our wariness; that’s what used to draw us to the picture show. Movies—and they don’t even have to be first-rate, much less great—can invade our sensibilities in the way that Dickens did when we were children, and later, perhaps, George Eliot and Dostoevski, and later still, perhaps, Dickens again. They can go down even deeper—to the primitive levels on which we experience fairy tales. And if people resist this invasion by going only to movies that they’ve been assured have nothing upsetting in them, they’re not showing higher, more refined taste; they’re just acting out of fear, masked as taste. If you’re afraid of movies that excite your senses, you’re afraid of movies.”
It seems like Kael was trying to do that, going up the down staircase. The review that got her a job was a piece blasting Charlie Chaplin's Limelight. The editor (or whoever hired her) found it funny. Which says a lot. About hiring practices and the value placed on film criticism.
History has not been kind to Kael in the way that it is to most criticism: Time determines value, and her writing hasn't aged in the normal way in that works of worth have far outlasted her attempts to dismiss them; her instances of high-praise now seem short-sighted—her breathless comparing of the premier of Last Tango in Paris with the premier of Stravinsky's "The Rite of Spring" ("The movie breakthrough has finally come. Bertolucci and Brando have altered the face of an art form.") now seems fannish and the extremes of hyperbolism (we won't even get into her lack of noting the film seems to ignore any issues about the role of women in the film, begins with a rape, and devolves into a nightmare of a man's fantasy).
Maybe it was Kael showing her age—or better, her era. Just as she triumphantly belittled Bosley Crowther for his tut-tutting of Bonnie and Clyde*, she was caught being gob-smacked by a foreign film featuring the Method Dionysus, Brando. Both Crowther and Kael betrayed their times and their limitations. And what should have been her lasting legacy, her essay "Raising Kane," is now notable for its lack of creditation to sources, and its hap-hazard grasping at visual straws. It was its own quixotic attempt at tilting at windmills...that had already been shown to be windmills. She added nothing to any argument about established credits except gossip, and second-hand gossip at that. In grasping for a subject for an assignment about "The Greatest Film Ever Made" she chose to muck-rake and stir ashes rather than give the subject its due. She seemed surprised but not remorseful at the push-back that erupted after its publication. One wonders if her attitude towards Tango would have changed over the years. One would hope so. "The critic must be honest enough to admit he is that man."
“A good movie can take you out of your dull funk and the hopelessness that so often goes with slipping into a theatre; a good movie can make you feel alive again, in contact, not just lost in another city. Good movies make you care, make you believe in possibilities again. If somewhere in the Hollywood-entertainment world someone has managed to break through with something that speaks to you, then it isn’t all corruption. The movie doesn’t have to be great; it can be stupid and empty and you can still have the joy of a good performance, or the joy in just a good line. An actor’s scowl, a small subversive gesture, a dirty remark that someone tosses off with a mock-innocent face, and the world makes a little bit of sense. Sitting there alone or painfully alone because those with you do not react as you do, you know there must be others perhaps in this very theatre or in this city, surely in other theatres in other cities, now, in the past or future, who react as you do. And because movies are the most total and encompassing art form we have, these reactions can seem the most personal and, maybe the most important, imaginable.”
But, how much fun would that be?
The movie gets off on the wrong foot by starting with Harry Knowles, who made a cottage industry for himself with his blog "Ain't It Cool News." Knowles likes to think of himself as a critic, but, more, he's reminiscent of those folks who did little shows about movies who might get a guest, a couple of clips and then gush about the thing no matter how good it was, like he was more of a press agent (or one's accomplice). And I've never been a fan of "Entertainment News," as it seems they send the interns to do it. Then, there is that partition of writers who are there merely to get their name next to a blurb on a poster—"The Feel-Good Hit of the Summer!!☆☆☆☆☆"—and a became such a joke when the internet hit with glowing words from the Picayune Star-Shopping Guide that the studios just stopped the practice; it was becoming too bald a lie and a joke. Not a fan. It immediately put me off the movie.
There is homage made to James Agee and Bosley Crowther, especially how Crowther became the target of much venom from more cosmopolitan critics who found his fuddy reaction to Bonnie and Clyde too un-hip. But Crowther operated mostly under the Hays Code era and treated the restricted envelope-pushers as stunt-productions like under the control of Otto Preminger. The Sarris-Kael wars are gone over. The rise of Siskel and Ebert in the media. But no Judith Crist. No Gene Shalit. No Leonard Maltin. Probably crowded the simplistic narrative to include them.
What's surprised me was the smug attitude of the interviewed that what they wrote was the "from the screen's image to my pen" sense of ownership and authorship. Nothing they do would be without the movies—who would be reading them if not for the source? No mention that what they write is done under deadline and, as such, is the "rough draft" of opinion, the naked "first impression." Nothing is said of length-restrictions. Nobody's asked "ever had to compromise your perspective for space?" Nobody's asked about editorial pressure. No, it's all "my first movie was..." and "Movies move me because..."
It's all about "me" but you get enough of that whenever you read their stuff—it has to be about them as much as it is about the movie, or rather their reaction to it. For once, ask them about The Movies as a phenomenon. Ask them how that art-form of the moving image will keep going long after their words catch bird-droppings and the internet carrier servers have been wiped.
Ask them if they're just glad they have a job. Ask them what the responsibility of their job is.
Robert Forster was acting in his first movie and it was Reflections in a Golden Eye directed by John Huston. Forster nervously asked Huston what he should do and Huston invited the actor to look through the camera viewfinder at the frame to be photographed. "Fill it up" was his response.
Just be careful what you fill it up with.
* "It is a cheap piece of bald-faced slapstick comedy that treats the hideous depredations of that sleazy, moronic pair as though they were as full of fun and frolic as the jazz-age cut-ups in Thoroughly Modern Millie... Such ridiculous, camp-tinctured travesties of the kind of people these desperadoes were and of the way people lived in the dusty Southwest back in those barren years might be passed off as candidly commercial movie comedy, nothing more, if the film weren't reddened with blotches of violence of the most grisly sort... This blending of farce with brutal killings is as pointless as it is lacking in taste, since it makes no valid commentary upon the already travestied truth. And it leaves an astonished critic wondering just what purpose Mr. Penn and Mr. Beatty think they serve with this strangely antique, sentimental claptrap."
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