Dear Friends,
Apology accepted, Roger. But really I was just teasing you a little. I don’t want you to think I’ve been carrying a grudge all year. To be honest, while I was a bit wounded last December to find myself publicly pre-judged, your skepticism about my hiring was perfectly justified. Had I been in your position, I might have reacted similarly. So next time I’m in Chicago, maybe we can have a beer (selected by David) and talk Bresson and Ozu.
Thanks for the love advice, guys. I haven’t gotten around to Two Family House or Lies yet, but I’ll check them out. And while I liked Pola X (curiously enough one of two French-language film adaptations of Melville novels released in Melville’s homeland this year), the amour was un peut trop fou for my bourgeois sensibilities. As for An Affair of Love, I found it impossibly coy and pretentious: I don’t care if we never see what’s going on behind the hotel door, but why not tell us their damn names? I’m glad, though, to be reminded of High Fidelity, which in turn reminds me (because of the lovely Iben Hjelje) of the Dogma 95 romantic comedy Mifune (a movie I know David hated and Roger liked). There was also, now that I think of it, Sandrine Bonnaire’s desperate passion for the young swimmer played by Sergei Bodrov Jr. in East-West and the romance between the two young boxers in Girlfight–a bit contrived, yes, but their first kiss was one of the better screen smooches I’ve seen in a while. The confused, desperate connection between Samantha Morton and Billy Crudup in Jesus’ Son was also sad and affecting. So maybe it wasn’t such a bad year for love after all.
But Jim, I don’t share your admiration for House of Mirth. Or rather, as Sarah said of Traffic, I admired the movie but didn’t love it. (If I have time to post again, maybe I’ll say more about why). This distinction between admiration and love is an important one, by the way, one that goes to the heart of what we do. Our job, more or less, is both to articulate rational, considered judgments of what we see and to communicate our affective responses to it. Sometimes–often, maybe–the head and the heart are at odds. Just as it’s possible to admire what you can’t love, it’s possible to love what you’re unable to admire. For example, the more I thought about Almost Famous, the more I became aware of its flaws–Sarah, you told me in conversation you found it “soft,” and you were right–but the experience of watching the movie filled me with such pleasure that, like you, Roger, I felt like hugging myself. (To clear up a possible grammatical ambiguity in the last sentence: Roger’s review did NOT say “I liked this movie so much I felt like hugging A.O. Scott.”) The tricky part of writing criticism is doing justice to your own ambivalence while still giving your readers some clear basis for deciding whether or not they should go see the movie.
This morning I watched a bit of Yi Yi on video and found myself agreeing with both Jim and David. There’s an early scene during the brother-in-law’s wedding party shot with a stationary camera a good distance from the dozen or so characters milling around in the rented ballroom. Even on a decent-sized TV screen, you feel as though you need binoculars. And yet there is something about the intimacy of the story and its slowly unfolding complexity that does seem suited to television, which I think can do subtext, David, even if, in its American network incarnation, it usually chooses not to. And as Sarah suggests, to note the affinities between You Can Count on Me and high-quality television is not so much to diminish its achievement as to identify it. I should confess a bias: I would generally much rather watch television than go see a play. Had it been staged, I expect You Can Count on Me would have contained a lot more speechifying and long scenes of the brother and sister reminiscing about their childhood the way characters in plays almost always, and real people almost never, do. Film critics invoke television in a reflexively pejorative way, perhaps because we persist in seeing it as the natural enemy of the art form we cherish. My original question on Wednesday was meant to tease out this unexamined bias, which I think is based on some misguided aesthetic assumptions (as well as some sound ones) and on anxieties that go back at least a generation, if not two. In the ‘50s and ‘60s people feared that TV would kill the movies. But as Jim points out, television has also been a medium that has nurtured and supported filmmakers. This has been the case in Europe more than here, though mention should be made of Tanner 88, Robert Altman (who got his start in series television) and Garry Trudeau’s amazing campaign miniseries for HBO (available on video, though not easy to find), which helped get Altman back into the game in addition to being uncannily prophetic about the political culture of the 1990s. So while Yi Yi is unquestionably a great work of cinema, it’s not automatically an insult to say that it might have been a great miniseries. Berlin Alexanderplatz was a great miniseries, and so was Hanif Kurieshi and Roger Michell’s The Buddha of Suburbia (which was better than the feature film Sammy and Rosie Get Laid in part because the miniseries format allowed for a broader social and historical perspective).
Time is running out, and there are so many loose ends dangling. I was hoping to pick up on Sarah’s mention of Lupe Ontiveros to get back to the discussion of race that David gestured toward in his first post. I was also hoping to offer some words in defense of O Brother Where art Thou? and Dr. T. and the Women … maybe later.
Until then,
Tony
