I returned to the site to find a flood of new comments, which I will attempt to catch up with by addressing each of my honorable colleagues in turn
David–
Well, we disagree about George Washington, but since you genuinely didn’t like it, I think you should have said so. Not slamming it because you thought it had a small chance of finding an audience is, I think, the wrong decision; David Gordon Green is obviously one of the year’s most noticed new directors and like all newcomers can benefit as much from criticism as from praise. Also, in the case of such films, all publicity is good publicity.
Which leads me to wonder, why can’t we devise a name for art-alternative-independent-foreign-documentary films? Since “B” movies are well known but “A” movies never caught on, why not call these other worthy titles Category A movies (for art/alternative)? Such movies always seem to get lost in murky categories and off-putting nomenclature. Naming them Category A (or anything memorable, for that matter) would be useful because then a cachet would attach to attending them.
There is a difference between digital projection and digital filmmaking. I am enthusiastic about the latter because it provides a way to make movies on smaller budgets, and I agree with you that Chuck & Buck is an excellent example. Time Code was more interesting as a demonstration than as a film. (Are you looking forward to the next four-screen simultaneous slice of life?) But both films were exhibited on celluloid. I have seen digital projection, and it is simply not the way I prefer to see movies in a theater and will not be for a very long time to come.
Only one more word on this subject: MaxiVision 48, discussed here last year, now has strong sponsorship and new financing while the digital projection boom seems to have stalled.
Tony–
First of all, it is true I am not “the only Chicago-based critic” to have expressed a negative view about your being hired by the Times, but full disclosure compels me to say that at the time I was extremely disappointed that Dave Kehr did not get the job (reportedly because of ageism, although who knows), and so I got smart-ass about you with Salon. The fact is, your movie reviews have been as good as your book reviews, and I am ashamed to have spoken so recklessly. I sent an apology via one of your in-laws who I happened to meet, but this is a better way to make amends.
As for Rosenbaum’s argument, he is both right and wrong–right that the mainstream neglects what we will call Category A films, and wrong that it should not devote so much time to Hollywood product. Most of the people who read most of our publications most of the time mostly want to read about big new Hollywood movies with stars in them. It is our job to satisfy that demand, in theory with reviews helping them to further evolve as filmgoers. (The critic is essentially a teacher.) Having covered those popular releases, however, we should also review Category A films in the same way (with the same headline sizes, shall we say). Your citation of the Times’ handling of Hamlet is an admirable example.
Where Rosenbaum and I (and you) differ is on the films themselves. I do not believe Kiarostami’s The Taste of Cherry was neglected by audiences because they were kept away by a media conspiracy. I believe they stayed away because they were sane, and the movie is bogus and boring. Kiarostami is a limited, arid, uninteresting director who inspires reviews much more interesting than his films.
In Thailand last summer I had a fascinating conversation with Brian Bennett, head of the Bangkok Film Festival, who had recently attended a festival in Iran. He is wildly enthusiastic about Iranian films, but he likes the accessible ones, like Children of Heaven, Color of Paradise, Time for Drunken Horses or Two Women–the ones the Kiarostami fans snub. He described the visiting Western critics and festival heads as moving in a pack, walking out of popular narrative films and then ganging up to praise the latest impenetrable exercise in navel-scratching. Their bias against mainstream (!) Iranian films, he said, is destroying the chances of the Iranian cinema outside Iran. The only Iranian films the Western festivals play are the ones no one in his right mind can endure.
Of course it is possible to disagree about Kiarostami, and I remember endless conversations in the lobby of the Hotel Splendid at Cannes with Rosenbaum and Kehr, who patiently tried to explain to me why I should be fascinated by a movie about a man driving through a wasteland holding endless and pointless conversations with various inarticulate men he picks up–a movie so inept in controlling its effect that any reasonable viewer would mistakenly assume for the first hour that the man was gay.
Regarding the backlash against your review of The Wind Will Carry Us–a critic can praise anything he likes as long as he describes it in such a way as to fairly represent its effect on the likely reader of his review. I have also received such letters, usually at the other end of the generic scale, for example, from those who could not comprehend how anyone could recommend The Cell.
I share your affection for Chicken Run and your distaste for Gladiator, a muddy mess with second-rate special effects (the upper rows of the Coliseum kept shimmering into shadowy abstraction) and a gladiatorial style that owed more to the WWF than Rome. Also, they got the thumbs wrong: Thumbs down was what you wanted in those days. Who says it’s wrong to use thumbs in judging movies?
David–
I deduce from your congratulations about the Lincoln Award that you also visit Romenesko’s Media News site. I love that site, which is so simple and so perfect.
Sarah–
I agree: It was NOT the worst year in the history of the movies, etc., and I was amused to find Peter Travers bemoaning the low quality of the year’s films in a quote for USA Today since he certainly found a lot of them to praise.
Re: Traffic. Soderbergh was NOT “really just going to teach you such irritating lessons as: be nice to your antsy and rich adolescent daughter, talk to her or she might feel angry and want to do drugs.” The father’s treatment of his daughter has nothing to do with her addiction, which is swift, complete, and nearly lethal, and has nothing to do with parents and everything to do with peers and drugs.
Sarah and Tony–
I didn’t find Traffic an example of “liberal morality” at all, but more an example of conservative, even libertarian, thinking on the drug problem. One of the advocates of decriminalization of drugs is the National Review. If you examine drugs in terms of the behavior of markets, as NR does, it becomes clear that drug laws function essentially as a price support system. I don’t know if that’s Soderbergh’s belief, but it’s the message I found in his film.
Tony–
You ask, “Did any of you see a great–or even a passable–love story this year, or at least a persuasive movie about love?” Apart from those you mentioned, what about An Affair of Love, in which the two characters agree to meet to share a (secret) fetish, and then are blindsided by the fact that they start to really like each other? The end of the affair is sad and romantic. I also liked the love story in Two Family House, in which the hero had to redefine his idea of himself in order to accept the heroine at all. I liked the way the Cusack character learned more about love in High Fidelity. Was it love or identification that linked Joe Gould and Joseph Mitchell in Joe Gould’s Secret? I thought Rachel Griffiths illustrated some tricky aspects of love in Me Myself I. Ed Harris and Anne Heche have a flirtatious dance of words in The Third Miracle that was observant about the way a man and woman will talk about a neutral subject when what they are really discussing is how much they are growing to like each other and the possibility of sex.
Jim–
You quote Rosenbaum, who “asks rhetorically how much freedom Roger Ebert would have to give everything a ‘thumbs down’ for three or four consecutive weeks without jeopardizing his show.”
An excellent question. My answer would be: If the ratings held up, I could give thumbs down from here to eternity. Of course, I would eventually not be invited to the screenings, and we wouldn’t get any more review clips to show, but I could buy tickets after the movies opened and then reproduce scenes from the movies using my genius for mime and imitation. You should see my Neve Campbell.
In the real world, Jonathan’s scenario would not happen because it is unlikely that I would dislike every movie for three or four weeks. Siskel and I once did give thumbs down to every movie on a show, I recall. But Jonathan might have asked: Could a reviewer for any publication–the Chicago Reader, for example–dislike every movie for three or four weeks and not cause notice and concern? There is a theoretical position one could take in which almost every movie would be bad (Sturgeon’s Law: “98 percent of everything is crap”) but none of us Movie Clubbers has ever hit a dry spell quite that long.
