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the movie club: Critic vs. critic.

Five critics dish over the year in film.

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from: J. Hoberman

Foreign-Film-Loving Critics: Snobs or Subversives?

Posted Wednesday, Dec. 27, 2000, at 11:43 PM ET

Who are these people?

Dear Colleagues,

Seasonal greetings and here's hoping that everyone has survived the ridiculous pre holiday glut. People have been complaining for months about what a lousy year it was--starting with the realization that the leading Oscar possibilities were Erin Brockovich (which I could barely sit through, Julia Roberts' get-up and biker house-husband notwithstanding) and Gladiator (full of show-biz hokum and otherworldly palaver). My favorite American movie, Shadow of the Vampire, sounds worse than idiotic on paper--like the dude who played the vampire in Nosferatu was really a vampire!--plus it's practically being released on New Year's Eve. There were a couple of oddball releases. For me, Chicken Run is the real Life Is Beautiful, a family feel-good comedy set in a death camp in which the expressions of fixed hysteria are even more alarming. Nearly as bleak, Cast Away is the most unrelentingly absurdist (as opposed to absurd) big-budget feature I can remember. If only it had ended with Hanks re-encountering his dentist ...

Anyway, last year was so rich that 2000 has to seem a bit anemic by comparison--at least in terms of American movies, Hollywood or independent. George Washington was certainly a baffling mixture of the brilliant and the inept, but there was no Being John Malkovich, no Rushmore or Election (or Dick), no Boys Don't Cry or Magnolia or Three Kings or South Park or Iron Giant. There wasn't even an Eyes Wide Shut or a Blair Witch Project or a Fight Club to argue about--unless you count Dancer in the Dark, which, like most of the strongest movies released over the last 12 months, was foreign. There probably weren't any movies better reviewed this year than Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Yi Yi, while the first 10 movies in the 2000 Village Voice critics poll--which solicited opinions from some 60 "alternative press" critics plus Voice alums, like our host--were all foreign. (Fantastically complete results may be found and parsed at www.villagevoice.com.) There are seven American movies in the next 10 but only three of these (Traffic, Almost Famous, and Wonder Boys) could even be considered studio movies.

You may say that this emphasis on the foreign is snobbish, elitist, solipsistic, anti-American, or whatever, but it does suggest a certain resistance to the state of affairs described by Jonathan Rosenbaum, namely that "American film reviewers are expected to dispense a certain comfort to moviegoers by assuring them that what's available at their local multiplex or video store is all that's worth seeing." So, is that what we're going to do? As far as I'm concerned there are few pleasures in movie reviewing greater than finding and championing an unheralded small movie. David, I appreciate your bringing Gun Shy to my attention--particularly since movies in which Sandra Bullock plays a feisty free spirit are usually a pleasure to avoid. Is it out on video? What else is there? For me, Takeshi Kitano's much reviled Kikujiro (I think that Owen Gleiberman gave it an F in EW) was a true film maudit--a superficially mawkish fairy tale subverted by the director-star's comic brutality and acute formalism (and inconsolable sorrow). Did anyone see that--or the so-called Chinese Vertigo, Suzhou River?

Let me know,
Jim Hoberman
The Village Voice

P.S.: I also think that The House of Mirth was ineptly handled and am convinced that had the movie been promoted with one-quarter the energy that Miramax puts into flogging its Oscar bait, Gillian Anderson would have won the New York Film Critics' Circle award for best actress. A number of critics never got to screenings; nor, so far as I know, were any screeners sent out. If you're going to complain, David, then why not mention the PR firm by name? (It was mPRm--no?) Believe me, they'll get the message and so will the distributor who hired them.

the movie club
entries
1234567891011121314151617181920212223
from: J. Hoberman

Foreign-Film-Loving Critics: Snobs or Subversives?

Posted Wednesday, Dec. 27, 2000, at 11:43 PM ET
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Roger Ebert, David Edelstein, J. Hoberman, Sarah Kerr, and A.O. Scott are film critics at, respectively, the Chicago Sun-Times, Slate, the Village Voice, Vogue, and the New York Times. This week, Slate has asked them to compare notes on the year in film.
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