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the movie club: Critic vs. critic.

Five critics dish over the year in film.

the movie club
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from: A.O. Scott

Movie Categories Answer to Agendas, Not Criticism

Posted Friday, Dec. 29, 2000, at 4:54 PM ET

Who are these people?

Dear Roger, Sarah, David, and Jim,

This will be, with regret, my last post. I can't tell you how much fun this has been. Each of your postings has been like a double espresso, and I've been lying awake each night, and sitting distracted at my desk each day, my head abuzz with ripostes, qualifications, arguments, and second thoughts. On a more personal note, this has been a dizzying, sometimes anxious year for me in this scary, thrilling new job, and your kind words about my work mean a lot. But even without them, I'd regard the four of you (along with a half-dozen or so other critics, including Jonathan Rosenbaum) as my role models, phantom interlocutors, and ideal readers. So thank you, and I look forward to reading, seeing, and (Roger and Jim) finally meeting you in the coming year.

And thanks, David, for your gleanings from "The Fray." For some reason, every time I've tried to check out what our readers are saying, my computer informs me that I have performed an illegal operation and shuts down my Netscape. (Someone alert the Justice Department!) The only point I'm inclined to respond to is No. 4, which relates to Roger's "category A" proposal. I suppose there has always been a split in the audience between those who like big popular entertainments and those who seek out more rarefied stuff, but maybe only in the sense that the latter audience has always been smaller. I'm skeptical of the notion that taste correlates easily with sociology. That is, I think it's as dangerous to categorize the public--Rosenbaum is fond of quoting Oscar Wilde's aphorism that there are as many publics as there are personalities--as it is to categorize movies. I think both encourage lazy thinking, which is the enemy of both criticism and art. So while I sympathize with Roger's desire for a workable critical shorthand (and I appreciate it when you indicate clearly in your reviews that an especially challenging picture may not be for every taste), I second David's demurral. Categories like high and low, pop and art, even foreign and domestic, are always applied ex post facto by people other than the artists themselves and answer to agendas other than that of free and honest criticism. It drives me crazy, for instance, when I hear people issue blanket condemnations of say, hip hop, or TV cartoons, or French movies, based entirely on prejudiced, pre-filtered assumptions about what such things must be like. Another aphorism, this time from Blake: "To generalize is to be an idiot. Discrimination of particulars is the alone distinction of merit."

I'm irritated by people who reflexively dismiss foreign movies and just as irritated by people who reflexively claim to prefer them. A while ago, at a party, a very earnest documentarian looked at me with pity when she found out what I did for a living. "Oh God," she said, "you have to sit through all those Hollywood movies." (A friend of mine recently expressed a similar sentiment, but with "Iranian" substituted for "Hollywood.") Now I admit that I sometimes fall into the unthinking habit of using "Hollywood" as a term of abuse (and "Iranian" as a signifier of praise), but I would be malnourished indeed if my diet consisted strictly of Kiarostami and Techine without the essential vitamins provided by the Farrelly Brothers, Pixar animation, or (on occasion) Barry Levinson. And it would be the height of snobbery to believe that only critics are capable of embracing movies in all their mind-boggling variety. Which doesn't mean liking everything, of course. It just means keeping in mind something Duke Ellington once said about music (last aphorism, I promise). To paraphrase the Duke: There are two kinds of movies. Good ones and bad ones. Those categories give us plenty to work with.

But I've wandered a long way from the movies themselves and risk becoming an idiot in consequence. For the reader who asked about Shadow of the Vampire: Jim and I both reviewed it this week. He loved it, and I liked it with some strong reservations. It's a strange movie, not entirely in control of its themes, but with some real insight into the uncanny power of moving images. Then again, I also liked Topsy-Turvy, especially the scene where Gilbert (unless it was Sullivan) chews the head off a live bat.

I wish this could go on all year. Thanks again, all of you.

Best,
Tony

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the movie club
entries
1234567891011121314151617181920212223
from: A.O. Scott

Movie Categories Answer to Agendas, Not Criticism

Posted Friday, Dec. 29, 2000, at 4:54 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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