Andy Dehnart, Wesley Morris, and Alex Pappademas
Wow, I go away to see one extremely awful Chinese movie, and you have flipped "The Breakfast Table" over like Ed Harris in everything! The wonder, the fury!! I'm not sure where to begin, but I hope Robert Downey Jr. is following our bouncing ball.
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StumbleUponCelebrity addiction is so weird. But I have to believe that Aaron Sorkin and Matthew Perry are like: "Thank God." I hate that the debate over what to do with a guy like him always hinges on the argument over whether he's a genius. He is not. A real genius, after said relapses, slithers his way into a Woody Allen flick or onto Penélope Cruz's arm. He just rescued Ally McBeal. He is, however, brilliant in the way he rolls with the punches of his mistakes without troubling us with his bruises. I say we give him that Stephen Gaghan guy's number for rehab counseling. What to do with him? I think MTV should co-opt him in one their new ads. His saga has miniseries written all over it. In the meantime, the last thing I think we need is more Hollywood squares pleading his case. Dude, loved you in Home for the Holidays, but tell it to the judge.
Moving right along: Our discussion-turned-sparring-match-turned-brawl over this MTV business is really fascinating and has everything to do with that suspicion I raised earlier. I don't think we're misdefining culture at all. As I understand it, culture is the coffeehouse of communicated ideas. Morality exists on an entirely different continent and to get the two to summit requires federal outrage--the exhumation of Krzysztof Kieslowski. And maybe one of the points I think we bypassed in the midst of our critics crisis yesterday has a lot to do with that discrepancy. Life--one that includes sensitivity, morality, etc--doesn't begin when we switch DVDs or slip off our headphones. It continues. John Sayles is a firm believer in the art of life, and his movies reflect his having lived in a world that includes the incredible bounty of life's tragicomedy.
I tend to enter the world with a panoply. Some days I'm a camera, others I'm a sponge, and as a critic I'm afraid I live in a cultural vacuum. At the expense of my humanity, I sometimes see only semiologies and their implications as they concern other semiologies--not life, not other people. My mother firmly believes I live in a celluloid tower. I should get a kid or a mortgage or lose something important, she says. There happen to be no moral implications in my vacuum. I'm not as bad as the people who see an accident and just stand there as it happens, witnessing it, afraid to interfere like a reality TV camera and alter the happening. (Am I outing myself as a huge, cold freak? I'm not a Radiohead record. I'm not the new Spielberg movie. I'm a real boy. I care and want to be loved.)
Those MTV ads have the power to offend, and depending on which country you live in--Culture or Morality--they emit contrary or at least grossly divergent meanings. The now-hibernating Eminem skirmishes underscored the magnitude of this perspective discrepancy. And here we have another in the form of Jackass. Co-opting the language of the language of the PSA, which at least for our generation was co-opted from those extremely kitschy, exceptionally paranoid health and hygiene films from the '50s. (If you haven't seen them, they're worth digging up. They were traveling from city to city last year.) Something ticked me off about the MTV ads.
But it wasn't the insult to kids living with syphilis, rather it was to the people who actually tune in and find the gross incongruity between the ads and the actual content. My priorities are weird but, like many people, I think, I'm an empirical moralist: Had I or someone I love a case of the itch-down-theres, I might be more immediately compelled to consider the human factor, something that I think obfuscates conversations about Robert Downey Jr.
Subject shift. This will be stale tomorrow morn, but we really have to have a few words about Michiko Kakutani's piece about the '80s. That's my girl. But baby, where's the beef?
'Night boys,
Wesley
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Reader Comments From The Fray:
[Notes from the Fray Editor: President Bush on drilling, MTV and the youth market: same situation? Talk to WillV here. Thread your way through all the posts saying yes they do have the ads in Chicago (we know now, OK?) and find some posted lists: Zeitguy's Rools of Cool, Paul Caniff's answers to questions, and Gypsy's theory on disco. Jared White suggests Eggertian rather than Eggersesque. Check out the checkmarks for discussions on criticism and music. For more good stuff on film reviews read in full the fascinating posts from Steve Sailer and Aluminum Man (below). Done all that? Congratulations, you are now a complete popular culture Instant Expert. (Or a Breakfast Table Fray expert--same thing.)]
At the risk of sounding churlish--or rather, gleefully trying to sound churlish--the comment of your "Breakfast Table" writer about the Bush administration--"Essentially, they're politically motivated cowards" [Monday's entry]--demonstrates an acute lack of insight into, well, one of the great features of civilization. Politically motivated bravery is usually a suspect virtue--it led Napoleon into Russia, Hoover into a principled stand against "hand-outs," and Tom DeLay into being Tom DeLay. The real problem is that the Bushies face no bullying from the other side of the aisle: nobody who is willing to demagogue them, dog them, and dice them into the neutered conservatism which was Jr.'s daddy's trademark. In the weird mores of Washington, the dogger/dicer really doesn't have to have a national constituency--just a nasty taste for institutional infighting. If only Wellstone had Gingrich's taste for lowmindedness.
--Roger
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Having recently become the film critic for United Press International, I've been thinking a lot about these issues. The biggest problem with movie reviews in general is that reviewers are so homogenous--almost always male, white, upper middle class, with a grad degree in humanities or liberal arts, urban, high IQ, intellectual but not hugely logical or well-informed about things beyond the cultural realm like business or science or sociology, and extremely opinionated--that the tastes of huge demographic groups get ignored. I fall in most of those categories, too, but coming at a rather late age to this trade, I just don't as often experience anymore the testosterone surge that makes me want to shove my opinion down the throats of people who aren't like me.
For example, women. Over the years I've noticed that women generally don't like the same movies I like. That used to offend me greatly. I figured I could cure women of their bad taste in movies by exposing them to the really good stuff (i.e., what I liked) and explaining to them--over and over again--why it's better than the crap they liked. Slowly, though, I grew to respect women and their tastes more. I also learned that lots of other people aren't as smart as me and that making them watch what I liked to watch wasn't going to make them enjoy it more. Now, I take steps to help put myself in other peoples' shoes...
--Steve Sailer
(To reply, or to read this post in full, click here.)
Most Tom Green fans (and I'm not one of them) will have already decided to see Freddy Got Fingered a long time ago, and nothing that reviews have said (or will say) makes any difference. The same is true of the upcoming Lord of the Rings trilogy or the last installments of the increasingly awful Star Wars series. In fact, contrary to what the Breakfast Tablers are suggesting, I think most people have their minds made up about whether or not to see any given movie long before reviews hits the stands.
What informed, thoughtful, articulate critics can do is make us see, hear and understand things in movies that we otherwise might miss. They can challenge us by forcing us to examine elements that we might otherwise pass over, and make us look at a movie from a perspective perhaps unlike our own.
--Aluminum Man
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