2004: The Year in Movies

Each year, film critics gather in Slate's "Movie Club" to kvetch about the year in movies. This year's club includes David Edelstein of Slate, A.O. Scott of the New York Times, Charles Taylor and Stephanie Zacharek from Salon, and Armond White from the New York Press. (Also joining the conversation late: Scott Foundas is a film critic for LA Weekly. Christopher Kelly is a film critic for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. Wesley Morris is a film critic for the Boston Globe.)

Who are these people?

Certainly the Internet—on which any blowhard can build his or her own soapbox—has encouraged a slew of posturing hipster-critics (and, to be fair, a good many really smart, genuinely iconoclastic ones). But I've just finished Stephen Greenblatt's brilliant piece of speculative scholarship, Will in the World—an eye-opening treatment of the society that fed Shakespeare's plays, poems, and sonnets. And here's one cherce bit quoted by Greenblatt that puts our own critical stylings in perspective, a passage from pamphleteer and sometime critic Thomas Nashe on the subject of "upstarts" like the young William Shakespeare:

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Indeed it may be the engrafted overflow of some kill-cow conceit, that overcloyeth their imagination with a more than drunken resolution, being not extemporal in the invention of any other means to vent their manhood, commits the digestion of their choleric encumbrances to the spacious volubility of a drumming decasyllabon.

Methinks our own kill-cow conceits have a somewhat more euphonious decasyllabon.
David

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