by
A S Hamrah
View all notes
Available query params: commented=1, untagged=1
I sat down next to him and said hello. He acknowledged me without speaking and soon the film began. The then prominent film critic had a notebook in his lap, but he remained immobile until a scene revealed that Winslet’s husband was an online porn addict. At that point the critic began furiously taking notes, scribbling with great force and speed. Since I had read his book, his vigorous jotting during that particular scene caught my attention. When his review came out, he called the movie, which was average and predictable, “extraordinary” and “startling.”
why is this so funny
The cashier looked at the picture, then at me, then back to Welles in the magazine. She looked up again at my young, beardless face and my full head of black hair, which was clearly visible because I was not wearing a hat or a cape. “Is that you?” she asked, pointing at the photo.
“No!” I blurted out. “That’s Orson Welles!”
“Oh,” she said, scanning a can of pinto beans. I put the magazine back on the rack where I found it, gathered my grocery bags, and left through the automatic doors. Wow, I thought, that was a lesson in the artist-critic divide.
amazing
Part of what made this victory of perpetual blockbuster reanimation possible was the abandonment by most baby boomers of the film-critical cultural sphere, a flight that culminated in the publication of Susan Sontag’s 1996 essay “The Decay of Cinema” in the New York Times. Sontag claimed that both cinephilia and cinema were dead, an argument that now resembles the early 1990s “end of history” posited by Francis Fukuyama. At the beginning of the 21st century, however, as internet cinephilia began to rise, world cinema gave us, to name only a dozen, Mulholland Drive, In the Mood for Love, The Werckmeister Harmonies, In Vanda’s Room, Trouble Every Day, Khrustalyov, My Car!, Platform, The Piano Teacher, Kandahar, The Circle, Batang West Side, and Millennium Mambo. A serious, vital cinema of great originality, emotional depth, and beauty — the kind beloved by Sontag — was not in decline at all.
When I think about those three films by Béla Tarr, Aleksei German, and Lars von Trier existing in the same world as the endlessly optimistic franchise films that keep coming out, the constant replacement of one thing by another that is just the same, the repetitive cycle of festivals that critics somehow manage to jet to every year on the fairy dust of other people’s money, the Tarr-German-von Trier pessimism keeps me going. They are the antidote that restores life by nullifying entertainment.
Lately the acting in TV commercials has gotten really good. The other night I saw an ad for some company that helps people get rid of timeshares they don’t want anymore and I thought, Man, that was great, really affecting. That could have been an episode of Togetherness on HBO, if that was still on. Car commercials are particularly satisfying these days. Thirty-second-long one-acts with movie-level production design and cinematography, each one is a humanist masterpiece featuring quality acting that fits right in with streaming drama. In one, a wedding party gets caught in the rain and they can’t walk to the outdoor altar so they have to jump in their mini-SUV to get there. You really get a feel for the relationships between these four people in that thirty seconds. Car manufacturers know our little victories are hard-won. Automakers just get us. In other ads, the family drama of auto insurance plays out just as insightfully.
A children’s movie about how great science is, The Martian has a pragmatic message for budding astronauts: you solve one problem, then another, and see if you survive. The film’s obsession with years-long plans imparts a Soviet feel to the space program depicted, but its sunny optimism keeps the movie all-American. Not once do we believe The Martian will end with a shot of Matt Damon’s skeleton half-buried in sand. Maybe the film is so bright because the days are thirty-nine minutes longer on Mars than on Earth, the same thirty-nine minutes that should have been cut from this Friday-less Robinson Crusoe. Kristen Wiig, however, is on hand to show that girls aren’t into The Lord of the Rings.
laughed out loud at this
A fairy tale of lean-in capitalism about a Cinderella without a prince, David O. Russell’s Joy recasts the crazy family of a Capra comedy with stellar toxicity. Joy’s (Jennifer Lawrence’s) undermining relatives are the selfish American clan par excellence, claiming to know everything about Joy’s business while sabotaging her future. Robert De Niro and Isabella Rossellini, playing evil-universe versions of themselves as Joy’s father and stepmother, delight in their performances as fickle scoffers.
Joy is a natural inventor prone to epiphanies about household products — the film could be called A Beautiful Mop. Her ingenuity and tenacity save her from a life of drudgery, though by the end her victory seems hollow. The film, busy with fake TV soap operas and flashbacks, doesn’t imagine another life for her, except maybe settling down with a cable-TV executive (Bradley Cooper) who lectures her and is wrong half the time. The mitigating factors in her struggle are that she can turn a profit, employ her friends, and help younger women manufacture improved lint brushes. Set in the early 1990s, Joy suggests these were the consolations working-class Gen Xers could hope for.
i vaguely remember watching this on a plane
[...] In film and television, his distinctive oeuvre has obsessed cinephiles, fans of the outré, and film academics, giving rise to the adjective Lynchian, a word, as Lim points out, that many have tried to define but that the culture at large has decided means “weird.” Lim boils the Lynchian down to “abysmal terror, piercing beauty, convulsive sorrow.” Lynch’s movies, he writes, “give form to the submerged traumas and desires of our age.”
Romero cast an African American in the lead, and he shifted the horror genre’s dynamic, aligning it with black-and-white anti-war documentaries like Emile de Antonio’s In the Year of the Pig, also released in 1968, and distinguishing it from the lurid color horror movies Roger Corman and Hammer Films had been turning out up till then. Those films made certain concessions to the film industry; Night of the Living Dead did not. This was an American horror movie, so it needed no English accents or familiar character actors. It was grim and unflinching, showing average citizens, played by average people, eating the arms and intestines of their fellow townspeople. Romero drove home this central point — that a zombie-infested America differed from the status quo only in degree, not in kind — by ending his film with realistic-looking fake news photos depicting his characters’ banal atrocities.
Bickerton quotes Jean-Louis Comolli, an editor at the magazine during its most radical phase in the ’60s and ’70s. Film criticism and filmmaking, he wrote, must make “a political choice to stop seeing the audience as an inert, amorphous mass open to all sorts of manipulation by advertising,” and instead must “bank on the existence of an audience that is lucid” and “ultimately as creative as the filmmaker.” Bickerton argues that Cahiers switched tactics as the film industry changed during the Reagan–Star Wars era, dumbing down in order to please a new kind of consumer and to drive flagging sales.
Only Serge Daney, the magazine’s most vital film critic since the days of Bazin and Truffaut, held fast, admitting that while “the times themselves [had] grown more feeble, in terms of thought,” film critics still had to discover and explain “what was cinema’s ‘specificity,’ given the proliferation of images through advertising and television. . . . And how should the critic conceive of his or her role within this transformed landscape of images?”