Another blog...

I started another blog for short, slightly more estoric posts on film criticism and related matters. I'm keeping my informal, off the cuff screening log entries here, though.

Recommendations

I wanted to comment on this quote that I posted on my tumblr blog:

I was reminded of Roger Ebert’s story, which he relates in his latest Answer Man column (I just now published it online), about a phone call he once got from a reader:

Caller: “We live near the Wilmette Theatre, which is showing ‘Cries and Whispers.’ What can you tell us about it?”

Ebert: “I think it is the best film of the year.”

Caller: “Oh, that doesn’t sound like anything we’d want to see!”

-Jim Emerson (commenting here)

What's interesting to me: I'm much more likely to recommend a movie that I enjoyed but don't feel too strongly about than a movie that I am passionate about. Let me elaborate just a bit and add that it really depends on who's asking for a recommendation.

Watching Regular Lovers was one of the richest, most rewarding, most interesting, and most emotionally compelling movie experiences I've had recently; watching Juno, on the other hand, was moderately enjoyable. But if I had to recommend a movie to most of my co-workers, most people in my family, most of my (non-movie buff) friends, it'd probably be Juno. Why? Because Regular Lovers is not the kind of movie most people would be open to and/or interested in. Even among my movie buff friends, I'd be hesitant to recommend it without a few words of "warning" ("Almost three hours", "French", "About May '68") and, in fact, there are a bunch of other movies that I didn't like quite as much (Once, The Hoax, Zodiac) that I'd be more likely to suggest.

I wonder if this makes me kind of a lousy champion for a movie to have: I mean, if I love Regular Lovers so much, shouldn't I be singing it's praises to everyone I meet and trying to get them to see it, too?

I don't know:

Part of me thinks that I should stick to my guns, recommend the movie ("Try Regular Lovers: it's one of my favorite movies of the year"), and hope that a few people (or at least one person) will act on the recommendation and feel like watching the movie was a worthwhile experience. But another part of me wants to avoid situations where I'm trying to sell the movie or convince someone they should see it. (My thinking here is: the kind of people who are likely to really respond to it are also likely to discover it without my help.)

Related question: is it more elitist for me to recommend a film like Regular Lovers (because it shows off what a sophisticated film-goer I am) or to not recommend it (because I can't imagine my co-workers/family members/friends would be able to get it)?

Catching Up, Part II

I owe some links:

First, David Cairns left a comment on my riff off of his essay on William Wyler. David let me know that his blog, Shadowplay, is here. I've added it to my blogroll, too. Here's an example of David doing the kind of research that I can definitely get behind.

Second, Noah Berlatsky left a link to a new site he has curated, Gay Utopia. I haven't read through everything there yet, but I did like his essay on "fecund" horror (and hope to comment in more detail later). (Also - fans of erotic horror fiction - you know who you are - should check out this story ).

The Week

I've been swamped this week...

New content in the comments:

Movie Club: Terminator 2

A discussion of the Western genre

Also, looking forward to Recess this Sunday!

Catching up...

I've been catching up with the comments both here and elsewhere, so I've got nothing much else to post for today.

A quick rundown though:

Played Sorcerer (in the Dictionary of Mu setting) last week. It was good to finally get gaming again.

And the games continued this weekend: I ran a session of Dogs in the Vineyard for the first time. Some rough patches and a few lessons learned, but, overall, a good and entertaining experience. The game is set up so that it's pretty easy to run: I could have done a little bit more in the way of preparation (we were using scrap paper instead of nicely photocopied/laser-printed character sheets, for example), but I don't think the game suffered much. Only problem: we didn't quite get to finish the story (we moved a bit more slowly than I anticipated).

Blogging

Since I started blogging again on February 1st of this year, I had managed to post at least one item every weekday (even if it was just something like this) until yesterday, when I got home very late and wasn't in the mood to do anything but relax.

Anyway, I'm having fun with this incarnation of the blog, even if I haven't been able to write the big, meaty posts that I sorta/kinda prefer. My blog is more superficial, now, not so much in the pejorative sense, but in that I generally just write a few comments on whatever happens to be bubbling up to the surface on that particular day. My editing has gotten a lot more half-assed, but I guess I'm not as concerned as I probably should be: I'd rather try to keep to a post-a-day, even if that means a couple of typos and mangled sentences.

Movie Chat: Oscar Facts, The Unwatched Masses, Lists, and Favorites

Edward Copeland goes to the source to try to clear up some Oscar "fact" confusion. I now hope that Little Miss Sunshine wins Best Picture, just so all those people who got their facts wrong, have their predictions come out wrong, too. (Link via The House Next Door).

I'm a big fans of lists - reading lists, year-end best lists , random lists - so I thought Andy Horbal's idea here was pretty neat. There's also an interesting discussion in the comments about the merits of the list Andy is drawing from. As always, I think the best approach to any list is to treat it as a way to start a discussion, not end one. Here's my own 10 best films I've never seen, according to They Shoot Pictures, Don't They?

8 1/2 *
Tokyo Story
City Lights
La Dolce Vita
L'Avventura **
Persona
Andrei Rublev
Ordet
Au Hasard, Balthazar
Wild Strawberries

*I've seen 8 1/2, but it was so long ago that I don't remember much of it and couldn't, in good conscience, talk about it with any authority.
**I've seen parts of L'Avventura on numerous occasions. I've just never sat down to watch it the whole way through.

Looking through the list a little more, my big blind spots are Bergman, Tarkovsky, Ozu, and Bresson. I'll be watching a bunch of Ozu and Bresson over the next few weeks (treating myself to some classics after spending the last few weeks catching up with 2006 releases for an upcoming "list" party), but I think I'm going to save Bergman and Tarkovsky for when I'm, um, older. The big, forehead-slapping, "Why haven't I watched this yet?"-movie is Ikiru - I've seen just about every other Kurosawa movie, so at this point, it's a little embarrassing that I've left this one so long. (Also, check out Andy's interesting business proposition.)

On a semi-related note: my girlfriend and I sat down to watch the 1931 version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde last night and I mentioned that Frederic March was one of my favorite actors. She said that was meaningless because everyone is my favorite actor. She wasn't being especially fair, there are lots of actors whose work I'm cool to or outright don't like, but I do have quite a few favorites.

Most film buffs are like this though, aren't they? We have lots of little favorites - favorite westerns, favorite character actors, favorite silent film directors, favorite horror movie actresses, etc. I could pretty easily start to list off my 100 favorite actors (March would definitely be there), which might seem a little indiscriminate, but I've seen lots of performances from lots of different actors.

Maybe I should just start using more specific language - i.e., Frederic March is one of my favorite old school, Hollywood actors: look for the way he tones down his theatrical style to make it work for the camera - although that might be a little too pedantic.

Blog Chat: Cinephiles?, Gateways, Plagiarism, More Children of Men

Andy Horbal asks this question over on his blog:

Do you
A) identify with
B) feel alienated by
the term cinephile? Or would you choose
C) none of the above?

I chose B): to me "cinephile" sounds too much like "audophile" which I (perhaps unfairly) associate with people who are really into their stereo system. I prefer "film buff", partly because it's a lot more casual sounding.

Blake Bell has a thoughtful post on the mainstream comics industry's delusions about coming up with gateway comics.

Eddie Campbell has a (perhaps) provocative post about plagiarism, Roy Lichtenstein, and IP. He quotes R.G. Collingwood:

Let all such artists as understand one another, therefore, plagiarize each other's work like men. Let each borrow his friends' best ideas, and try to improve on them. If A thinks himself a better poet than B, let him stop hinting it in the pages of an essay; let him re-write B's poems and publish his own improved version. If X is dissatisfied with Y's this-year Academy picture, let him paint one caricaturing it; not a sketch in Punch, but a full-sized picture for next year's Academy. I will not rely upon the hanging committee's sense of humour to the extent of guaranteeing that they would exhibit it; but if they did, we should get brighter Academy exhibitions. Or if he cannot improve on his friends' ideas, at least let him borrow them; it will do him good to try fitting them into works of his own, and it will be an advertisement for the creditor. An absurd suggestion? Well, I am only proposing that modern artists should treat each other as Greek dramatists or Renaissance painters or Elizabethan poets did. If any one thinks that the law of copyright has fostered better art than those barbarous times could produce, I will not try to convert them.

I bet you can find this kind of cross-pollination with the folks making videos for sharing on YouTube, too. Hmmm... Thinking about it, the line between the people producing original content for YouTube and the people just uploading found/captured videos looks pretty fuzzy.

And Sean Collins responds to my post on Children of Men. Once again, I find myself not only agreeing with Sean, but wishing that I had put it this way myself first:

...I still found the dystopia convincing and frightening, and I think that at least in part that comes from approaching those elements as horror... Children of Men fails as a dystopia that one could logically arrive at from its constituent elements, I think, but succeeds despite that because of the way those elements add up as a big frightening collage of Things That Are Horrifying. Domestic terrorism, ecological and economic breakdown, torture, prisoner abuse, large-scale human rights violations by a Western nation, internecine warfare between "freedom fighters," increased video surveillance, assassinations, plausibly deniable action by the government against journalists and dissidents, Abu Ghraib, Vladimir Putin, the drug war, limited nuclear exchanges, pandemics, Islamic fascism, urban warfare, intrusive media and advertising presence, euthanasia, and (I think this is the real emotional key to why the film works and I haven't seen anyone comment on it) the constant presence of animals in great danger, as undiluted an conveyor of helplessness as it gets--put it all together and it works in the same way that, for example, The Shining takes axes and ghosts and corpses and haunted houses and child abuse and rivers of blood and isolation and psychics and puts them all together and that works.

The more I think about Children of Men, the less my quarrels with its ideas seem to matter. Usually, it goes the other way around for me, as it did with The Queen, which I saw around the same time, where the nagging, nay saying voice in my head was relatively quiet while I was watching the movie, but grew louder the more I thought about it.

On the other hand, I still think there's something a little underhanded about the way Cuaron et al. do a complete 180 on the novel's take on immigration. And it's the fact that the novel makes more sense regarding this issue that keeps me a little bit suspicious of Cuaron's choices.

Why I am a bad blogger

That last post of mine is a pretty good example of why I am a bad blogger. Not so much because it makes huge generalizations or because it takes one of my pet peeves and tries to turn it into some kind of profound statement: most blog posts do those things. No, I am a bad blogger because I was too lazy to find even one example of the kind of piece I was writing about so that I could link to it. (After seeing that Slate didn't have any backlash pieces on its main page, I gave up the search.) In fact, I'm too lazy to link to all the other posts I've written on the subject. Oh, well...

The Backlash Backlash

On the one hand, I've always thought that the phenomenon of critical backlash was a useful corrective to the way our hype-driven pop culture tends to overvalue and over-praising movies, TV shows, books, etc. (I admit to being just as guilty of over-praising stuff as anyone else).

On the other hand, I'm completely bored by these hit pieces that target virtually anything that manages to find an audience. They've all started seeming like the same piece. And I wonder if there's now an incentive for snarky twenty/thirty-something pop culture writers/bloggers to delay admitting that they like anything until they find out if it will end up being a worthy backlash target.

Honestly, I could care less if you, unlike all your friends/fellow-bloggers/co-workers, just "don't get" Battlestar Galactica or Lost or whatever.

But I guess I'm just really tired of all this posturing masquerading as arts and culture criticism. (And I am posturing now? Does taking an anti-posturing stance make me just as bad? Probably. Oh well...)

Playing Catch-Up

When I took a break from blogging, I also cut down on my blog reading. This gave me more time to do important stuff like reading Robert Heinlein novels, playing tabletop RPGs and tinkering with RPG design, posting on message boards, and watching lots of TV shows on DVD.

Now, I'm playing catch-up with all the great writing on blogs that I've missed out on over the last few months. It's a quixotic undertaking, but I'll keep at it in the hopes that I'll find more stuff like this excellent Sean Collins post from last month. Sean is again dealing with one of his favorite topics - violence and torture as part of our arts and entertainments - and, as usual, he's sharper (not to mention less hypocritical) than most other pop culture pundits.

This time, Sean comments on Eli Roth's claims that the graphic torture scenes in Roth's movie Hostel are meant to make the audience feel guilty about the current state of world affairs (Roth specifically mentions Iraq and the response to Hurricane Katrina).

Sean's response is one that I wish I had come up with:

The notion that your society, your era, your government, your audience is uniquely prone to evil--a notion almost always accompanied by the sort of clean-hands finger-pointing exemplified by Roth [and others]--is to me the absolute laughable height of narcissism in pessimist's clothing; it's the art-critical equivalent of doomsday prophesying. The fact that filmmakers and critics now feel they have free rein on the subject of torture and brutality because they see our government involved in it yet apparently had little or nothing to say on the subject when it was status quo in countless other countries across the globe for years and years and years (which it still is) is exhibit A.

There is nothing special about your pet target. On the contrary. All humans, from every country and time period ever, are terrible. That's what great art is about. I can see an argument being made that embracing this belief is a way of letting oneself off the hook; I submit that one who makes that argument proves in so doing that he doesn't understand the belief at all.

Well, I probably wouldn't have gone so far as Sean does here (it is the potential for terribleness that isn't unique to any time or place or culture) but I like the way Sean takes this right over the edge.

He also talks a lot about The Sopranos in this post, and what he says has helped me to get a better handle on my increasingly ambivalent feelings about this show. But that probably deserves a post of its own.