Bryan Appleyard takes a look at the artists who died in 2007 for The Times, and says a few infuriating things about the state of comtemporary filmmaking in the process. The thrust of the piece is a bit of Summer 2007 nostalgia: “The deaths of Antonioni and Bergman drew painful attention to the lack of great European auteurs.” Post-colonial angst is SO exhausting, but let’s engage with it anyway, shall we?

In assessing the year’s disappointments, Appleyard lumps Quentin Tarantino in with Francis Ford Coppola and Philip Roth as artists “who did not die but, somehow, faded.” He dismisses Tarantino on the grounds that Kill Bill was “dismal” (although, both critically and commercially, it was undeniably successful, at least in the States). Death Proof also gets an unrealistic drubbing. In calling Tarantino’s half of Grindhouse “not so much a film as an act of pathological self-indulgence [which] convinced even some of his most devoted fans that the game was up,” Appleyard ignores the fact that Death Proof, which beat out films like Sweeney Todd, The Lives of Others and Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead in indieWIRE’s comprehensive 2007 critics poll, is widely considered to be the chunk of Grindhouse that could actually stand on its own.

When Appleyard moves on to consider candidates for The New Film Auteur (with a straight face, as if there’s going to be an election, or maybe a competition show on Bravo), his logic betrays even more personal bias.

In bemoaning the lack of a great European film auteur, he suggests we shift our attention to “the east…in the mighty form of Wong Kar Wai.” Appleyard namechecks In The Mood For Love and 2046, but conveniently excludes My Blueberry Nights, Wong’s latest film, which crashed and burned at Cannes and currently sits on Harvey Weinstein’s shelf, awaiting an inevitably anti-climactic February release.

Does preserving the future of auteur theory really require such advantageous amnesia? If so, perhaps it’s time to just give the game up. Elsewhere in the piece, Appleyard bemoans the difficulty in declaring inarguable “greatness” in our fractured culture:

The further, more troubling question is, what is greatness? The climate of excess is also a climate of uncertainty and tribal dispute.

He seems to answer his own question: greatness is, regardless of any and all available evidence, whatever you want it to be.