It would take a certain amount of energy and emotional strength to produce a full consideration of David Denby’s piece in today’s New Yorker, which swiftly traces the lineage of the last seven years of American micro-independent film up to and including Joe Swanberg’s upcoming SXSW and IFC VOD debut, Alexander the Last. I currently feel that this variety of strength and quantity of energy are resources that I cannot access, and if I could, I’m not sure the best target to point them at would be a piece that has already been declared late to the party by two reliable sources.  However, in case it seems imperative to take up this task at some point in the future, here are the vague bases I would try to touch in such a consideration:

• Prior to this, David Denby has produced two notable works in the past six months (in this case, we’ll take “notable” to be equivalent to “provoking of blog posts and/or mocking on The Daily Show“; if there is another definition of the word here on Planet Earth in 2009, I don’t understand the question and I won’t respond to it). Most recently, there was Snark, a polemical book in which the film critic argues that “snarkers like to think they are deploying wit, but mostly they are exposing the seethe and snarl of an unhappy country, releasing bad feeling but little laughter,” and goes on to cite with no apparent humour intended the nine elements that make snark so dangerous.  A short time after Snark was published, Denby wrote off The Curious Case of Benjamin Button — a film which might rightly be considered to embody the bloated sincerity that finely calibrated snark so successfully deflates –– with the witty rejoinder, “who cares?” Denby then went on to point out, clearly without “bad feeling”, that “many people in Hollywood endlessly have ‘work’ done to put off aging, and here’s a movie that begins with a wizened baby and ends with physical perfection, a progression that may encapsulate both the nightmares and the dreams of half the Academy.” …Read more