This is the year that print film criticism went on life support, online film critics drafted sober eulogies and the rest of the world yawned distractedly while poised over the plug. Into the ill-attended open grave my colleague Lauren Wissot just tossed a meditation on film culture titled, “The Movie-Going Public.”
I dig it because it dares to take filmgoers as seriously as it does cinema itself. Further, it manages, mostly by way of example, to pee all over the very notion of a professional film critic. I use don’t use the term “pee” lightly but with great care, thinking of readers like Anonymous, who responded to Lauren’s post with, “You’re not an elitist. But you are crass, vulgar and unprofessional… Manny Farber is rolling in his grave.” I want Anonymous, if he or she is reading this, to imagine Mr. Farber howling in pain from the beyond at my using such a crude bathroom word as “pee” in reference to the profession he devoted his life to. But another dead 20th Century critic is probably grinning in his grave. James Agee: “I suspect I am, far more than not, in your own situation: deeply interested in moving pictures, considerably experienced from childhood on in watching them and thinking and talking about them, and totally, or almost totally without experience or even much second-hand knowledge of how they are made. It is my business to conduct one end of a conversation, as an amateur critic among amateur critics. And I will be of use and of interest only in so far as my amateur judgment is sound, stimulating,
or illuminating.” (Props to Ryland Walker Knight.)
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Screw it. I am herewith declaring Mad Men fair game for this movie blog, even though it is not technically a movie. It’s inspiring too much good bloggishness to ignore.
- Emily Nussbaum has gotten some grief for posting a spoilery clip in her Vulture post, but her short, salty take on maybe the biggest “They can’t do that!” scene of the series so far has been indelible. I’ll redact the spoiler: “But this scene, the one with Don Draper [redacted!] an odious she-manager into submission, sent a message. You think this is escapism, lifestyle fun, Entourage with better suits? Wrong-o.”
- Two different interpretations of the final scene. First, Andrew Johnson at The House Next Door: “[Betty is] unexpectedly happy. Like her husband, she’s just paid her freight by sucking up to the people who pay for her lifestyle–and, like Don, she just did so by managing expectations. The episode ends with something we rarely get from Mad Men–a scene in which Don and Betty feel like both a real couple and a real team.”
- And then, the one I’m more inclined to agree with, from Alan Sepinwall: “As Betty sits in that car at episode’s end, reflecting on another night of her husband using her as window dressing for a deal — or, in this case, worse: bait for the leering of a famous drunk — she can’t hide from it anymore. She plays to Don like she’s happy to be part of his life, but she’s crying because she realizes that, yes, she is profoundly sad, and has no idea how to go about improving this state of things.”
- Finally, a word from What Would Don Draper Do?: “The face in the mirror and the name I’ve claimed almost become one. But no matter how many times I answer or accept responsibiliy, just almost. I’d give anything to bridge almost - to fill myself out completely, leaving no empty spaces, not even the fingertips.”
In the wake of the massive success of Stuff White People Like––the sometimes funny (but usually in a really annoying, condescending, post-collegiate know-it-all jerk-off sort of way) blog-to-book sensation that’s taken, um, seven or eight other blogs by storm over the pas six months––there have been, of course, imitators. The most recent is Stuff Hollywood Assistants Like, the most recent in a short line of semi0nonymous blogs which purport to offer tales from inside the drudgery of minimum wag Hollywood employment (see also Hollywood Temp Diaries, and wasn’t this the original gimmick behind Defamer?)
I like SHAL more than some of its competitors, if for no other reason than it actually has a voice and an idiosyncratic sense of humor … you know, like a blog should? Some recent entries of note: Earthquakes, Las Vegas, and Swingers (the diner, not the movie).
Remember that interview that Variety EIC Peter Bart gave MTV in June, responding to the “boycott” of his publication by a handful of fanboy sites who insisted that the trade had repeatedly failed to properly credit their “scoops”? Variety’s Anne Thompson resurrected the debate and the Bart quote this morning in a blog post pegged to Comic-Con, where a gang of outlets of various sizes––including us––will be fighting to post the same material at the same time. If my post about The Watchman goes up 20 seconds after Cinematical’s, will I get in trouble for not giving them “credit” for “breaking” the story? What’s the netiquette??!!???
She’s mostly looking at the divide between a “legit” outlet like Variety and the independently run sites like Film School Rejects, but I think Anne makes some good points about this stuff not being the black-and-white matter of thievery that some of the sites would like to believe. As far as I’m concerned, this is the key part of her piece:
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Note: This review appeared in slightly different form during the Tribeca Film Festival.
I saw The Wackness last spring at a special screening held for the critics participating in the Moving Image Institute last week. Afterwards, Sony Classics president Michael Barker was asked about critical response to the film thus far. Barker disclaimed that “most major critics” hadn’t yet reviewed the film, but then said something surprisingly candid about the makeup of the film’s detractors. “What’s the demographic of the critics who don’t like it?” he began, starting a statement with a question in expert post-Robert Evans mogul style. “Female. Single. Mothers with teenage kids––they don’t like the movie.”
Who ever is doing research over at Sony deserves a raise. I fit just two of those descriptors, and I don’t like it, either.
Maybe it’s true that even professional critics struggle to get beyond their own natural demographic biases. A certain (very young, very male) segment of the film blogosphere lashed out at Sony for buying The Wackness towards the close of Sundance––not because they didn’t like the film, but because they loved the film so much that they were moved to protect it from what they saw as the risk of a mis-managed mainstream release. I thought this campaign was absolutely inane at the time—in the virtually non-existent narrative buying climate of Sundance 2008, the boys should have been happy that their pet project was picked up at all––but having finally seen the thing, I’m at no loss to explain why those writers have embraced this film. With its full-on, fully uncritical glorification of adolescent male self-indulgence and permanent immaturity, The Wackness is a kind of cinematic embodiment of certain tendencies that make the sub-AICN movie web go round.
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We all freaked out when famously blog-hostile reporters Peter Bart and Patrick Goldstein recently got on their knees and started their own blogs, but really, the weird part was that these guys were so insistently anti-blog to begin with. They’re both big on railing against critics, and their alleged impotence when it comes to influencing the audience (to reject industry product); they both act like for a professional critic to offer an assessment on a Hollywood film is to somehow throw handcuffs on the potential ticket buyer’s ability to exercise free will (to consume industry product). Well, what are blogs, if not a space where the audience shrugs off those and other types of handcuffs in order to trade notes on their consumptive desires and experiences? You’d think they’d be an industry booster’s dream.
All of that’s a long lead up to the fact that I don’t know exactly how to parse this blog post by Goldstein, in which he once again beats the “who needs critics?” drum, and uses his blog to annoint Hollywood producer Avi Lerner as the “out of touch” review slinger’s populist replacement:
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When I read that Patrick Goldstein, author of the L.A. Times column The Big Picture, was launching a new blog under the auspices of the paper, I didn’t think it was that big of a deal. I think the exact thought that popped into my head was something along the lines of, “Oh hey! He likes to package pseudo-populist opinion as though it’s unimpeachable fact––he’ll fit right in!”
But the rest of the internet is, like, freaking out. Shoutcasting the story as “BREAKING” news, FishbowlLA went on to relate that the Times plans to put “Goldstein’s knowledge and sources to work in a blog that brings responsible journalism to the faster-than-pulp pace of 24/7 online entertainment reporting.” Finally, a “responsible” corrective for our chaos!
But all meta-commentary on this issue of international importance pales in comparison to the hundreds of words put forth by Jeffrey Wells. …Read more
Peter Bart now has a blog, but that’s no reason for him to play nice with the blogosphere. In a post from earlier this week, he did his best to discredit any opinion about this impending Hulk movie that is not his own:
The dweebs may not like the effects. The star, Edward Norton, may not like the cut. And the blogosphere is steeped in bad buzz. So here’s what Universal decided to do about it Sunday night: Throw a party, invite 5,000 folks to a screening and celebrate The Incredible Hulk as an instant hit…The audience roundly applauded the set-pieces of CGI mayhem, as if to tell Comic-Con-ish doubters, “Get a life.”
Because of course, it’s better to manufacture the illusion of “an instant hit” than to actually make an attempt to appeal to the “Comic-con-ish” built-in fans of the brand. I could go on and on about how to claim that the reaction of an invited audience (probably predominantly made up of people on the Marvel, Paramount or associated payrolls) is more valid that the worries of a film’s core ticket buyers is unforgivably solipsistic and probably not in line with Variety’s ostensible mission to couch all value judgments in assessments of commercial viability. But instead, I’ll just quote at length from one of Bart’s more articulate commenters,
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A day after learning and announcing that his job at Premiere.com had been eliminated, Glenn Kenny has already set up a new personal blog, free of association with Premiere/Hachette. Well, sort of: the subtitle on the TypePad blog is, currently, “Film writer Glenn Kenny’s own bought-and-paid-for-blog, thank you very goddamn much.” The title-title is Some Came Running, and in the first entry, Kenny explains what he hopes to do with it: “Consider this space the drunken boat we stand in, trying to pull either and/or both of these figures in. Not to be loopy, or maudlin, or anything. Just a fancy way of saying…let’s hang, my friends.”
Related: “Hachette has always been an abortion of a magazine company,” writes Nick Denton at Gawker.
I’ve been tracking the odd pop cultural situation that awaits this month’s release of The Tracey Fragments for awhile now. The film, which I’ve written about before, stars Juno phenom Ellen Page; it premiered at Berlin in 2007 and played tons of festivals, but by year’s end had failed to secure U.S. theatrical distribution. Then, in February of this year, when Page was at the peak of her powers as a precocious Oscar nominee and face of one of the biggest “surprise” hits in recent memory, Tracey was picked up by ThinkFilm for domestic distribution.
This is a film which, despite positive reviews and an award from Berlin, went almost completely unnoticed when it screened at Toronto in September, largely because it didn’t have a distributor that could afford to hire track suited boys to pass out branded Tic Tacs on its behalf. And yet, as soon as ThinkFilm put out a new trailer for the film, it promptly attracted a bunch of negative blog attention, ranging from unfair to inaccurate.
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Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past two days––and or, don’t read many film blogs, which is the likelier of the two scenarios––you’ll know that Nathan Lee was laid off from his position as second film critic at the Village Voice this week, due to unspecified “economic reasons.” That makes Lee the fourth full-time New York based critic to get pink slipped in the past month, and it’s not hard to see his firing as a sign that, as Lee himself put it in an email to colleagues widely circulated on blogs, “staff film critic…jobs no longer appear to exist.”
For those of us old enough to have put a few years effort towards such a career but too young to have achieved any kind of institutional seniority, this is a pretty troubling state of affairs. Strippers are winning Oscars, but *I* have no future? There’s a great joke here, but because it’s on me it’s up to someone else to unpack.
In any case, I’ll point you to the comment sections on both The Reeler and The House Next Door, where bloggers/internet critics like Vadim Rizov and Andrew “Filmbrain” Grant are chewing over the issues with “old media” critics like Glenn Kenny and David Edelstein. Interestingly, a number of members of the extended Village Voice family weigh in, most notably Luke Y. Thompson, whose comment on Lee at The Reeler (which he now admits was “ill-considered”) touched off a firestorm of bashing.
We’ve spent the past three weeks previewing films that are going to be premiering at SXSW, but the festival also has a conference component, with four days packed full of panels. Karina (that’s me) will be speaking on the Blogs, Buzz and Buddy lists panel on Sunday at 3:30. I’ll also be moderating a panel at 1pm on Monday called Deal or No Deal: The Road to Self-Distribution.
As far as panels that don’t actually require me to operate a microphone are concerned, I’m really excited about the Jeffrey Tambor Acting Workshop. Yes, George (and Oscar) Bluth himself is going to let us in on his “process.” Even cooler, he’s gonna do it by coaching Hannah Takes the Stairs stars Greta Gerwig and Kent Osbourne through a reading of an excerpt of John Patrick Shanley’s The Dreamer Examines His Pillow. Yes, seriously. The magic happens at 1pm on Sunday.
There are tons of other great events going on and no one can attend them all, but after the jump you’ll find a list of a few I have my eye on. If you’re on a panel or have panels you’re particularly excited about, let us know in the comments.
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Facebook and Seesmic have banned a promotion for the international rollout of the Diane Lane film Untraceable. The movie basically bombed when it was dumped here in late January, but because people on the internet love nothing better than making fun of mainstream cultural stuff that pretends to understand the internet, it garnered a bit of snarky blog attention for its ridiculous premise alone. Lane stars as some kind of FBI cyberterrorism analyst who is charged with stopping the mastermind behind KillWithMe.com, who pledges to murder captive victims when the site reaches a quota of page views. Totally misguided attempt to plumb the new web culture as dressing for the same old thriller, and thus a sure sign that Web 2.0 is dead? Or a genius satire of the internet publishing industry? Nobody cared either way, I guess––the film has so far failed to make back its production budget domestically.
Which means its international box office is key. Which explains why Universal, desperate to make some noise, would hire a firm to essentially replicate KillWithMe.com on social networks.
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Do adults actually take President’s Day off? The studios, assuming *someone* isn’t going to work or school today, opened their movies on Thursday night and are going to keep 
