The Film Criticism Blog-A-Thon

Chabrol and Godard

“But to the critic to whom art is important, sacred, and, ultimately, coextensive with life itself, to produce bad art and to condone it—and thereby give rise to further bad art and finally drive out the good—are the two most heinously dangerous sins imaginable.”
—John Simon

Andy Horbal at No More Marriages! has instigated a Film Criticism Blog-A-Thon, a subject open to broad definition that could well take over the internet. While many will undoubtedly seize the opportunity to wax philosophical, cigars and brandy in hand, I’m currently preoccupied with other projects to contribute anything of substance. There are, however, a few notes I can add to the fray:

I don’t normally read film criticism or reviews. The only film critics who’ve succeeded in engaging my attention at any length are Pauline Kael, David Thomson, J. Hoberman…and, yes, John Simon. Plus, there's a dogeared copy of Leonard Maltin's 1998 Movie & Video Guide in my bathroom.

A film’s subject matter doesn’t matter. In the end, it’s all in the art of film, the craftsmanship and storytelling.

Andrew Sarris did not keep his pimp hand strong. Once in a Village Voice column, Mr. Sarris related the story of when he showed his university students The Asphalt Jungle sometime in the 1980s. It seemed that whenever a character in the film uttered the line, “Don’t bone me!” the students laughed. Professor Sarris didn’t get the joke, and had to ask them for an explanation. If Andrew Sarris can’t figure that one out, who knows how many other things have flown over his head through the decades? Such an admission voids a great deal of his written concepts and understandings. The moral? Clean-living and sheltered bourgeois academics should not always be trusted (if at all). Should Mr. Sarris wish to challenge this, all I have to say is, “Don’t bone me!”

Kael’s misgivings about the auteur theory… stemmed from a belief that male critics simply wanted to justify their penchant for action movies (Hawks, Ford, Joseph Lewis). Recent Blog-A-Thons gushing on about Brian De Palma and Abel Ferrara had me wishing Pauline were still alive to comment.

Reviews or critiques should never be read before seeing the film. No matter how objective we imagine ourselves, expectations and preconceptions will always color perception and alter the shape and value of a film. I never read about films before seeing them, and rarely read about them afterwards. To this day, my freshest viewing experience occurred when I went to a theatre and knew nothing, not even the title, of what I was about to see.

The need to know what a film is “about” before seeing it is an open admission of a closed mind.

The movie is over even before it started. In Henry Jaglom’s Someone to Love, Orson Welles sums up the dilemma faced by the filmmaker, and inadvertently causes one to question the relevance of the critic: “We’re not filmmakers. We’re just a ragbag bunch of people doing something that is technologically already almost passé. It’s a great problem of movies is that they’re always old-fashioned. It takes too long to make a movie. By the time your idea’s on the screen, it’s already dead.”

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