Today I’d like to talk a little about a subject that can make a lot of cinephiles, film bloggers and internet users in general a little squeamish, if not outright defensive: copyright issues. I’m going to write about it at length, because I think it’s important and that there are a lot of misconceptions and misjudgments out there.
I’m going to try and make a distinction about what’s legal and what’s ethical based on my own knowledge and experience acquiring non-mainstream films and writing about them. I’ll finish by discussing some of the iffy “grey zone” questions I've had to ask myself.
What pop-culture has to say
First of all, let’s talk about the most common case, which is downloading a movie from the internet. Let’s assume this is a relatively recent (last 30 years) movie made in America by someone or some company that has not divested its copyright prerogatives and that it is widely available from a distributer on a modern format like DVD. The way I understand it, this describes most movies that are pirated. There is no question, none whatsoever, that downloading such a film is illegal and unethical.
I don’t think most people pirating movies have any doubts that what they’re doing is illegal, but they still manage to rationalize it. Downloading media has become so widespread that there is an “it’s OK because everybody’s doing it” atmosphere. It’s like drinking during prohibition, right? As I was attending college various techniques like direct connect and torrents became ubiquitous and many, many students I knew, otherwise ethical in other areas of their lives, had no qualms with amassing huge collections of illegal works. Most of my cinephile friends have downloaded a film at least once.
But doing something that is wrong just because lots of people are doing is about the worst logic I can think of and shows a weakness of character and general cynicism that it pretty contemptible. That’s why almost anyone who regularly violates copyright usually convinces themselves that what they are doing is not actually wrong. Perhaps illegal, but not particularly unethical. “Nobody gets hurt except maybe some corporate fat-cats.” Some of the rationalizations I hear people spout make me madder than if they’d just admitted they didn’t want to fork over their money.
A Chinese coworker of mine once explains how I should actually be on his side (pro-piracy), because bootlegging only hurts the big studios (who I’m always pillorying) and helps the common man see more movies (which I’m often advocating). In this popular self-serving fantasy, video pirates are technological freedom fighters committing heroic revolutionary acts. “Down with oppressive capitalism! Up with communal sharing of artistic works!”
Right. I’m sure self-interest never even enters into it. Much as I mistrust the rich and powerful, I don’t have much love for self-proclaimed Robin Hoods who steal from anyone who has what they want and give to themselves. If anyone, it’s the uploaders and free download sites who could claim to have society’s greater good at heart (though their substantial banner ads and popups make me think otherwise), but let’s at least not pretend downloading is about anything other than wanting to see a free movie.
What the law has to say
Any work, as soon as it is recorded in a fixed form is immediately protected by copyright. Films made for studios are considered “works for hire” and the rights belong to the producer and/or studio, not the director or screenwriter. No registration necessary. No copyright logo (©) necessary. No FBI warning necessary. These three things are included by major studios and distributers solely because they provide additional leverage when suing violators.
The copyright is held for 70 years after the author’s death (if made independently), 95 years from first date of publishing or 120 years from creation (whichever comes first).
In essence, you can not copy, distribute or display a film without permission if the rights are still in effect, subject to fair use. Fair use is a nebulous concept that takes into consideration the purpose, portion and influence on profit that a reproduction incurs. For instance, the screenshots that I take for use on this blog are explicitly protected because they are used for the purpose of a review, are not exploited for my money and represent a tiny fraction of the film in question.
But don’t get the idea that copyright is a simple matter. It is the realm of lawyers and complicated exceptions and elaborate flowcharts. (Though who doesn’t love a law that distinguishes separate treatments for parody and satire?) It can take a great deal of research to discover if a film’s copyrights have lapsed, putting it in public domain. I recently bought a 12-movie collection of silent “public domain” Hitchcock films from Best Buy. I’ve since discovered that most of them actually do have rights retained on them, but if the distributer, Best Buy and a reasonably sharp film blogger like myself didn’t know, can Joe Consumer be expected to do the research?
Well, copyright law does make provisions for people who commit what is called “innocent infringement” if the person was not aware and had no reason to believe that the work was still under copyright. You’d only be liable for about $200 per work. Willful infringement (most of what goes on online) is another matter, and if the work is registered, could result in as much as $150,000 per work. The law is much harsher on those who make a bootleg than it is with people who knowingly buy a bootleg. Downloading a film, by the way, counts as making an illegal copy. “Time-shifting,” recording a film off of TV to watch later, is covered by fair use.
There is no active agency that enforces copyright, which is one reason why most people get away with it. A complaint has to be issued from the authentic rights holder who must send a cease and desist letter and press suit themselves. If the work in question is not registered, they can only hope to recover the loss of profit they suffered, which often makes the effort worthless. If the work was registered, they can hit you for the numbers mentioned above.
Now here is something I want all the free film revolutionaries to pay close attention to: because the big studios register all their works, monitor a lot of internet sites and possess an army of lawyers with decades of experience, they are the ones mostly likely and most able to enforce their copyrights. They go through a lot of trouble to ensure that they do not lose profits because of piracy. They hire lobbyists to secure laws in their favor. They hire lawyers to sue companies and individuals. They raise the prices on DVDs to help recoup their losses.
They might still do these things to some extent even if piracy was not such a problem, but the more piracy goes on, the more they will react with aggressive business strategies. The bottom line is that when you score a point against a big studio by downloading one of their films, they will just take it out on people, often times the ones who are paying legally. It is the little companies and independent filmmakers, who are less able to defend themselves, that actually get hurt. Even if these victims are interested in fighting to enforce their copyrights, they have to pay court fees and waste time that could have gone to their continued creative output.
What ethics has to say
So if you actually care about making artistic works available to a wider audience then there are productive and ethical ways of championing that cause that are more credible than self-interest motivated piracy:
1) Support movements to change copyright law.
2) Help research and publicize lists of films that have not been renewed and are in the public domain.
3) Research films that are not available and not in public domain and organize campaigns to request those movies be released. When a large enough fan base makes itself known, there’s a much greater financial impetus to distribute unavailable films.
4) Support studios, distributors and filmmakers who make quality films available at reasonable prices.
5) Politely contact rights holders for permission or carefully utilize fair use provisions to present films in a non-profit, educational environment.
6) Make your own creative works and get them out to the public.
Complicated as copyright law is, the ethical questions surrounding the issue are even more slippery. At least in today’s culture I suspect that people are much more likely to obey their own judgment than the law, so talking about the ethical standpoint might be more convincing. If someone says they don’t believe in copyrights, they aren’t likely to hold back just because a rarely-enforced law says so.
So let’s look at some fundamental premises that copyright law takes for granted:
1) An artist’s work belongs to the artist or whoever commissioned the work and took the financial risk for it.
2) Artistic works such as film have value.
3) The person(s) in (1) has the sole right to modify, sell, exchange or license the work and to otherwise obtain the financial value they believe it to be worth.
I know a lot of people who claim to disagree with one or more of these ideas. For example, you might say that a responsible government has a duty to provide free access for its citizens to at least some of their culture’s creative heritage much the same way as it should ensure universal education and medical care for the poor. You might argue that fixing a price for a work of art is subjective, or disagree over why producers/studios have exclusive rights while the crew has none or quibble about the exact extent of the artist’s moral rights to their work (an area where the US trails a bit behind Europe).
I understand these and similar disagreements, but if you just plain don’t accept any of the basic premises above, you probably can’t be convinced of the need for copyrights. But if you’ve at least thought about the issues and developed and a worldview that isn’t merely self-serving, than at least you’re not obliviously taking bootlegs for granted.
Believe it or not, copyright law did originally have the public good in mind. It’s a balancing act: on one hand, you want to protect an artist’s copyright so that it is profitable and sustainable to create artistic works and on the other hand you want as many people as possible to have access to these works.
The original copyright act of 1709 issued rights for 14 years with a one-time optional renewal for 14 more years. This has since been extended to a rather ridiculous 95 years since its first publication (in our case, screening) which accounts for pretty much the entire history of cinema. I doubt if most people could even name a feature film from before 1914. Clearly the law has come to favor the rights holders over the public. Not coincidentally, those rights holders are largely giant media corporations with Washington influence. Indeed, supported by special interests groups like Disney, a succession of laws derisively called the “Mickey Mouse Protection Act” has continued to push back the expiration date indefinitely.
At least with film, where a huge proportion of the profits are made within the first weekend of the release and most of the money even from rentals happens within a couple of years, I consider the lifetime of copyrights to be irrationally out of control. But if a studio or distributer continues to make their films widely available for reasonable prices and on modern formats, I still think it’s tough to violate copyrights and still allege the moral high ground. Especially these days with library’s stocked with classic films that are freely available to the public.
To me, the ethical question of rather it is OK to violate copyrights only really gets interesting when you look at films that are not widely or reasonably available or which aren’t available at all.
What I have to say
This is where I come in and start talking about my opinion on the ethics of unauthorized film distribution. It suffers from my own rationalizations and compromises, but I try to be honest about it and to hold myself to high standards, common sense and best intentions. I do think pretty much every film should be available to the world at a reasonable price (say, ~$50 or less), and in that sense I am guilty of my generation’s renowned sense of entitlement, but I’m not asking filmmakers or distributors to give something for nothing.
Solipsistic as it may sound, I’m going to conduct a Q&A with myself. That way, if anyone else wants to, they can copy just the list of questions and answer them based on their own convictions or present them to others as discussion points. Both might make for good exercises.
Q: How do you feel about borrowing movies between friends?
A: If money doesn’t exchange hands, I’m all for it. In fact, it’s one of my favorite ways of shaping cinephile converts.
The strict wording on some FBI warnings I’ve seen implies that you can’t even watch the film with your extended family. I think that’s just ridiculous.
Q: How do you feel about showing films to clubs or other organizations?
A: I think screenings of legal copies in small, non-profit clubs and educational organizations is fair use and utterly grand (obviously, considering my film club history). My college gets permission to show DVDs and 35mm prints to the community for free in exchange for not advertising the screenings, while my brother’s college runs licensed, low-cost screenings that have permission to advertise. I think that with anything smaller than those venues, especially if you’re showing something that most of the audience wouldn’t have even known about otherwise, you’re not cutting into anyone’s profit.
Q: Should you avoid bootlegs (from here on to include downloads and any other unauthorized acquisition of a film) even if there is no other option?
A: There’s a lot of circumstances I try to take into account. The simplest case, where a film is not available in any home format and is not shown on TV in your country, is one where I easily approve of bootlegs (presumably sourced from tapes of foreign TV airings). You are still responsible for confirming that the movie is not available.
Q: What if a film sometimes plays on TV, but isn’t otherwise available?
A: Wait for it to play on TV and watch or record it. If it requires cable/satellite that you wouldn’t otherwise buy, having a friend record it has never seemed a cardinal sin to me.
However, if a station owns the rights for a film and never (or almost never) plays it, do what you want and make your own peace. Previously I would give TCM (who owns an enormous amount of the unreleased films out there) about 6 months to a year to play a film before I sought other means, but if TCM follows through with their plan to make their entire library available on DVD by request, then I no longer need to make furtive back-alley deals.
Q: What if a film is available only on an old format like laserdisc?
A: Personally, I keep a VHS player around so that I can still watch the huge number of films that are available on tape but not disc. For films only previously marketed on obsolete formats like laserdisc, check whether the distributer is still around and considering a rerelease. Failing that, I generally seek out bootlegs sourced from the obsolete format.
Q: What if a movie is only available from another country, in PAL format and/or with incompatible region codes?
A: I found that a great investment is a region-free, any-standard DVD player (which are perfectly legal) that can play movies from anywhere in the world. Since region encoding is not backed by law – it is purely a way to increase profits by giving higher prices to wealthier regions – I never feel bad buying the film and stripping the silly limitations off with computer software (the distributor still got their money).
That said, I think that this is a case where the rights owner stupidly limited their own profits by not giving you a fully authorized option to pursue, and so I understand if people feel that getting a bootleg isn’t harming the company more than they harmed themselves.
Q: What if a movie is only available in another language?
A: You can often times find free subtitle files, which are legal to create and distribute. Minimal tech savvy is required to apply subtitle files to movies viewed on your computer.
Fansubbed bootlegs are illegal, but I still consider them a reasonable option if the current rights owner has no plans to provide a version in your language. I consider people who provide high quality fansubs to be doing a service to the cinema community.
Q: What if a film is only available for an exorbitantly high price, like a 35mm rental fee of or a festival/promotional/educational purposes price?
A: I’ve seen a lot 35mm rentals as high as $1000, without even taking into account the cost of the equipment you would need to project it. Festival/promotional/educational copies, which often pertain to experimental films, tend to be in the $100 to $250 range. That’s a sign that the distributor is doing outdated celluloid copies not intended for the general market. Sometimes you just have to wait for them to get their distribution branch in order for the price to drop.
If the rights owners posses digitized copies of these films that could be written to a DVD-r with little hassle, I consider the prices quoted above to be unreasonable and beyond the means of the general public (though exceptions exist). I have occasionally resorted to bootlegs in that situation, but often I just ignore these films.
If a movie is just plain expensive, like a Criterion release or the latest Blu-ray blockbuster, that doesn’t count as unreasonable in my book. You need to just commit to the price tag or wait for the cost to fall and used copies to become available.
Q: What if the rights owner wants to restrict who sees a film or how it is displayed?
A: If the rights owner in this case is the original author (preferably the director), then you should listen to their explanation, if one is given, and preferably respect it. I don’t usually agree that a film must be seen in theatrical conditions (as some filmmakers and critics insist) to be correctly understood and fully appreciated, but that is one expression of an artist’s moral rights over their work.
Sometimes I give in to moments of weakness and watch bootlegs of these films anyway, but I promise myself that, even if I don’t like it, I will give it a proper chance on the silver screen given the opportunity.
If the rights owner is a special interest group or religious organization that has acquired the rights for the purpose of preventing distribution and suppressing the original artist’s message, I side with the artist.
If the rights owner is a company utterly unaware or uninterested in distributing the film and unwilling to sell the rights to someone who is, I look for a bootleg. I’ve heard that the rights to some Peter Greenaway films went through several bankruptcy and repackaging sales and are now bundled into some obscure Japanese investment holding. If that’s true, then it’s a good example of a copyright not serving anyone’s idea of the public good.
Q: What if you think a film is in the public domain?
A: If it really is in public domain then it is legal to download and copies sold by anyone can’t be considered bootlegs. However, you should do at least some research into the matter. If I can’t find any glimmer of extant copyrights for a film during an hour of internet searching, I’ve satisfied my own conscience. The United States Copyright Office will conduct a semi-conclusive search for $150, or if you live near D.C. you can search their records for free. I’ve never gone that far.
Just because a film is in the public domain, though, doesn't mean it's not worth paying for. Most free and budget releases of public domain films are god-awful lazy transfers. I've found myself paying extra to get a definitive edition in more than one case.
Q: What if a film is only available on the grey market?
A: The grey market is usually meant to refer to internet sellers, called dealers, who sell movies that no one else has actively asserted copyrights for. Sometimes rights are not renewed, get trapped in limbo by a legal dispute, disappear with a distributor who goes out of business or get sold piecemeal only to specific countries. Dealers often times have a message like this one on their websites:
“The United States Berne Act states that: Films unreleased in the United States, including original version of films altered and/or edited for release in the United States, are not protected by American copyright; thus, they are considered public domain.”
That’s BS, although for years I believed it, mostly because I wanted desperately to believe it and never bothered to check. Having since read the Berne Convention Act and related copyright laws, I can safely say that it states the exact opposite: Movies copyrighted in foreign countries (or at least the majority who signed the Berne Act) are fully protected by U.S. copyright law.
Still, if you have decided for whatever reason that this is the best way to get the film, then it is less illegal than downloading the film since the lion’s share of the liability is on the shoulders of the dealer. Most of the dealers I’ve worked with are good people and will immediately withdraw items from their catalogue if you can show that another entity owns the rights.
Q: What if you acquire an unauthorized version of a movie when nothing else was available and then an authorized version becomes available?
A: My personal code of ethics is that I have to buy the authorized version when if it becomes available. This is really hard for me if I didn’t even end up liking the movie when I saw the bootleg.
The same philosophy has served me well with videogames. In college, I downloaded emulated roms (bootlegs of old videogames that run on a computer) from obsolete systems, but now that Nintendo makes many of these available legally on the Wii’s online store, at very reasonable prices, I’ve squared myself with the company.
Q: Is it OK to make copies of rented material?
A: Generally, no. I have at least two friends who rip all their Netflix movies to their computer so that they can send the discs back the same day. The way I see it, if you watch the film multiple times on your computer or lend it out, you are getting all the benefits of buying the film at only rental prices. If you are just watching the films at a later time and then deleting them, that’s probably just fair use time-shifting.
Q: Be honest, how many unauthorized movies do you own?
A: If you’ve tried to get a movie I’ve reviewed on this blog, odds are good that it was suspiciously absent from Netflix or Amazon. I’ve bought a bit over a hundred grey market bootlegs, most of which I can justify in keeping with the answers I’ve given above. I really do try to make sure that the artist and/or rights owner is compensated for their work whenever reasonably possible. I plan to be even more careful in the future.
The one black market bootleg I own, “Kill Bill Part I,” was purchased in the Philippines by a roommate and given to me as a gift. I keep it around because the creative English subtitles are hilarious, and probably constitute an original work in themselves.
The conversation continues, with particular emphasis on the anime community, over at The Grump Factory. John shares some his own thoughts and reactions on the issue of downloads and bootlegs.
Showing posts with label Metacriticism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Metacriticism. Show all posts
Friday, June 26, 2009
Friday, January 23, 2009
The Art of Listmaking
I’m going to try to make this introduction quick, since I cover this ground quite often: movie lists have a bad name. It’s because of how tedious, uninspired and uncritical they can be at their worst. Done correctly, they can be illuminating, thought-provoking and productively contentious. But is satisfying listmaking merely just a matter of taste? I think there’s more to it.
I’ve oft mentioned my love of the list concept and my penchant for poring over even the most dubious compilations. A great deal of the best films I’ve seen found their way in front of me not by way of advertising, reading, classes or sage advise, but from various miscellaneous lists. Asking someone for their top-ten is often times my handy personality test, secret handshake and conversation starter all in one.
And yet at the same time I have to acknowledge that many lists are tepid duds, get disproportionate deference and don’t substitute for reviews or critical analysis. Many critics and fans can readily shoot of a long list of reasons to dismiss lists completely. As for me, I’d rather [over]analyze the process of putting together a satisfying list and discuss what distinguishes the good from the bad.
Let’s start by considering two types of lists: specific and generic.
Specific Lists:
The specific list is actually much easier to deal with due to its limited scope. Examples would include my Top 10 Food Movies or Top 12 Hobo Films. All you need is some criteria, could be a genre, a country or something more eccentric, and a willingness to research and watch until you’ve comfortably covered a reasonable spectrum of the qualifiers.
Specific lists have a lot of room for creativity and are more fertile soil for sprouting interest. Choosing an inspired topic can often times be more attention-grabbing than the actual films on the list.
There are also two subtly different approaches. One is to rank films by how well they fit the topic and the other is to simply ask which films technically qualify and then rank them by their perceived quality. A concrete example might be comedies: do you rank the films just by funniness alone or do you take into account how the film works overall, including the dramatic and emotional resonance?
Some advice specifically for specific lists:
1) For small lists like top 10s, choose an interesting and focused topic. For broader areas like genres, countries or decades, choose a higher number to overcome obviousness.
2) Whatever definition you choose for qualifying movies, push it to the brink. Take for example westerns. Western genre lists often bore by sticking only to iconic “classics,” occasionally loudly admitting a few big-name revisionist westerns (starring Clint Eastwood or Kevin Costner) to fake variety. I’m often much more interested in hearing about fringe cases (which are also good for sparking debate) like non-Leone spaghetti westerns, “El Topo,” “Tears of the Black Tiger,” “The Terror of Tiny Town,” “Johnny Guitar” or “American Astronaut.” (Note: If you aren’t going to consider fringe cases, go ahead and tighten up your definition; maybe “Top 30 Classical Westerns” in this case).
3) The more specific your topic, the higher the percentage of coverage you should aim for. If you are going to make a list of sports-themed Hungarian musicals, I think you ought to have seen as close to all of them as possible. It might not be that much work.
Generic Lists:
Generic lists generally consider all of cinema and are inevitably more often the subject of skepticism, derision and controversy than specific lists. Many of these lists overlap significantly which, depending on your viewpoint, either unites into a consensus cinematic canon or runs together into repetitive dogma. Both sides of the coin are valid: while it is important not to be too slavish in our acceptance of the critical majority, these lists can be very useful for introducing new cinephiles and providing a cultural and artistic overview.
I’d like to list what I see as the most common strains of generic lists, how to distinguish them in the wild and how I feel about them.
Greatest Films – “Greatest” is possibly the biggest and boldest claim that can be made about films and yet it gets tossed around pretty lightly. “Greatest” lists draw lots of fire whether they recycle the same tired entries or pointedly leave them out. Only the gutsy should attempt these alone, since declaring yourself sole judge of greatness requires no small amount of solipsistic pretentiousness. These lists can be made more interesting by those who detail their methods, sound or otherwise, for establishing that illusive ideal of objectivity. Trying for humongous numbers also helps.
Most Important – The goal of “Most Important” lists is to delve into the innovations, cultural impact and historical role of films. These are slightly easier than “Greatest” lists, since it’s usually less contentious to measure the effect of a film than to assess its quality. They can also be pretty stale. Unless the writer adds unconventional choices (with arguments defending them), these are generally only useful for providing a timeline of cinematic developments, something which has already been extensively documented.
Favorite – One of the few types of list that dispenses with objectivity altogether and embraces the subjective nature of art. I often find “Favorite” lists to be the most honest and interesting, since they admit to revealing as much about the person and their worldview as they do about the quality of films. These lists also have the most variety of titles, with room for guilty pleasures, obscurities and movies that have eschewed consensus. I urge most listmakers to rely on this format as a basis. I consider “Desert Island” lists to be a somewhat confusing variation, since they imply films that you could watch endlessly; not necessarily true of my favorites.
Most Representative – This is a relatively rare type of generic list that might be described as the type of the catalog you’d put in a time capsule, SETI probe or class curriculum. The idea is to provide a list that contains the largest coverage over what cinema offers, usually trying to avoid unnecessary overlap. These lists span history, the world and all genres trying to leave nothing out, often including things that might not make it into traditional “Greatest” or “Most Important” lists like Bollywood musicals, Hong Kong martial arts films, slapstick comedies, essay films, documentaries, animations, etc. Guardian critic Derek Malcolm even included a porno in his 100.
Most Popular – These lists aggregate votes from a large group and apply some system to translate those votes into a ranked list. The goal is to get as many voters as possible, usually resulting in a very democratic result characterized by predictable mainstream films. “Most Popular” lists usually fail to introduce people to new movies and tend to confirm, rather than challenge, people’s artistic sensibilities. I think that most “Most Popular” lists of interest target a specific group, like a country, an online community or a profession, so that it provides insight into the local variations within widespread cultural trends.
Highest Grossing – One of the most objective types of general lists is a ranking of financial success. While it is usually a fairly concrete aspect to measure, there are still important nuances and pitfalls. Does one include rentals and home video sales, for instance? I also advise ignoring any “Highest Grossing” lists that don’t adjust for inflation and the best such lists also adjust for the changing relative cost of tickets (total number of ticket sales is a much more accurate measurement across eras). Yet no matter how you work the details, these list tend to be more flawed than even “Most Popular” ones, reflecting marketing campaigns, seasonal consumer shifts and here-then-gone zeitgeists more so than anyone’s idea of quality.
Creating a List:
Now I’d like to expand on what makes a worthwhile list. Relevant advice will appear in bullets.
First, you should choose a topic.
* Don’t make a list about something you don’t care about. A good list requires a great deal of immersion into the topic and reflects the passion of the compiler.
Then you need to choose an accurate title and write an introduction that reflects the restrictions, style and intent of the list. You should return and fine-tune it as your develop the list.
* Don’t fall into the trap of mixing and matching the rules. I can’t believe the number of times I’ve seen “Greatest” lists that include films like “Birth of a Nation” or “The Jazz Singer” clearly borrowed from “Most Important.” If you are taking into account historical context, please just say so.
* You don’t need a long and wordy title. If there are assumptions or specific rules that you wish to apply, simply state them in the introduction.
* Many lists assume that it goes without saying that they are considering only certain films that meet criteria like feature-length, fictional, live-action, English-language, American, sound-era, recent, theatrically distributed, etc. These do not go without saying. Your introduction should clarify any restrictions you are applying.
* Almost all lists nowadays come with boilerplate disclaimers. These tend to justify the creation of yet one more list, admit the inherit limitations of the format and then discuss the listmaker’s personal philosophy and biases. I’m so sick of reading the justification/limitations fine print that I usually just skip it, but leave it in if you feel the need (I apologize for the number of times I put my readers through it). By all mean, however, include some context about yourself, your tastes and your listmaking process.
Then comes the real heart and soul of a list: what made it in and what didn’t. I find it easiest to do an in/out pass first before actually ranking the titles. I usually feel that, with the exception of highly specific lists expecting few candidates, the inclusion/rejection of a film is much more important than the precise order. As a ravenous reader of lists, this has also made it easier for me to digest the abundance of varying opinions.
My advice in the section is a subjective take on the listmaking process.
* A list should satisfy the reader that the author has a reasonable knowledge of the topic. A general rule of thumb is that you should see at least twice as many contenders as the size of your final list.
* Do your homework. You should spend some time seeking out and watching new contenders after choosing the topic and before presenting the finished list. The last thing we need is more MSN-style lists where the writer has just pulled the first ten suitable movies that came to mind without studying the topic or filling in their viewing gaps.
* In general, I think it’s wise to include enough recognizable films to reassure readers about the titles they won’t recognize. If the reader hasn’t seen any film on the list, they won’t have any point of comparison to judge your taste and decide whether to seek out the remaining movies.
* On the flip side, I believe that a list should always have some obscure titles. One of the main reasons I read lists is to discover something new. I track many lists that interest me, but one of my personal rules is that I only keep around a list if it includes at least one film unique to my list collection.
* A list should challenge the reader with at least a few difficult, rare or arguable films. If there’s one thing I pass over faster than a list I wholly disagree with, it’s a list I completely agree with. Better that it stirs the reader to see a new film, rewatch an old one they’d dismissed, reconsider their opinion, argue for them more passionately or compose a counter-list.
* I always admire lists that strive for a certain level of variety within their restrictions. A common mistake of the green listmaker is to stick too closely to recent history and familiar culture. I have a lot more faith in the open-mindedness and thoroughness of a listmaker when they include films from before they were born and from places they’ve never lived. I impose pretty high standards of eclecticism on the lists I make and respect, but for most a solid handful of worldliness should do.
* Don’t make a list so long that it includes films you don’t even like.
* Don’t make a list so short that an average cinephile could guess every title off the top of their heads.
* An explanation/defense for your choices is often appreciated and can range from a sentence to a couple of pages. Why risk leaving readers scratching their heads or doubting your judgment when you have a chance to persuade them.
Once you have the basic placers chosen, you can begin the process of ranking them. Sometimes it’s not even necessary to apply an ordering and you should remain sensitive to whether it adds something to the list or not. Ranking lists can only increase the chance of someone disagreeing with you, but I often do it nonetheless.
* If you’re as fickle as I am, you’ll probably want to reorder, rebalance and tweak the list quite often, so I encourage everyone to use a spreadsheet utility like Microsoft Excel or OpenOffice Calc to facilitate moving the data around.
* You may have noticed that I said spreadsheet and not word processor. I like to keep around statistical data like the director, release date and country of origin for so that I can easily generate statistics. Spreadsheet programs make this extremely easy.
* You don’t have to number things in a strict 1,2,…,n way if you don’t want to. I often keep track of lists by tiers. This way the best-of-the-best are distinguished within the top tier and the borderline cases can all be found in the bottom tier. When I add a new movie and need to bump out an old one, it’s convenient to have only a small batch of bottom tier films to survey.
* Ranked lists are best used for distinguishing very similar films and worst for ordering very different works that don’t really compare directly.
* Learn to live with cycles (ex: A > B, B > C, C > A) that result from running many direct side-by-side comparisons. Taste often knows no logic.
Now I want everyone to go out and make a slew of amazing lists full of personality, originality and underappreciated masterpieces. Then send them to me for my amusement.
I’ve oft mentioned my love of the list concept and my penchant for poring over even the most dubious compilations. A great deal of the best films I’ve seen found their way in front of me not by way of advertising, reading, classes or sage advise, but from various miscellaneous lists. Asking someone for their top-ten is often times my handy personality test, secret handshake and conversation starter all in one.
And yet at the same time I have to acknowledge that many lists are tepid duds, get disproportionate deference and don’t substitute for reviews or critical analysis. Many critics and fans can readily shoot of a long list of reasons to dismiss lists completely. As for me, I’d rather [over]analyze the process of putting together a satisfying list and discuss what distinguishes the good from the bad.
Let’s start by considering two types of lists: specific and generic.
Specific Lists:
The specific list is actually much easier to deal with due to its limited scope. Examples would include my Top 10 Food Movies or Top 12 Hobo Films. All you need is some criteria, could be a genre, a country or something more eccentric, and a willingness to research and watch until you’ve comfortably covered a reasonable spectrum of the qualifiers.
Specific lists have a lot of room for creativity and are more fertile soil for sprouting interest. Choosing an inspired topic can often times be more attention-grabbing than the actual films on the list.
There are also two subtly different approaches. One is to rank films by how well they fit the topic and the other is to simply ask which films technically qualify and then rank them by their perceived quality. A concrete example might be comedies: do you rank the films just by funniness alone or do you take into account how the film works overall, including the dramatic and emotional resonance?
Some advice specifically for specific lists:
1) For small lists like top 10s, choose an interesting and focused topic. For broader areas like genres, countries or decades, choose a higher number to overcome obviousness.
2) Whatever definition you choose for qualifying movies, push it to the brink. Take for example westerns. Western genre lists often bore by sticking only to iconic “classics,” occasionally loudly admitting a few big-name revisionist westerns (starring Clint Eastwood or Kevin Costner) to fake variety. I’m often much more interested in hearing about fringe cases (which are also good for sparking debate) like non-Leone spaghetti westerns, “El Topo,” “Tears of the Black Tiger,” “The Terror of Tiny Town,” “Johnny Guitar” or “American Astronaut.” (Note: If you aren’t going to consider fringe cases, go ahead and tighten up your definition; maybe “Top 30 Classical Westerns” in this case).
3) The more specific your topic, the higher the percentage of coverage you should aim for. If you are going to make a list of sports-themed Hungarian musicals, I think you ought to have seen as close to all of them as possible. It might not be that much work.
Generic Lists:
Generic lists generally consider all of cinema and are inevitably more often the subject of skepticism, derision and controversy than specific lists. Many of these lists overlap significantly which, depending on your viewpoint, either unites into a consensus cinematic canon or runs together into repetitive dogma. Both sides of the coin are valid: while it is important not to be too slavish in our acceptance of the critical majority, these lists can be very useful for introducing new cinephiles and providing a cultural and artistic overview.
I’d like to list what I see as the most common strains of generic lists, how to distinguish them in the wild and how I feel about them.
Greatest Films – “Greatest” is possibly the biggest and boldest claim that can be made about films and yet it gets tossed around pretty lightly. “Greatest” lists draw lots of fire whether they recycle the same tired entries or pointedly leave them out. Only the gutsy should attempt these alone, since declaring yourself sole judge of greatness requires no small amount of solipsistic pretentiousness. These lists can be made more interesting by those who detail their methods, sound or otherwise, for establishing that illusive ideal of objectivity. Trying for humongous numbers also helps.
Most Important – The goal of “Most Important” lists is to delve into the innovations, cultural impact and historical role of films. These are slightly easier than “Greatest” lists, since it’s usually less contentious to measure the effect of a film than to assess its quality. They can also be pretty stale. Unless the writer adds unconventional choices (with arguments defending them), these are generally only useful for providing a timeline of cinematic developments, something which has already been extensively documented.
Favorite – One of the few types of list that dispenses with objectivity altogether and embraces the subjective nature of art. I often find “Favorite” lists to be the most honest and interesting, since they admit to revealing as much about the person and their worldview as they do about the quality of films. These lists also have the most variety of titles, with room for guilty pleasures, obscurities and movies that have eschewed consensus. I urge most listmakers to rely on this format as a basis. I consider “Desert Island” lists to be a somewhat confusing variation, since they imply films that you could watch endlessly; not necessarily true of my favorites.
Most Representative – This is a relatively rare type of generic list that might be described as the type of the catalog you’d put in a time capsule, SETI probe or class curriculum. The idea is to provide a list that contains the largest coverage over what cinema offers, usually trying to avoid unnecessary overlap. These lists span history, the world and all genres trying to leave nothing out, often including things that might not make it into traditional “Greatest” or “Most Important” lists like Bollywood musicals, Hong Kong martial arts films, slapstick comedies, essay films, documentaries, animations, etc. Guardian critic Derek Malcolm even included a porno in his 100.
Most Popular – These lists aggregate votes from a large group and apply some system to translate those votes into a ranked list. The goal is to get as many voters as possible, usually resulting in a very democratic result characterized by predictable mainstream films. “Most Popular” lists usually fail to introduce people to new movies and tend to confirm, rather than challenge, people’s artistic sensibilities. I think that most “Most Popular” lists of interest target a specific group, like a country, an online community or a profession, so that it provides insight into the local variations within widespread cultural trends.
Highest Grossing – One of the most objective types of general lists is a ranking of financial success. While it is usually a fairly concrete aspect to measure, there are still important nuances and pitfalls. Does one include rentals and home video sales, for instance? I also advise ignoring any “Highest Grossing” lists that don’t adjust for inflation and the best such lists also adjust for the changing relative cost of tickets (total number of ticket sales is a much more accurate measurement across eras). Yet no matter how you work the details, these list tend to be more flawed than even “Most Popular” ones, reflecting marketing campaigns, seasonal consumer shifts and here-then-gone zeitgeists more so than anyone’s idea of quality.
Creating a List:
Now I’d like to expand on what makes a worthwhile list. Relevant advice will appear in bullets.
First, you should choose a topic.
* Don’t make a list about something you don’t care about. A good list requires a great deal of immersion into the topic and reflects the passion of the compiler.
Then you need to choose an accurate title and write an introduction that reflects the restrictions, style and intent of the list. You should return and fine-tune it as your develop the list.
* Don’t fall into the trap of mixing and matching the rules. I can’t believe the number of times I’ve seen “Greatest” lists that include films like “Birth of a Nation” or “The Jazz Singer” clearly borrowed from “Most Important.” If you are taking into account historical context, please just say so.
* You don’t need a long and wordy title. If there are assumptions or specific rules that you wish to apply, simply state them in the introduction.
* Many lists assume that it goes without saying that they are considering only certain films that meet criteria like feature-length, fictional, live-action, English-language, American, sound-era, recent, theatrically distributed, etc. These do not go without saying. Your introduction should clarify any restrictions you are applying.
* Almost all lists nowadays come with boilerplate disclaimers. These tend to justify the creation of yet one more list, admit the inherit limitations of the format and then discuss the listmaker’s personal philosophy and biases. I’m so sick of reading the justification/limitations fine print that I usually just skip it, but leave it in if you feel the need (I apologize for the number of times I put my readers through it). By all mean, however, include some context about yourself, your tastes and your listmaking process.
Then comes the real heart and soul of a list: what made it in and what didn’t. I find it easiest to do an in/out pass first before actually ranking the titles. I usually feel that, with the exception of highly specific lists expecting few candidates, the inclusion/rejection of a film is much more important than the precise order. As a ravenous reader of lists, this has also made it easier for me to digest the abundance of varying opinions.
My advice in the section is a subjective take on the listmaking process.
* A list should satisfy the reader that the author has a reasonable knowledge of the topic. A general rule of thumb is that you should see at least twice as many contenders as the size of your final list.
* Do your homework. You should spend some time seeking out and watching new contenders after choosing the topic and before presenting the finished list. The last thing we need is more MSN-style lists where the writer has just pulled the first ten suitable movies that came to mind without studying the topic or filling in their viewing gaps.
* In general, I think it’s wise to include enough recognizable films to reassure readers about the titles they won’t recognize. If the reader hasn’t seen any film on the list, they won’t have any point of comparison to judge your taste and decide whether to seek out the remaining movies.
* On the flip side, I believe that a list should always have some obscure titles. One of the main reasons I read lists is to discover something new. I track many lists that interest me, but one of my personal rules is that I only keep around a list if it includes at least one film unique to my list collection.
* A list should challenge the reader with at least a few difficult, rare or arguable films. If there’s one thing I pass over faster than a list I wholly disagree with, it’s a list I completely agree with. Better that it stirs the reader to see a new film, rewatch an old one they’d dismissed, reconsider their opinion, argue for them more passionately or compose a counter-list.
* I always admire lists that strive for a certain level of variety within their restrictions. A common mistake of the green listmaker is to stick too closely to recent history and familiar culture. I have a lot more faith in the open-mindedness and thoroughness of a listmaker when they include films from before they were born and from places they’ve never lived. I impose pretty high standards of eclecticism on the lists I make and respect, but for most a solid handful of worldliness should do.
* Don’t make a list so long that it includes films you don’t even like.
* Don’t make a list so short that an average cinephile could guess every title off the top of their heads.
* An explanation/defense for your choices is often appreciated and can range from a sentence to a couple of pages. Why risk leaving readers scratching their heads or doubting your judgment when you have a chance to persuade them.
Once you have the basic placers chosen, you can begin the process of ranking them. Sometimes it’s not even necessary to apply an ordering and you should remain sensitive to whether it adds something to the list or not. Ranking lists can only increase the chance of someone disagreeing with you, but I often do it nonetheless.
* If you’re as fickle as I am, you’ll probably want to reorder, rebalance and tweak the list quite often, so I encourage everyone to use a spreadsheet utility like Microsoft Excel or OpenOffice Calc to facilitate moving the data around.
* You may have noticed that I said spreadsheet and not word processor. I like to keep around statistical data like the director, release date and country of origin for so that I can easily generate statistics. Spreadsheet programs make this extremely easy.
* You don’t have to number things in a strict 1,2,…,n way if you don’t want to. I often keep track of lists by tiers. This way the best-of-the-best are distinguished within the top tier and the borderline cases can all be found in the bottom tier. When I add a new movie and need to bump out an old one, it’s convenient to have only a small batch of bottom tier films to survey.
* Ranked lists are best used for distinguishing very similar films and worst for ordering very different works that don’t really compare directly.
* Learn to live with cycles (ex: A > B, B > C, C > A) that result from running many direct side-by-side comparisons. Taste often knows no logic.
Now I want everyone to go out and make a slew of amazing lists full of personality, originality and underappreciated masterpieces. Then send them to me for my amusement.
Thursday, September 18, 2008
Temperature Taxonomy for Directors
Today I’m going to propose a loose way of categorizing directors using a temperature metaphor that has already been around in an incomplete form. You might ask if we really need another way of classifying, pigeon-holing and dissecting films especially in an era where ideas like auteurism, genre and nationality have been widely attacked and even language and mode of production are not as clear-cut as they used to be. The answer is no. I’m only doing this because I enjoy lists and taxonomies and find it useful for describing the type of films I love.
So here are the categories: cold, cool, warm and hot. Simple enough. Directors can fall under one or more temperature and they can change throughout their career. The designations consider the directors style, content and goals. Here is a basic outline of what I intend each to mean:
Cold
A cold director is concerned with aesthetic and formal possibilities. He is often focused on the superficial exteriors of things and how they directly affect our senses rather than the symbolic or interpretative meanings. Characters are usually unimportant; treated with detachment and little concern for psychological depth or realism. Technical qualities such as color, composition, framing, lighting, staging, set design, movement and editing are more important than story or characters. The primary goal is to achieve beauty, often through experimental methods and non-narrative imagery.
Cool
Cool directors are interested, first and foremost, in entertaining. The central preoccupation is story and ample use of action, romance, comedy and suspended disbelief are employed to draw viewers into enjoying themselves. Genre devices and clichés are to be used as hooks to familiarize and accommodate the audience. The main artistic drive is to create the impression of high production values, with most technical aspects treated as distracting nonessentials. Material unrelated to understanding the story or encouraging character identification is removed or made inconspicuous so that the viewing experience is clear and concise. Ambiguity, controversy and challenges (such as difficult moral dilemmas) should be avoided.
Warm
A warm director is typically, though not necessarily, a humanist who seeks truth and understanding through the medium of film. Richly realized characters are the most important factor, with stories that may be very simple, personal and/or realistic. Deep themes that encourage further thought and argument after the movie are frequent. Films will often have a message or a specific agenda, though they might also be meditations on difficult multisided topics or unassuming character studies. The pacing is usually slow, with plenty of room for dialogue and contemplation.
Hot
Hot filmmakers are keyed to emotions and the visceral experience of watching a film. They want to affect the viewer, drawing them into the heightened emotional states through melodrama and expressionism. The films are often unrealistic and intense with wild originality, creative surrealism and unexplained strangeness used to transcend expectations and conventions. Hot directors may also employ shock, controversy, extremism, fast pacing, chaotic styles and sudden changes in technique to ensure an audience reaction. They want to challenge viewers and shake them out of complacency.
From these description it might be easily seen that in general experimental works fall under cold, studio films for wide release (especially genre films like action and comedy) are cool, critical darlings and prestige pictures tends towards warm and cult films and melodramas are typically hot.
The ancient Greeks and Romans practiced humorism, a medical theory that the body was made up of four humors: blood, phlegm, yellow bile and black bile. These were thought to control both diseases and personalities. My taxonomy is similar in that each director may have a combination of the four principles and in that such theoretical systems are almost entirely bunk.
While many great films are made under each of these categories, people will no doubt tend towards some and away from others. I like this taxonomy because it reveals my somewhat contradictory love for opposite poles: the hot and the cold. I think of the poles as the cinematic frontier, where the new exploration is being done: cold directors by pursuing formal and technical ambitions and hot directors by plumbing the depths of the human heart and psyche. The well-established middle territory of cool and warm is loved by audiences and critics respectively, but I find it less exciting.
With any system such as this there are necessarily limitations. Certainly there are some fuzzy borders between the categories and a lot of subtleties that are being missed. For instance, my love of hot directors doesn’t mesh with my dislike for some extreme cinemas: I’ve never been a fan of shock for its own sake, though I value transgression. My allegiance to cold directors is sometimes tested by minimalist avant-garde directors whose work is hard to engage with. Oh well.
Anyway, let’s get to the fun! I’m now going to start classifying directors by temperature. Feel free to comment with your additions and objections!
Cold: Bernardo Bertolucci, Stan Brakhage, Peter Greenaway, Wojciech Has, Aki Kaurismaki, David Lynch, Guy Madden, Tsai Ming-Liang, Nicholas Roeg, Raoul Ruiz, Lars von Trier, Bela Tarr, Orson Welles
Cool: Michael Bay, Jackie Chan, George Cukor, Cameron Crowe, Walt Disney, Hal Hartley, Howard Hawks, John Hughes, Peter Jackson, John Landis, George Lucas, Sidney Lumet, Brett Ratner, Ridley Scott, Raoul Walsh, Billy Wilder, Robert Wise
Warm: Kenneth Branagh, Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, Vittorio de Sica, Milos Forman, James Ivory, Abbas Kiarostami, Ken Loach, Kenji Mizoguchi, Yasujiro Ozu, Eric Rohmer, Roberto Rossellini, Francois Traffaut, Agnes Varda
Hot: Abel Ferrara, David Cronenberg, Lucio Fulci, Crispin Glover, Yasuzo Masumura, Takashi Miike, Glauber Rocha, Ken Russell, Andrei Zulawski
Cold/Cool: Joel and Ethan Coen, Alfred Hitchcock, Buster Keaton, Takashi Kitano, Stanley Kubrick, Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Patrice Leconte, Michael Mann, Christopher Nolan, Sam Peckinpah, Quentin Tarantino, Tom Tykwer
Cold/Warm: Theo Angelopoulus, Michelangelo Antonioni, Ingmar Bergman, Robert Bresson, Carl Theodore Dreyer, Atom Egoyan, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Federico Fellini, Louis Malle, Sergei Parajanov, Frantisek Vlacil, Wim Wenders
Cold/Hot: Dario Argento, Sergei Eisenstein, Jean-Luc Godard, Kim Ki-Duk, Alaine Robbe-Grillet, Shinya Tsukamoto
Cool/Warm: Robert Altman, Charlie Chaplin, Ron Howard, Krzysztof Kieslowski, Stanley Kramer, Akira Kurosawa, Ernst Lubitsch, Mira Nair, Nicholas Ray, Martin Scorsese, Stephen Spielberg, Zhang Yimou
Cool/Hot: Tex Avery, Stephen Chow, Roger Corman, Terry Gilliam, Jean-Pierre Jeunet, Richard Lester, Baz Luhrmann, Sam Raimi, Douglas Sirk, Johnny To, Paul Verhoeven
Warm/Hot: Luis Bunuel, Werner Herzog, Nagisa Oshima, Pier Paulo Pasolini, Vsevolod Pudovkin, Peter Watkins
So here are the categories: cold, cool, warm and hot. Simple enough. Directors can fall under one or more temperature and they can change throughout their career. The designations consider the directors style, content and goals. Here is a basic outline of what I intend each to mean:
Cold
A cold director is concerned with aesthetic and formal possibilities. He is often focused on the superficial exteriors of things and how they directly affect our senses rather than the symbolic or interpretative meanings. Characters are usually unimportant; treated with detachment and little concern for psychological depth or realism. Technical qualities such as color, composition, framing, lighting, staging, set design, movement and editing are more important than story or characters. The primary goal is to achieve beauty, often through experimental methods and non-narrative imagery.
Cool
Cool directors are interested, first and foremost, in entertaining. The central preoccupation is story and ample use of action, romance, comedy and suspended disbelief are employed to draw viewers into enjoying themselves. Genre devices and clichés are to be used as hooks to familiarize and accommodate the audience. The main artistic drive is to create the impression of high production values, with most technical aspects treated as distracting nonessentials. Material unrelated to understanding the story or encouraging character identification is removed or made inconspicuous so that the viewing experience is clear and concise. Ambiguity, controversy and challenges (such as difficult moral dilemmas) should be avoided.
Warm
A warm director is typically, though not necessarily, a humanist who seeks truth and understanding through the medium of film. Richly realized characters are the most important factor, with stories that may be very simple, personal and/or realistic. Deep themes that encourage further thought and argument after the movie are frequent. Films will often have a message or a specific agenda, though they might also be meditations on difficult multisided topics or unassuming character studies. The pacing is usually slow, with plenty of room for dialogue and contemplation.
Hot
Hot filmmakers are keyed to emotions and the visceral experience of watching a film. They want to affect the viewer, drawing them into the heightened emotional states through melodrama and expressionism. The films are often unrealistic and intense with wild originality, creative surrealism and unexplained strangeness used to transcend expectations and conventions. Hot directors may also employ shock, controversy, extremism, fast pacing, chaotic styles and sudden changes in technique to ensure an audience reaction. They want to challenge viewers and shake them out of complacency.
From these description it might be easily seen that in general experimental works fall under cold, studio films for wide release (especially genre films like action and comedy) are cool, critical darlings and prestige pictures tends towards warm and cult films and melodramas are typically hot.
The ancient Greeks and Romans practiced humorism, a medical theory that the body was made up of four humors: blood, phlegm, yellow bile and black bile. These were thought to control both diseases and personalities. My taxonomy is similar in that each director may have a combination of the four principles and in that such theoretical systems are almost entirely bunk.
While many great films are made under each of these categories, people will no doubt tend towards some and away from others. I like this taxonomy because it reveals my somewhat contradictory love for opposite poles: the hot and the cold. I think of the poles as the cinematic frontier, where the new exploration is being done: cold directors by pursuing formal and technical ambitions and hot directors by plumbing the depths of the human heart and psyche. The well-established middle territory of cool and warm is loved by audiences and critics respectively, but I find it less exciting.
With any system such as this there are necessarily limitations. Certainly there are some fuzzy borders between the categories and a lot of subtleties that are being missed. For instance, my love of hot directors doesn’t mesh with my dislike for some extreme cinemas: I’ve never been a fan of shock for its own sake, though I value transgression. My allegiance to cold directors is sometimes tested by minimalist avant-garde directors whose work is hard to engage with. Oh well.
Anyway, let’s get to the fun! I’m now going to start classifying directors by temperature. Feel free to comment with your additions and objections!
Cold: Bernardo Bertolucci, Stan Brakhage, Peter Greenaway, Wojciech Has, Aki Kaurismaki, David Lynch, Guy Madden, Tsai Ming-Liang, Nicholas Roeg, Raoul Ruiz, Lars von Trier, Bela Tarr, Orson Welles
Cool: Michael Bay, Jackie Chan, George Cukor, Cameron Crowe, Walt Disney, Hal Hartley, Howard Hawks, John Hughes, Peter Jackson, John Landis, George Lucas, Sidney Lumet, Brett Ratner, Ridley Scott, Raoul Walsh, Billy Wilder, Robert Wise
Warm: Kenneth Branagh, Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, Vittorio de Sica, Milos Forman, James Ivory, Abbas Kiarostami, Ken Loach, Kenji Mizoguchi, Yasujiro Ozu, Eric Rohmer, Roberto Rossellini, Francois Traffaut, Agnes Varda
Hot: Abel Ferrara, David Cronenberg, Lucio Fulci, Crispin Glover, Yasuzo Masumura, Takashi Miike, Glauber Rocha, Ken Russell, Andrei Zulawski
Cold/Cool: Joel and Ethan Coen, Alfred Hitchcock, Buster Keaton, Takashi Kitano, Stanley Kubrick, Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Patrice Leconte, Michael Mann, Christopher Nolan, Sam Peckinpah, Quentin Tarantino, Tom Tykwer
Cold/Warm: Theo Angelopoulus, Michelangelo Antonioni, Ingmar Bergman, Robert Bresson, Carl Theodore Dreyer, Atom Egoyan, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Federico Fellini, Louis Malle, Sergei Parajanov, Frantisek Vlacil, Wim Wenders
Cold/Hot: Dario Argento, Sergei Eisenstein, Jean-Luc Godard, Kim Ki-Duk, Alaine Robbe-Grillet, Shinya Tsukamoto
Cool/Warm: Robert Altman, Charlie Chaplin, Ron Howard, Krzysztof Kieslowski, Stanley Kramer, Akira Kurosawa, Ernst Lubitsch, Mira Nair, Nicholas Ray, Martin Scorsese, Stephen Spielberg, Zhang Yimou
Cool/Hot: Tex Avery, Stephen Chow, Roger Corman, Terry Gilliam, Jean-Pierre Jeunet, Richard Lester, Baz Luhrmann, Sam Raimi, Douglas Sirk, Johnny To, Paul Verhoeven
Warm/Hot: Luis Bunuel, Werner Herzog, Nagisa Oshima, Pier Paulo Pasolini, Vsevolod Pudovkin, Peter Watkins
Tuesday, May 13, 2008
Ramble on Editing, Petulia and Pauline (Part 3 of 3)
Part III: Pauline Kael.
After watching “Petulia,” I read some reviews by others and ended up tracking down Pauline Kael’s famous essay “Trash, Art and the Movies” which I hadn’t read since senior year of high school. At the time I loved it. It confirmed everything I had ever suspected about movies: that everything I liked was great cinema just by virtue of my liking it. Whenever I didn’t enjoy a complicated, difficult or innovative film it was not because I wasn’t yet ready for it, wasn’t looking into it deeply enough or hadn’t reached the emotional, intellectual or aesthetic maturity to appreciate it. No, it was just that filmmaker had failed at his essential task: to entertain.
In her own word, “…it might be a good idea to keep in mind also that if a movie is said to be a work of art and you don’t enjoy it, the fault may be in you, but it’s probably in the movie.”
It isn’t hard to see why this appealed to movie fans everywhere. It wrote them the intellectual equivalent of a blank check to go on doing what they were already doing. Don’t challenge yourself. Remain passive. Pleasure is king (amusement is prince), and the simpler the pleasure the more pure and honest it rings.
Critics loved the essay even more (percentage-wise, more of them read it), because it freed them of the difficult tasks of analysis and interpretation. Go with your gut instinct, your first reaction! For professionals who often have to submit their reviews within a day or two of the screening, this soothed their worries that further contemplation, a bit of objective distance or, god forbid, a second viewing, might change their opinions. Kael was notorious for never seeing a film twice and I have to wonder if this was just a defense mechanism so that she’d never have to admit to anyone, least of all herself, that film, art and even entertainment is something more than a momentary reflex. It is often only on the second viewing that I learn to really appreciate a film, since I can focus more on the style and form and take the story and dialogue for granted.
Now, of course, I can see how dangerous of an essay “Art, Trash” is, not least because it is so superbly written. Its popularity amongst film critics working for mainstream periodicals has contributed to the sanctioning of anti-intellectual attitudes that only serve to shrink the range of experiences (even pleasures!) that film can provide.
One statement sums up much of Kael’s argument: “Perhaps the single most intense pleasure of moviegoing is this non-aesthetic one of escaping from the responsibilities of having the proper responses required of us in our official (school) culture.”
I have to ask, “Escaping where?” I’m skeptical that people feel trapped in an official school culture, as most people I know are not living in a day-to-day world of inescapable high-culture, or any sort of nefarious web of philosophy and art. We live in popular culture, and the tyranny there is not the schoolteachers Kael is always mocking, but the media and the business community that tries to tell us where to spend our money, time and attention. For me, escapism is a chance to break out of the cheap marketing ploys and blanket conformity that relies on nothing more than the basic pleasures Kael triumphs.
That leads me to the second problem with Kael’s statement. She states that the most intense pleasure of movie-going is the non-aesthetic, but never mentions any of those less-intense pleasures. For me, the variety is important: imagination, admiration, enlightenment, surprise and the recognition of truth. What about the aesthetic pleasures like beauty and innovation? Should we just throw those out? Am I being pretentious by going one step further and suggesting that cinema might offer more to my life than pleasure? Isn’t it worth something if a film is informative, provocative, or moving?
I’m not arguing for less pleasure in cinema, but I can be entertained and still love the mise-en-scene. Why settle for only the simple pleasures?
I don’t think it’s unreasonable to start out a filmgoer just liking good stories and the human interest elements that Kael champions. But after seeing a few dozen love triangles, one will likely start to care as much about the performances as the plot wherein Miss A almost marries handsome B, but realizing that loyal C is more genuine. After a handful of court room dramas, one notices the writing and not just the verdicts. (Not guilty for protagonists. Guilty for giant corporations. There, I spoiled them.) After the umpteenth murder scene, we might take a moment out from our emotional distress and notice the cinematography. I haven’t stopped enjoying these films. Quite the opposite; now I have a richer and deeper enjoyment that encompasses multiple levels at once.
I think most film enthusiasts are not dour gluttons for pretentiousness, but people who have learned to get something out of film that others don’t. I, for one, still love a good story, but give me technical skill, careful craftsmanship and some solid performances and then you’ll earn a standing ovation. Reading the plot summary alone is not going to get me out of my seat.
I can even enjoy what Kael dubs trash (as anyone who reads the Film Walrus can attest) and still analyze, deconstruct, interpret and admire it without “ruining” the experience.
Now that I’ve gotten that out of the way, let me tie it back to “Petulia.” Kael singles this movie out in her essay and, along with another one of my favorites, “2001,” utterly savages it:
“I have rarely seen a more disagreeable, a more dislikable (or a bloodier) movie than “Petulia” and I would guess that its commercial success represents a triumph of publicity—and not the simple kind of just taking ads.
[…]
“The images of “Petulia” don’t make valid connections, they’re joined together for shock and excitement, and I don’t believe in the brilliance of a method which equates hippies, war, surgery, wealth, Southern decadents, bullfights, etc. Lester’s mix is almost as fraudulent as “Mondo Cane”; “Petulia” exploits any shocking material it can throw together to give false importance to a story about Holly Golightly and The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit. The jagged glittering mosaic style of “Petulia” is an armor protecting Lester from an artist’s task; this kind of “style” no longer fools people so much in writing but it knocks them silly in films.”
Pauline Kael is demonstrating exactly the problem I’m trying to get at: she’s working with an immediate instinctual reaction without rising to meet the challenges that the movie offers. Whenever she doesn’t understand one of Lester’s artistic decisions, she accuses him of lacking any artistry at all. It is the logical conclusion of refusing to partake in deeper meanings and emotions that one sees only the superficial; the jagged glittering mosaic.
It’s all the more a shame since Kael defends another 1968 film, “The Thomas Crown Affair,” which I also love for its editing virtuosity (courtesy of Hal Ashby, who ranks up there with Roeg), amongst other assets. The harmlessness of the genial heist film falls well within her safety zone, but “Petulia,” which dares to be serious and cynical, causes a knee-jerk reaction so violent that she calls the movie bloody (there is really only one scene with blood and that is relatively mild by today’s standards) and shocking (the content and tone are actually quite subdued).
For both “Petulia” and “2001,” she highlights a central criticism meant to delegitimize any proponents. She claims “Petulia” does little more than cash in on the zeitgeist, riding the misanthropy and anti-Americanism that was popular during the Vietnam War era. With “2001,” she dismisses it as only interesting to stoners who use its dazzling imagery to supplement their highs (an accusation recently made by Premier magazine as well).
If she’s right, than I’m wrong about two films I consider brilliant. So I present a succinct counterargument:
I watched “Petulia” in 2008 and “2001” while sober…
and I still think they’re brilliant.
After watching “Petulia,” I read some reviews by others and ended up tracking down Pauline Kael’s famous essay “Trash, Art and the Movies” which I hadn’t read since senior year of high school. At the time I loved it. It confirmed everything I had ever suspected about movies: that everything I liked was great cinema just by virtue of my liking it. Whenever I didn’t enjoy a complicated, difficult or innovative film it was not because I wasn’t yet ready for it, wasn’t looking into it deeply enough or hadn’t reached the emotional, intellectual or aesthetic maturity to appreciate it. No, it was just that filmmaker had failed at his essential task: to entertain.
In her own word, “…it might be a good idea to keep in mind also that if a movie is said to be a work of art and you don’t enjoy it, the fault may be in you, but it’s probably in the movie.”
It isn’t hard to see why this appealed to movie fans everywhere. It wrote them the intellectual equivalent of a blank check to go on doing what they were already doing. Don’t challenge yourself. Remain passive. Pleasure is king (amusement is prince), and the simpler the pleasure the more pure and honest it rings.
Critics loved the essay even more (percentage-wise, more of them read it), because it freed them of the difficult tasks of analysis and interpretation. Go with your gut instinct, your first reaction! For professionals who often have to submit their reviews within a day or two of the screening, this soothed their worries that further contemplation, a bit of objective distance or, god forbid, a second viewing, might change their opinions. Kael was notorious for never seeing a film twice and I have to wonder if this was just a defense mechanism so that she’d never have to admit to anyone, least of all herself, that film, art and even entertainment is something more than a momentary reflex. It is often only on the second viewing that I learn to really appreciate a film, since I can focus more on the style and form and take the story and dialogue for granted.
Now, of course, I can see how dangerous of an essay “Art, Trash” is, not least because it is so superbly written. Its popularity amongst film critics working for mainstream periodicals has contributed to the sanctioning of anti-intellectual attitudes that only serve to shrink the range of experiences (even pleasures!) that film can provide.
One statement sums up much of Kael’s argument: “Perhaps the single most intense pleasure of moviegoing is this non-aesthetic one of escaping from the responsibilities of having the proper responses required of us in our official (school) culture.”
I have to ask, “Escaping where?” I’m skeptical that people feel trapped in an official school culture, as most people I know are not living in a day-to-day world of inescapable high-culture, or any sort of nefarious web of philosophy and art. We live in popular culture, and the tyranny there is not the schoolteachers Kael is always mocking, but the media and the business community that tries to tell us where to spend our money, time and attention. For me, escapism is a chance to break out of the cheap marketing ploys and blanket conformity that relies on nothing more than the basic pleasures Kael triumphs.
That leads me to the second problem with Kael’s statement. She states that the most intense pleasure of movie-going is the non-aesthetic, but never mentions any of those less-intense pleasures. For me, the variety is important: imagination, admiration, enlightenment, surprise and the recognition of truth. What about the aesthetic pleasures like beauty and innovation? Should we just throw those out? Am I being pretentious by going one step further and suggesting that cinema might offer more to my life than pleasure? Isn’t it worth something if a film is informative, provocative, or moving?
I’m not arguing for less pleasure in cinema, but I can be entertained and still love the mise-en-scene. Why settle for only the simple pleasures?
I don’t think it’s unreasonable to start out a filmgoer just liking good stories and the human interest elements that Kael champions. But after seeing a few dozen love triangles, one will likely start to care as much about the performances as the plot wherein Miss A almost marries handsome B, but realizing that loyal C is more genuine. After a handful of court room dramas, one notices the writing and not just the verdicts. (Not guilty for protagonists. Guilty for giant corporations. There, I spoiled them.) After the umpteenth murder scene, we might take a moment out from our emotional distress and notice the cinematography. I haven’t stopped enjoying these films. Quite the opposite; now I have a richer and deeper enjoyment that encompasses multiple levels at once.
I think most film enthusiasts are not dour gluttons for pretentiousness, but people who have learned to get something out of film that others don’t. I, for one, still love a good story, but give me technical skill, careful craftsmanship and some solid performances and then you’ll earn a standing ovation. Reading the plot summary alone is not going to get me out of my seat.
I can even enjoy what Kael dubs trash (as anyone who reads the Film Walrus can attest) and still analyze, deconstruct, interpret and admire it without “ruining” the experience.
Now that I’ve gotten that out of the way, let me tie it back to “Petulia.” Kael singles this movie out in her essay and, along with another one of my favorites, “2001,” utterly savages it:
“I have rarely seen a more disagreeable, a more dislikable (or a bloodier) movie than “Petulia” and I would guess that its commercial success represents a triumph of publicity—and not the simple kind of just taking ads.
[…]
“The images of “Petulia” don’t make valid connections, they’re joined together for shock and excitement, and I don’t believe in the brilliance of a method which equates hippies, war, surgery, wealth, Southern decadents, bullfights, etc. Lester’s mix is almost as fraudulent as “Mondo Cane”; “Petulia” exploits any shocking material it can throw together to give false importance to a story about Holly Golightly and The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit. The jagged glittering mosaic style of “Petulia” is an armor protecting Lester from an artist’s task; this kind of “style” no longer fools people so much in writing but it knocks them silly in films.”
Pauline Kael is demonstrating exactly the problem I’m trying to get at: she’s working with an immediate instinctual reaction without rising to meet the challenges that the movie offers. Whenever she doesn’t understand one of Lester’s artistic decisions, she accuses him of lacking any artistry at all. It is the logical conclusion of refusing to partake in deeper meanings and emotions that one sees only the superficial; the jagged glittering mosaic.
It’s all the more a shame since Kael defends another 1968 film, “The Thomas Crown Affair,” which I also love for its editing virtuosity (courtesy of Hal Ashby, who ranks up there with Roeg), amongst other assets. The harmlessness of the genial heist film falls well within her safety zone, but “Petulia,” which dares to be serious and cynical, causes a knee-jerk reaction so violent that she calls the movie bloody (there is really only one scene with blood and that is relatively mild by today’s standards) and shocking (the content and tone are actually quite subdued).
For both “Petulia” and “2001,” she highlights a central criticism meant to delegitimize any proponents. She claims “Petulia” does little more than cash in on the zeitgeist, riding the misanthropy and anti-Americanism that was popular during the Vietnam War era. With “2001,” she dismisses it as only interesting to stoners who use its dazzling imagery to supplement their highs (an accusation recently made by Premier magazine as well).
If she’s right, than I’m wrong about two films I consider brilliant. So I present a succinct counterargument:
I watched “Petulia” in 2008 and “2001” while sober…
and I still think they’re brilliant.
Saturday, February 16, 2008
But Who Will Review the Reviewers?
I meant to do some sort of timely follow-up to my post about how I review, but never got around to it, for one reason or another. I had several ideas that never came to fruition. I thought I might do a historical overview of film criticism, but I’m a long way from having done the research required. I thought about doing a list of my favorite film critics and bloggers, but that also merited more time spent exploring the internet and sifting through sites. Today’s theme is a little more general and, hopefully, should make for better discussion.
I’ve come up with a set of spectrums to classify reviewers. None of them attempts to describe how “good” or “bad” the reviewer is, but they get at some deeper questions that I’d like to address. I hope that by asking yourself which positions on the spectrums you prefer, it might help you better understand what you look for in newspapers, magazines and blogs. I know my own tastes are pretty variable, but when it comes down to what I actually and consistently read, there are a lot of things in common. I’ve also tried to give some idea of where I think I stand (or would like to stand) on each spectrum.
I’m presenting the spectrums as a scale (I’d recommend a seven point scale) with a descriptive terms that describe the approaches at either end. I should start by mentioning that one side or the other is not objectively better, but I do have my own preferences. I tend to think the extremes are not usually optimal. As usual, expect some overlap.
1) Focus <-------> Coverage
A website or blog with focus has some particular premise around which to organize the reviews. These range from fan sites for actors and actresses to themed reviewers like giallo fever. Their advantage is usually an extreme knowledge within their field and plenty of dedication. The disadvantage is the narrow perspective and marginal utility for casual fans.
Coverage refers to reviewers who will write about just about anything. These people generally have broader tastes and a more eclectic variety of interests, but they can lack consistency and the type of obsessive immersion that makes focused writers so compelling. Most professional critics like Roger Ebert are high in coverage, though some have such strong biases in their scoring that, in practice, they are actually focused.
A distinction I would like to make is that coverage does not mean merely the quantity or percentage of films reviewed, but rather, the variety. I have favorites in both the focus and coverage camps, but I tend not to read amateur reviewers who cover every single film released (like the hard-working Reelviews) since I just don’t have the time. When I need that type of extreme coverage I rely on collaborative efforts like Metacritic, AllMovieGuide, IMDB, Greencine Daily, Indiewire and the Netflix community (I abhor Rotten Tomatoes because of the site design and dull, narrow-minded conformity) though I approach their ratings with skepticism since none of these sites cater specifically to my taste.
When I started this blog, I thought I was going to be a focused reviewer either in Asian cinema or Italian gialli. Of course, that’s not how thing played out. I could hardly keep my enthusiasm for all cinema boxed into a single distinct label. The only thread that still noticeably runs through my choices is my love for unusual cinema (cult films, B-movies, art house, etc.) by directors who think outside the box-office. I think I could do to be a little more prolific (I’m constantly beating myself up for not working harder), but I’m pretty content with the range of material I cover.
2) Casual <-------> Expert
This one is often linked to focus/coverage. I consider a casual reviewer to be a hobbyist with little or no film training who has viewed hundreds of films, but probably not thousands. A casual reviewer loves movies and sees them as a great source of entertainment, but generally has plenty of other hobbies and interests besides. They tend to lean towards big-named wide-release titles and have less interest in older films, foreign films and art films. The biggest advantage of casual reviewers is that they are very much in touch with the majority of the population and the predictive power of their ratings is often more effective than paid professionals.
I considered putting “professional” instead of “expert,” but opted against the idea, because being paid is hardly the key criteria on this spectrum. An expert reviewer is someone who tends to be more knowledgeable and obsessive. They often have an education in journalism or film production, analysis and theory, though this is also not necessary; an understanding of film on a technical and artistic level is more important. The advantage to experts is that they are often more rigorous in their reasoning and more open-minded to new approaches. They can often relate disparate films to each other and have a keener eye for originality and style. The disadvantage is that they can often be aloof, picky, jaded, esoteric, pretentious or egotistical.
I definitely prefer the expert reviewers and would qualify most of the writers I read as such (whether they are paid or not), though insightful newcomers often provide the freshest perspectives. Recently I’ve grown somewhat disenchanted with one of the great cinema experts, Jonathan Rosenbaum, but he may be the last of a dying breed in a culture increasingly saturated with non-professional experts. I personally strive to fall towards the expert side of the spectrum, but I consider myself in a constant evolution to improve my understanding and appreciation of film.
3. Harsh <-------> Accepting
This is basically a scale for how hard it is to please a reviewer. A harsh critic only places his stamp of approval on a very small fraction of films and tends to tear into perceived flaws. Meanwhile, an accepting reviewer will usually play up the best aspects of a film and will try to judge the movie by on its own ground. The harsh critic is perfect for people who only intend to see a few of the very best films available, but they are only useful when their opinions are nearly identical with your own. An accepting reviewer is useless as a sieve, but excellent for someone striving to broaden their horizons, even if it means spending more time and money and risking more duds.
Though many of the most famous critics like Vincent Canby and Jonathan Rosenbaum made their reputations on the strength of their discriminating taste and astronomically high standards, I dislike almost all harsh critics. Part of reason is that I hate to read people bashing films I really that I found worthwhile. I enjoy the vast majority of the films I see or I wouldn’t spend so much time watching, reading about and writing on them. Accepting reviewers are also generally more open-minded, a quality which I highly value.
Obviously, it’s important to have some standards and to distinguish between the great, the merely good and the waste of time. Someone like Harry Knowles gives so many positive reviews that he seems to be helping distributors rather than viewers. This is why you can see his name praising a conspicuous number of movies with “revenge of” prefixes and Roman numeral suffixes.
That said, I think viewers would get the most out of their experience (both intellectually and in terms of sheer pleasure) if they at least tried to appreciate everything they see. Still, some films are just terrible and I love a witty thrashing handed to a truly deserving failure. So do many readers, if the sales of Ebert’s “I Hated, Hated, Hated This Movie” and “Your Movie Sucks” are any evidence. I consider venting my rage at dreadful films to be healthy in small doses, but I usually write about them only when they serve as an example of something not to do or can trigger further discussion.
4. Entertainment <-------> Art
There are many ways to classify a reviewer’s tastes, but I think that this distinction is probably the most important. Is the reviewer more concerned with entertainment and the pleasure that can be derived from movies or are they primary interested in the artistic value and social relevance? You could map this pretty closely to Mainstream vs Independent, but its not a perfect fit. The pros and cons are strictly a matter of intended audience; cinephiles have very different reasons for watching films.
These aren’t mutually exclusive, either, but anyone who samples a reviewer can form a general idea of where they stand. My own opinion is that the American advertising complex has the entertainment side pretty much covered with trailers, promos, banner ads, magazine covers, posters, commercials, TV shows, tie-in, etc. and so I mostly read reviewers who explore and expose material on the less publicized art/indie side of things. I often rely on these reviewers to make me aware of films I would never have otherwise discovered.
This spectrum doesn’t really work well when I try to place myself. I really like the two edges, but I tend to be unenthusiastic about the center territory where generic dramas and unremarkable genre installments lurk.
5. Opinion <-------> Analysis
An opinion writer is someone who reviews a film based upon their overall reaction, taking into account their emotional response, their excitement and interest throughout the film and their general assessment of the quality by their personal criteria. Typically, story, acting and pacing are highly valued. The vast majority of professional reviewers and bloggers are bunched deep onto this side of the spectrum.
An analysis writer is often times a film theorist or academic who is more interested in the form, operation and technical qualities of the film. They may write reviews, which are by nature opinions, but they often emphasize elements like editing, cinematography, staging, set design, lighting and sound mixing that opinion writers might not notice or care about.
I prefer reviewers who are somewhere in the middle-to-right (analysis-leaning). One reason is that I find few people who match my opinions (and even then, I prefer my own), but almost all analysis can be interesting and illuminating. I also think that good analysis is a rare skill, whereas opinions are ubiquitous and do not require talent.
My original thought on writing this article was to focus solely on this issue, but ultimately it is just one factor amongst many. I had observed a significant distinction in reviewers: some felt that the most important thing to write about was what they brought to the film whereas others tried to focus on what the film brought to them. The first type of reviewers is an opinion writer who is ultimately judging the film on things like their attention span, worldview, moral sense and personal taste.
These are important aspect of a reviewer and help define their personality in a way that makes them dynamic and appealing to readers. However, it can be dangerous if these are the sole criteria used for judging a film. It creates millions of reviews that dismiss movies because they have sex or violence or that celebrate films because the reviewer thinks someone in the cast is hot or, most banal of all, whine that the film is “boring” without providing any real information about the content. It is no wonder that these reviews often end up being short-sighted and short-lived: as culture (fashion, politics, discourse) changes, so do the opinions that we bring to movies.
Yet the movies themselves never change. The composition of each shot, the movements of the camera through space and the aural and visual elements that went into the film are constant. It’s a fact that seems obvious, but is often overlooked or ignored.
I blame the late, great film critic Pauline Kael for lending mainstream legitimacy to the implicit idea that the reviewer is more important than the film. Kael was a brilliant writer and always an informed and engaging read, but in retrospect, I think she popularized the primacy of subjective responses and the reviewer’s personal agenda. She had an enormous influence on the professional critic establishment and I’m not always sure it was for the better (a very unpopular statement, I know). I would compare her to Freud, who was foundational in developing his field, but whose specific ideas were often in the wrong direction.
Alternatively, I hail David Bordwell as a much needed alternative. Many are familiar with him from his textbook “Film Art,” the most widely used introductory survey for film analysis. In his books and blog he has always sought to understand cinema as an art and even a science, a series of images and sounds that invite many interpretations, but which exist and interrelate in highly concrete and objective ways. He certainly has opinions, but he is astonishingly capable of understanding what shapes them and what elements of a film could cause other viewers to reach different conclusions.
6. Style <-------> Substance
Lastly, I’d like to address the issue of prose. A style reviewer is a writer in the sense of the novelist, whose word choice, sentence structure and references affect our enjoyment of reading the review. A substance reviewer is a writer in the sense of a reporter, who primarily presents the plot summary, the cast listing and so on. The advantage of style is in the enjoyment of the read, while the advantage of substance is in the need to be informative.
I believe that style is an important element of all writing. With film criticism, it can distinguish one writer from a sea of millions and make all the difference. Since I don’t consider the statistics about a movie to be all that important, I often keep the plot summaries short and I skip out mentioning the cast unless I think it might matter to readers. I try to provide trivia only when it is interesting and I leave IMDB to handle the exhaustive details.
Going Beyond:
These spectrums are not the only traits of film criticism, but hopefully they provide a broad approach that is of some use. Is there anything I missed that you feel is worth mention? Want to defend where you are on one of the spectrums or explain why you prefer one end to another? Let me know!
I’ve come up with a set of spectrums to classify reviewers. None of them attempts to describe how “good” or “bad” the reviewer is, but they get at some deeper questions that I’d like to address. I hope that by asking yourself which positions on the spectrums you prefer, it might help you better understand what you look for in newspapers, magazines and blogs. I know my own tastes are pretty variable, but when it comes down to what I actually and consistently read, there are a lot of things in common. I’ve also tried to give some idea of where I think I stand (or would like to stand) on each spectrum.
I’m presenting the spectrums as a scale (I’d recommend a seven point scale) with a descriptive terms that describe the approaches at either end. I should start by mentioning that one side or the other is not objectively better, but I do have my own preferences. I tend to think the extremes are not usually optimal. As usual, expect some overlap.
1) Focus <-------> Coverage
A website or blog with focus has some particular premise around which to organize the reviews. These range from fan sites for actors and actresses to themed reviewers like giallo fever. Their advantage is usually an extreme knowledge within their field and plenty of dedication. The disadvantage is the narrow perspective and marginal utility for casual fans.
Coverage refers to reviewers who will write about just about anything. These people generally have broader tastes and a more eclectic variety of interests, but they can lack consistency and the type of obsessive immersion that makes focused writers so compelling. Most professional critics like Roger Ebert are high in coverage, though some have such strong biases in their scoring that, in practice, they are actually focused.
A distinction I would like to make is that coverage does not mean merely the quantity or percentage of films reviewed, but rather, the variety. I have favorites in both the focus and coverage camps, but I tend not to read amateur reviewers who cover every single film released (like the hard-working Reelviews) since I just don’t have the time. When I need that type of extreme coverage I rely on collaborative efforts like Metacritic, AllMovieGuide, IMDB, Greencine Daily, Indiewire and the Netflix community (I abhor Rotten Tomatoes because of the site design and dull, narrow-minded conformity) though I approach their ratings with skepticism since none of these sites cater specifically to my taste.
When I started this blog, I thought I was going to be a focused reviewer either in Asian cinema or Italian gialli. Of course, that’s not how thing played out. I could hardly keep my enthusiasm for all cinema boxed into a single distinct label. The only thread that still noticeably runs through my choices is my love for unusual cinema (cult films, B-movies, art house, etc.) by directors who think outside the box-office. I think I could do to be a little more prolific (I’m constantly beating myself up for not working harder), but I’m pretty content with the range of material I cover.
2) Casual <-------> Expert
This one is often linked to focus/coverage. I consider a casual reviewer to be a hobbyist with little or no film training who has viewed hundreds of films, but probably not thousands. A casual reviewer loves movies and sees them as a great source of entertainment, but generally has plenty of other hobbies and interests besides. They tend to lean towards big-named wide-release titles and have less interest in older films, foreign films and art films. The biggest advantage of casual reviewers is that they are very much in touch with the majority of the population and the predictive power of their ratings is often more effective than paid professionals.
I considered putting “professional” instead of “expert,” but opted against the idea, because being paid is hardly the key criteria on this spectrum. An expert reviewer is someone who tends to be more knowledgeable and obsessive. They often have an education in journalism or film production, analysis and theory, though this is also not necessary; an understanding of film on a technical and artistic level is more important. The advantage to experts is that they are often more rigorous in their reasoning and more open-minded to new approaches. They can often relate disparate films to each other and have a keener eye for originality and style. The disadvantage is that they can often be aloof, picky, jaded, esoteric, pretentious or egotistical.
I definitely prefer the expert reviewers and would qualify most of the writers I read as such (whether they are paid or not), though insightful newcomers often provide the freshest perspectives. Recently I’ve grown somewhat disenchanted with one of the great cinema experts, Jonathan Rosenbaum, but he may be the last of a dying breed in a culture increasingly saturated with non-professional experts. I personally strive to fall towards the expert side of the spectrum, but I consider myself in a constant evolution to improve my understanding and appreciation of film.
3. Harsh <-------> Accepting
This is basically a scale for how hard it is to please a reviewer. A harsh critic only places his stamp of approval on a very small fraction of films and tends to tear into perceived flaws. Meanwhile, an accepting reviewer will usually play up the best aspects of a film and will try to judge the movie by on its own ground. The harsh critic is perfect for people who only intend to see a few of the very best films available, but they are only useful when their opinions are nearly identical with your own. An accepting reviewer is useless as a sieve, but excellent for someone striving to broaden their horizons, even if it means spending more time and money and risking more duds.
Though many of the most famous critics like Vincent Canby and Jonathan Rosenbaum made their reputations on the strength of their discriminating taste and astronomically high standards, I dislike almost all harsh critics. Part of reason is that I hate to read people bashing films I really that I found worthwhile. I enjoy the vast majority of the films I see or I wouldn’t spend so much time watching, reading about and writing on them. Accepting reviewers are also generally more open-minded, a quality which I highly value.
Obviously, it’s important to have some standards and to distinguish between the great, the merely good and the waste of time. Someone like Harry Knowles gives so many positive reviews that he seems to be helping distributors rather than viewers. This is why you can see his name praising a conspicuous number of movies with “revenge of” prefixes and Roman numeral suffixes.
That said, I think viewers would get the most out of their experience (both intellectually and in terms of sheer pleasure) if they at least tried to appreciate everything they see. Still, some films are just terrible and I love a witty thrashing handed to a truly deserving failure. So do many readers, if the sales of Ebert’s “I Hated, Hated, Hated This Movie” and “Your Movie Sucks” are any evidence. I consider venting my rage at dreadful films to be healthy in small doses, but I usually write about them only when they serve as an example of something not to do or can trigger further discussion.
4. Entertainment <-------> Art
There are many ways to classify a reviewer’s tastes, but I think that this distinction is probably the most important. Is the reviewer more concerned with entertainment and the pleasure that can be derived from movies or are they primary interested in the artistic value and social relevance? You could map this pretty closely to Mainstream vs Independent, but its not a perfect fit. The pros and cons are strictly a matter of intended audience; cinephiles have very different reasons for watching films.
These aren’t mutually exclusive, either, but anyone who samples a reviewer can form a general idea of where they stand. My own opinion is that the American advertising complex has the entertainment side pretty much covered with trailers, promos, banner ads, magazine covers, posters, commercials, TV shows, tie-in, etc. and so I mostly read reviewers who explore and expose material on the less publicized art/indie side of things. I often rely on these reviewers to make me aware of films I would never have otherwise discovered.
This spectrum doesn’t really work well when I try to place myself. I really like the two edges, but I tend to be unenthusiastic about the center territory where generic dramas and unremarkable genre installments lurk.
5. Opinion <-------> Analysis
An opinion writer is someone who reviews a film based upon their overall reaction, taking into account their emotional response, their excitement and interest throughout the film and their general assessment of the quality by their personal criteria. Typically, story, acting and pacing are highly valued. The vast majority of professional reviewers and bloggers are bunched deep onto this side of the spectrum.
An analysis writer is often times a film theorist or academic who is more interested in the form, operation and technical qualities of the film. They may write reviews, which are by nature opinions, but they often emphasize elements like editing, cinematography, staging, set design, lighting and sound mixing that opinion writers might not notice or care about.
I prefer reviewers who are somewhere in the middle-to-right (analysis-leaning). One reason is that I find few people who match my opinions (and even then, I prefer my own), but almost all analysis can be interesting and illuminating. I also think that good analysis is a rare skill, whereas opinions are ubiquitous and do not require talent.
My original thought on writing this article was to focus solely on this issue, but ultimately it is just one factor amongst many. I had observed a significant distinction in reviewers: some felt that the most important thing to write about was what they brought to the film whereas others tried to focus on what the film brought to them. The first type of reviewers is an opinion writer who is ultimately judging the film on things like their attention span, worldview, moral sense and personal taste.
These are important aspect of a reviewer and help define their personality in a way that makes them dynamic and appealing to readers. However, it can be dangerous if these are the sole criteria used for judging a film. It creates millions of reviews that dismiss movies because they have sex or violence or that celebrate films because the reviewer thinks someone in the cast is hot or, most banal of all, whine that the film is “boring” without providing any real information about the content. It is no wonder that these reviews often end up being short-sighted and short-lived: as culture (fashion, politics, discourse) changes, so do the opinions that we bring to movies.
Yet the movies themselves never change. The composition of each shot, the movements of the camera through space and the aural and visual elements that went into the film are constant. It’s a fact that seems obvious, but is often overlooked or ignored.
I blame the late, great film critic Pauline Kael for lending mainstream legitimacy to the implicit idea that the reviewer is more important than the film. Kael was a brilliant writer and always an informed and engaging read, but in retrospect, I think she popularized the primacy of subjective responses and the reviewer’s personal agenda. She had an enormous influence on the professional critic establishment and I’m not always sure it was for the better (a very unpopular statement, I know). I would compare her to Freud, who was foundational in developing his field, but whose specific ideas were often in the wrong direction.
Alternatively, I hail David Bordwell as a much needed alternative. Many are familiar with him from his textbook “Film Art,” the most widely used introductory survey for film analysis. In his books and blog he has always sought to understand cinema as an art and even a science, a series of images and sounds that invite many interpretations, but which exist and interrelate in highly concrete and objective ways. He certainly has opinions, but he is astonishingly capable of understanding what shapes them and what elements of a film could cause other viewers to reach different conclusions.
6. Style <-------> Substance
Lastly, I’d like to address the issue of prose. A style reviewer is a writer in the sense of the novelist, whose word choice, sentence structure and references affect our enjoyment of reading the review. A substance reviewer is a writer in the sense of a reporter, who primarily presents the plot summary, the cast listing and so on. The advantage of style is in the enjoyment of the read, while the advantage of substance is in the need to be informative.
I believe that style is an important element of all writing. With film criticism, it can distinguish one writer from a sea of millions and make all the difference. Since I don’t consider the statistics about a movie to be all that important, I often keep the plot summaries short and I skip out mentioning the cast unless I think it might matter to readers. I try to provide trivia only when it is interesting and I leave IMDB to handle the exhaustive details.
Going Beyond:
These spectrums are not the only traits of film criticism, but hopefully they provide a broad approach that is of some use. Is there anything I missed that you feel is worth mention? Want to defend where you are on one of the spectrums or explain why you prefer one end to another? Let me know!
Thursday, August 23, 2007
The Line Between Horror and Horrible
A recent email from my sister Meredith got me thinking more about the whole "torture-porn" debate still going on. I have been pretty silent on the issue except for the occasional derisive generalization or dismissive sigh. I don't have much to add that hasn't been said more eloquently elsewhere, so feel free to skip this post if you've already read three or more articles on the topic.
After the release of Hostel II, I followed the latest wave torture-porn discussion that raged across the internet. One of my favorite bloggers, Film Brain, had a succinct post a while back that made some great points. I stayed out of the discussion for the most part, just as I stayed out of the screenings, possibly because I'd already been burned by enough low-quality, high-shock material riding on notoriety and hype. I have to say that I don't like the films known by the "torture-porn" moniker nor do I understand the pleasure in watching them. I get extremely annoyed at the people who are only interested in "proving" how much gore and sadism they can take.
Keep in mind, this is coming from a guy who loves gialli and appreciates the mix of style, kitsch, murder and exploitation that gets stirred around in that frequently maligned subgenre.
Some randomly cobbled-together comments on the subject:
1) I think the phrase torture-porn is too loaded of a term and should not have become the accepted subgenre title. I think the individual movies have to be evaluated in terms of their modes of audience engagement, the filmmaker's intentions and the reception by audiences before they deserve the designation of "torture-porn" and sadly, I don't see anyone even attempting to do that seriously. It would make interesting reading for sure. That said, I too have tossed the phrase around with a derogatory tone and I admit it is convenient and widely accepted.
2) I usually feel that enough talent can redeem almost anything. I like plenty of intense, violent, exploitive and/or immoral movies, but usually they have to offer a good reason for their form and content. Recently I've grown somewhat troubled by films taking advantage of my weakness for artistic presentation. It gets frustrating in movies like "Hard Candy" or the works of Gaspar Noe when cinematic talent is used as an excuse to gain a critical or popular acceptance of what is essentially shallow shock value or malicious sadism. Still, I find these films to be better then their hackneyed siblings.
3) Meredith's mentioned the worn-out gender stereotypes and that hits upon two of my biggest problems with these films: sexism and uncreativity. They go hand in hand, since there is hardly anything less inspiring in our artistic community then someone regurgitating internalized patriarchal superiority and abusive gender stereotypes. And as Film Brain points out, the victims taking blood revenge doesn't justify the whole tedious exercise. It isn't that every movie has to be completely gender PC; most gender cliches (even boring positive ones!) can be happily subverted just by depicting characters as distinct and developed personalities.
4) To this day I am still more frightened by films like "Picnic at Hanging Rock" (1975), "The Vanishing" (1988) and "The Innocents" (1961) (which together have about a teaspoon of blood) then any dozen gory trips through shaky-camera ax chases, blood-drenched torture scenes and shriek-scream monlogues. The more unwittingly desensitized I become to violence and gore, the more I realize that what frightens me are abstractions like facing illness and death, societal wrongs, the unknown and the intricate depths of the human mind. Ironically, this ends up meaning that I am more scared when contemplating the psychology of some of these directors then I am when watching their movies.
5) I assume that, like every wave of shock and horror that has come before, all of this "torture-porn" controversy will seem like very tame and humdrum stuff to future generations. While that may be an unhealthy state for society to arrive at, it does mean that I can look forward to the day when nothing this side of legal shocks anyone at all. Then maybe directors will give up trying to shock and return to making interesting, insightful and imaginative horror films.
After the release of Hostel II, I followed the latest wave torture-porn discussion that raged across the internet. One of my favorite bloggers, Film Brain, had a succinct post a while back that made some great points. I stayed out of the discussion for the most part, just as I stayed out of the screenings, possibly because I'd already been burned by enough low-quality, high-shock material riding on notoriety and hype. I have to say that I don't like the films known by the "torture-porn" moniker nor do I understand the pleasure in watching them. I get extremely annoyed at the people who are only interested in "proving" how much gore and sadism they can take.
Keep in mind, this is coming from a guy who loves gialli and appreciates the mix of style, kitsch, murder and exploitation that gets stirred around in that frequently maligned subgenre.
Some randomly cobbled-together comments on the subject:
1) I think the phrase torture-porn is too loaded of a term and should not have become the accepted subgenre title. I think the individual movies have to be evaluated in terms of their modes of audience engagement, the filmmaker's intentions and the reception by audiences before they deserve the designation of "torture-porn" and sadly, I don't see anyone even attempting to do that seriously. It would make interesting reading for sure. That said, I too have tossed the phrase around with a derogatory tone and I admit it is convenient and widely accepted.
2) I usually feel that enough talent can redeem almost anything. I like plenty of intense, violent, exploitive and/or immoral movies, but usually they have to offer a good reason for their form and content. Recently I've grown somewhat troubled by films taking advantage of my weakness for artistic presentation. It gets frustrating in movies like "Hard Candy" or the works of Gaspar Noe when cinematic talent is used as an excuse to gain a critical or popular acceptance of what is essentially shallow shock value or malicious sadism. Still, I find these films to be better then their hackneyed siblings.
3) Meredith's mentioned the worn-out gender stereotypes and that hits upon two of my biggest problems with these films: sexism and uncreativity. They go hand in hand, since there is hardly anything less inspiring in our artistic community then someone regurgitating internalized patriarchal superiority and abusive gender stereotypes. And as Film Brain points out, the victims taking blood revenge doesn't justify the whole tedious exercise. It isn't that every movie has to be completely gender PC; most gender cliches (even boring positive ones!) can be happily subverted just by depicting characters as distinct and developed personalities.
4) To this day I am still more frightened by films like "Picnic at Hanging Rock" (1975), "The Vanishing" (1988) and "The Innocents" (1961) (which together have about a teaspoon of blood) then any dozen gory trips through shaky-camera ax chases, blood-drenched torture scenes and shriek-scream monlogues. The more unwittingly desensitized I become to violence and gore, the more I realize that what frightens me are abstractions like facing illness and death, societal wrongs, the unknown and the intricate depths of the human mind. Ironically, this ends up meaning that I am more scared when contemplating the psychology of some of these directors then I am when watching their movies.
5) I assume that, like every wave of shock and horror that has come before, all of this "torture-porn" controversy will seem like very tame and humdrum stuff to future generations. While that may be an unhealthy state for society to arrive at, it does mean that I can look forward to the day when nothing this side of legal shocks anyone at all. Then maybe directors will give up trying to shock and return to making interesting, insightful and imaginative horror films.
Friday, April 27, 2007
How Do I Review?
This essay is long overdue. Very early on with the Film Walrus, I intended to give an account of who I am as a film critic and how I go about reviewing films. I had trouble coming up with a good format to frame the discussion and kept putting it off.
Recently my friends Mad Dog and Magus reminded me of my omission when they started the the Grump Factory, an up-and-coming pop-culture-eclectic blog that included introductions and provided direct insight into the writers’ goals and views. A second reminder came today, when I received an essay back from one of my classes: History of Modern Art. I found myself agreeing with the mid-level grade, but disagreeing with all the reasons. In written comments the grader attacked my choice of thesis, my choice of examples, my use of a numbered list and a word that he didn’t understand (but which was used correctly). Almost none of it identified what was actually wrong with the paper: the lack of inspiration, the lazy formal analysis and the general absence of historical contextualization.
It made me think: How would I grade the paper? How do I grade art in general? I do it all the time, even if unconsciously. More relevant to this blog: How do I “grade” film? What matters to me in a film when I am writing a review or deciding on a score?
The Grump Factory may sneak out of the last question by refusing to give number/letter ratings, but my borderline-OCD/computer-science-oriented genetic make-up insists that I score, rank and list movies with compulsive excess. Oversimplification is very dangerous, such as when an entire movie is reduced to a number, or worse, a Boolean thumbs-up/thumbs-down status (Ebert has stated in multiple interviews that the review is more important than his hand, but he still perpetuates the system). Hopefully this essay will help show the complexity of reviewing a film, and encourage readers of any review to look beyond the numbers, thumbs, stars and letter grades.
To me, one of the key tricks is to take lots of factors into account. Judging a movie on only one or two elements comes off as ignorant (you leave out a lot), short-sighted (what if you change your mind on one of those main points?) and useless to others (they will probably have different preferences and hang-ups). You can never harm a review by taking into account too many elements.
As usual, two of my goals are honesty and self-awareness. I will list aspects of film and how important I think they are to my rating of a film with some details about my philosophy towards each element (some overlap is inevitable). None of these ideas are set in stone and I try to remain open-minded and capable of change. I do not necessarily want to believe the same things in ten years that I believe now. Growth can be a good thing.
Subject Matter
Not generally that important within some basic limits. I like to think that a movie about anything can be excellent or terrible based on how the film is done. That being said, I obviously have natural bias towards subjects I am already interested in. Lacking a predisposition on my part, I feel it is often the duty of the writer/director to convince me that I should be interested in their subject matter.
I prefer characters and plot to non-narrative modes, but even that is not a strict rule.
Genre
This can be fairly important in terms of my personal taste, my purchase of films and my rewatching habits. However, as with subject matter, I feel strongly that anything can be done right and I’ve found movies I love in every major genre. I have a preference for sci-fi, noir, horror, mystery, giallos and art films and a tendency against westerns, romantic comedies and teen sex comedies. Drama, action films, adventures, biographies, period pieces, documentaries, experimental works and many others fall on pretty neutral ground.
In general, I try to take genre standards into account with the numbered ratings. I try not to compare apples and oranges when ranking films or determining relative number scores. That being said, my personal bias for or against a particular genre probably affects my ratings by as much as a full point.
I do not require a film to be easily codified by genre and no movie will lose points purely because it defies genre-labeling or mixes genres.
Technical Craftsmanship
Extremely important. The skill in terms of editing, set design, mise-en-scene, composition, framing, movement, staging, cinematography, lighting, sound, music and all other technical aspects are of great interest to me. They need not be any particular type (for instance, minimalist mise-en-scene can be as good as dense ones, long takes can work as well as fast editing), but I am a believer that the formal aspects of a film should compliment and augment the other elements: story, theme, style, mood, etc. Craftsmanship does not have to involve high production values.
Style
Very important. There is little worse than a film that is completely generic. Style does not have to be extremely overt or fully consistent, but I like a film that has a dynamic atmosphere, a compelling method of storytelling and some originality in terms of look and feel. Style can make a familiar genre, plot or convention seem fresh again.
Budget
Almost completely unimportant. A $100 million CG-enhanced, celebrity-packed widely-released film has almost no intrinsic advantage in my book. Even low-budget films can establish an intriguing visual and aural atmosphere without needing loads of cash. Money can make a film look good only if used right, which requires craft and style. I also feel that the look a film does not necessarily define it, and excellent writing, acting and originality can overcome financial lack.
Writing (Story & Dialogue)
Important; often extremely important. My personal taste usually tends towards engaging stories with clever plots. Oft-told stories are not an automatic failure, but need to prove themselves in other ways, while I see originality as a nearly instant advantage. Sequels are required to contain quality in their own rights. Remakes are under obligation to improve or reinterpret the original and will usually have a disadvantage in my book. Plot holes are bad, but non-sequiturs and ambiguities can have their place if they are intentional. I try not to nitpick plots, but frequent or foundational problems in the story are inexcusable. I also feel that dialogue should be realistic for realistic films and should generally make sense within the internal logic of the film. Depending on the film, conspicuous wit, linguistic dexterity or even silence may be well-suited.
Acting
Usually very important. Much like the writing, realism is important for realistic films. Acting is often the most important quality of extremely realistic films such as family dramas or biographies. However, ideas about realism change over time. I tend to be a big fan of alternative acting modes and appreciate expressionism, melodrama, hyperbole, restraint, dehumanism and any other acting mode done well and with purpose.
Length
Not very important. A movie can be any length it needs to be so long as it remains good throughout. The only caveat is that a lousy movie is made worse by length, and more responsibility lies on the director to ensure that all his material merits the final cut. I tend to think that efficiency is a worthwhile trait and I will often note if a film could have been trimmed down to make other elements (such as pacing or story) flow better. Length remains a difficult area for many critics to overcome.
I judge the value of films based on their full length. I try to consider not just how much I like the ending, but how the overall film worked.
Pacing
Average importance. I find that it is very important to synchronize my personal mood with the pacing of a film to best appreciate it. I can tolerate very slow films and very fast films, so long as they are interesting and well-made. Pacing (especially slow pacing) is often a hang-up for many viewers and so I try to remain open-minded. Establishing a pace unintentionally unbefitting of the style, mood, genre or plot can be devastating. This is one area where I feel consistency can be important, in either “velocity” (steady pace throughout the film) or “acceleration” (steady change in rate throughout the film) or “rhythm” (deft alternation of two or more rates). Pacing should not be confused with mere editing rate (number of cuts).
Historical Context
Somewhat important. I try to take historical context into account, but it can rarely change my rating of a film by more than a point. I treat movies from past time periods as though they were in their own genres with their own conventions, rules, themes and preoccupations. I judge old films with such things in mind, but sometimes historical context can’t save a film where hindsight knows better.
Ideology
Slightly important. I attempt to remain open-minded in terms of ideology and I think many philosophies, opinions and standpoints and interesting and worth consideration. Even those I don’t agree with can be committed to film capably and insightfully. It saddens me that currently more than 45% of imdb.com votes for “Fahrenheit 9/11” are 1s and 10s, when I doubt any professional film critic could argue either rating successfully.
Objective intentions aside, I am unlikely to give even the best neo-Nazi recruitment video a very high score and so clearly some ideological value does underlie my opinions.
Whenever possible I like the ideology to be a minor element of the film and I think too much focus on it can be distracting and/or preachy.
I am also against antagonism towards the audience (for instance, shocking material used as a weapon to make the audience uncomfortable or sick without redeeming artistic or thematic merits) and breaches of ethics (killing animals needlessly, causing physical harm to another person, violating privacy or personal rights, etc.)
Emotion
Very unimportant. I have almost no need to connect emotionally with fictional characters or stories. When it happens and it works, all the better for the film. I think an emotional connection between a film and a viewer can be powerful and valuable, but it is often unreliable and untranslatable between viewers. I try to communicate my specific emotional reaction to a film in the review, but I leave that out of the final score and focus on judging whether the acting, writing and other elements were successful and fair in generating the emotions.
Sense of Humor
Ranges wildly based on the level of reliance a film has on comedy. For straight-out comedy, sense of humor is extremely important and so the film must appeal directly to what I think is funny. There just isn’t any objectivity when it comes to humor. Also, I tend to be pretty demanding on comedies, especially those that prey on lowest common denominator taste’s of audiences without even trying to be good movies in other respects.
Shock Value
Ranges wildly based on the level of reliance a film has on shock. A film which exists only to shock can not score very high. Shock, like emotion, can have an important place in film, but should not be leaned on to carry a movie. Shock value usually dates quickly and so I don’t trust it as a sign of lasting quality.
Kitsch
Can be important depending on the case. At its best, kitsch can reverse almost all the elements I’ve listed, making “bad” become “good” and creating pleasure out of former disadvantages. Kitsch is best when it occurs unintentionally.
Auteur Status
Very unimportant. Even new movies by my favorite directors are judged by the same standards as always. Points don’t carry over between films.
Other Opinions
Hopefully fairly unimportant. I try to decide my rating before I look at the ratings of other critics our sources to prevent myself from being subconsciously biased. However, I do think discussion of films and exposure to other opinions is important and can vastly improve the appreciation of a movie.
Personal Taste
Extremely important. Almost every review will contain a great deal of personal taste even if I try to be objective, so I won’t bother to deny it or choke it out. I do try not to score a movie more than two points away from where my most objective formal analysis would place it.
Recently my friends Mad Dog and Magus reminded me of my omission when they started the the Grump Factory, an up-and-coming pop-culture-eclectic blog that included introductions and provided direct insight into the writers’ goals and views. A second reminder came today, when I received an essay back from one of my classes: History of Modern Art. I found myself agreeing with the mid-level grade, but disagreeing with all the reasons. In written comments the grader attacked my choice of thesis, my choice of examples, my use of a numbered list and a word that he didn’t understand (but which was used correctly). Almost none of it identified what was actually wrong with the paper: the lack of inspiration, the lazy formal analysis and the general absence of historical contextualization.
It made me think: How would I grade the paper? How do I grade art in general? I do it all the time, even if unconsciously. More relevant to this blog: How do I “grade” film? What matters to me in a film when I am writing a review or deciding on a score?
The Grump Factory may sneak out of the last question by refusing to give number/letter ratings, but my borderline-OCD/computer-science-oriented genetic make-up insists that I score, rank and list movies with compulsive excess. Oversimplification is very dangerous, such as when an entire movie is reduced to a number, or worse, a Boolean thumbs-up/thumbs-down status (Ebert has stated in multiple interviews that the review is more important than his hand, but he still perpetuates the system). Hopefully this essay will help show the complexity of reviewing a film, and encourage readers of any review to look beyond the numbers, thumbs, stars and letter grades.
To me, one of the key tricks is to take lots of factors into account. Judging a movie on only one or two elements comes off as ignorant (you leave out a lot), short-sighted (what if you change your mind on one of those main points?) and useless to others (they will probably have different preferences and hang-ups). You can never harm a review by taking into account too many elements.
As usual, two of my goals are honesty and self-awareness. I will list aspects of film and how important I think they are to my rating of a film with some details about my philosophy towards each element (some overlap is inevitable). None of these ideas are set in stone and I try to remain open-minded and capable of change. I do not necessarily want to believe the same things in ten years that I believe now. Growth can be a good thing.
Subject Matter
Not generally that important within some basic limits. I like to think that a movie about anything can be excellent or terrible based on how the film is done. That being said, I obviously have natural bias towards subjects I am already interested in. Lacking a predisposition on my part, I feel it is often the duty of the writer/director to convince me that I should be interested in their subject matter.
I prefer characters and plot to non-narrative modes, but even that is not a strict rule.
Genre
This can be fairly important in terms of my personal taste, my purchase of films and my rewatching habits. However, as with subject matter, I feel strongly that anything can be done right and I’ve found movies I love in every major genre. I have a preference for sci-fi, noir, horror, mystery, giallos and art films and a tendency against westerns, romantic comedies and teen sex comedies. Drama, action films, adventures, biographies, period pieces, documentaries, experimental works and many others fall on pretty neutral ground.
In general, I try to take genre standards into account with the numbered ratings. I try not to compare apples and oranges when ranking films or determining relative number scores. That being said, my personal bias for or against a particular genre probably affects my ratings by as much as a full point.
I do not require a film to be easily codified by genre and no movie will lose points purely because it defies genre-labeling or mixes genres.
Technical Craftsmanship
Extremely important. The skill in terms of editing, set design, mise-en-scene, composition, framing, movement, staging, cinematography, lighting, sound, music and all other technical aspects are of great interest to me. They need not be any particular type (for instance, minimalist mise-en-scene can be as good as dense ones, long takes can work as well as fast editing), but I am a believer that the formal aspects of a film should compliment and augment the other elements: story, theme, style, mood, etc. Craftsmanship does not have to involve high production values.
Style
Very important. There is little worse than a film that is completely generic. Style does not have to be extremely overt or fully consistent, but I like a film that has a dynamic atmosphere, a compelling method of storytelling and some originality in terms of look and feel. Style can make a familiar genre, plot or convention seem fresh again.
Budget
Almost completely unimportant. A $100 million CG-enhanced, celebrity-packed widely-released film has almost no intrinsic advantage in my book. Even low-budget films can establish an intriguing visual and aural atmosphere without needing loads of cash. Money can make a film look good only if used right, which requires craft and style. I also feel that the look a film does not necessarily define it, and excellent writing, acting and originality can overcome financial lack.
Writing (Story & Dialogue)
Important; often extremely important. My personal taste usually tends towards engaging stories with clever plots. Oft-told stories are not an automatic failure, but need to prove themselves in other ways, while I see originality as a nearly instant advantage. Sequels are required to contain quality in their own rights. Remakes are under obligation to improve or reinterpret the original and will usually have a disadvantage in my book. Plot holes are bad, but non-sequiturs and ambiguities can have their place if they are intentional. I try not to nitpick plots, but frequent or foundational problems in the story are inexcusable. I also feel that dialogue should be realistic for realistic films and should generally make sense within the internal logic of the film. Depending on the film, conspicuous wit, linguistic dexterity or even silence may be well-suited.
Acting
Usually very important. Much like the writing, realism is important for realistic films. Acting is often the most important quality of extremely realistic films such as family dramas or biographies. However, ideas about realism change over time. I tend to be a big fan of alternative acting modes and appreciate expressionism, melodrama, hyperbole, restraint, dehumanism and any other acting mode done well and with purpose.
Length
Not very important. A movie can be any length it needs to be so long as it remains good throughout. The only caveat is that a lousy movie is made worse by length, and more responsibility lies on the director to ensure that all his material merits the final cut. I tend to think that efficiency is a worthwhile trait and I will often note if a film could have been trimmed down to make other elements (such as pacing or story) flow better. Length remains a difficult area for many critics to overcome.
I judge the value of films based on their full length. I try to consider not just how much I like the ending, but how the overall film worked.
Pacing
Average importance. I find that it is very important to synchronize my personal mood with the pacing of a film to best appreciate it. I can tolerate very slow films and very fast films, so long as they are interesting and well-made. Pacing (especially slow pacing) is often a hang-up for many viewers and so I try to remain open-minded. Establishing a pace unintentionally unbefitting of the style, mood, genre or plot can be devastating. This is one area where I feel consistency can be important, in either “velocity” (steady pace throughout the film) or “acceleration” (steady change in rate throughout the film) or “rhythm” (deft alternation of two or more rates). Pacing should not be confused with mere editing rate (number of cuts).
Historical Context
Somewhat important. I try to take historical context into account, but it can rarely change my rating of a film by more than a point. I treat movies from past time periods as though they were in their own genres with their own conventions, rules, themes and preoccupations. I judge old films with such things in mind, but sometimes historical context can’t save a film where hindsight knows better.
Ideology
Slightly important. I attempt to remain open-minded in terms of ideology and I think many philosophies, opinions and standpoints and interesting and worth consideration. Even those I don’t agree with can be committed to film capably and insightfully. It saddens me that currently more than 45% of imdb.com votes for “Fahrenheit 9/11” are 1s and 10s, when I doubt any professional film critic could argue either rating successfully.
Objective intentions aside, I am unlikely to give even the best neo-Nazi recruitment video a very high score and so clearly some ideological value does underlie my opinions.
Whenever possible I like the ideology to be a minor element of the film and I think too much focus on it can be distracting and/or preachy.
I am also against antagonism towards the audience (for instance, shocking material used as a weapon to make the audience uncomfortable or sick without redeeming artistic or thematic merits) and breaches of ethics (killing animals needlessly, causing physical harm to another person, violating privacy or personal rights, etc.)
Emotion
Very unimportant. I have almost no need to connect emotionally with fictional characters or stories. When it happens and it works, all the better for the film. I think an emotional connection between a film and a viewer can be powerful and valuable, but it is often unreliable and untranslatable between viewers. I try to communicate my specific emotional reaction to a film in the review, but I leave that out of the final score and focus on judging whether the acting, writing and other elements were successful and fair in generating the emotions.
Sense of Humor
Ranges wildly based on the level of reliance a film has on comedy. For straight-out comedy, sense of humor is extremely important and so the film must appeal directly to what I think is funny. There just isn’t any objectivity when it comes to humor. Also, I tend to be pretty demanding on comedies, especially those that prey on lowest common denominator taste’s of audiences without even trying to be good movies in other respects.
Shock Value
Ranges wildly based on the level of reliance a film has on shock. A film which exists only to shock can not score very high. Shock, like emotion, can have an important place in film, but should not be leaned on to carry a movie. Shock value usually dates quickly and so I don’t trust it as a sign of lasting quality.
Kitsch
Can be important depending on the case. At its best, kitsch can reverse almost all the elements I’ve listed, making “bad” become “good” and creating pleasure out of former disadvantages. Kitsch is best when it occurs unintentionally.
Auteur Status
Very unimportant. Even new movies by my favorite directors are judged by the same standards as always. Points don’t carry over between films.
Other Opinions
Hopefully fairly unimportant. I try to decide my rating before I look at the ratings of other critics our sources to prevent myself from being subconsciously biased. However, I do think discussion of films and exposure to other opinions is important and can vastly improve the appreciation of a movie.
Personal Taste
Extremely important. Almost every review will contain a great deal of personal taste even if I try to be objective, so I won’t bother to deny it or choke it out. I do try not to score a movie more than two points away from where my most objective formal analysis would place it.
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