Justified Elitism

*note - any names of real bloggers that appears in this article is simply to provide a practical example and is in no way an attack of or sign of disrespect towards said blogger

Many weeks back Rachel of Rachel's Reel Reviews, who does lists of three every Thursday did one about the three movies that got people up in arms over her not having seen. One was Rocky, one was Citizen Kane and I don't quite remember the third.

Then, a couple weeks later, I got an angry comment on Suite101 for a review of 1900 from an anonymous person who more or less declared that, because I didn't like this movie I was: an idiot, derogatory, illiterate, have an ugly mother, my father was a Nazi and that I'm probably dyslexic, senile, and, more than likely, homeless...you get the point. Forget the worth of the movie, it was my personal being that needed the criticism.

Then Rachel added a comment to that post about how show reviewed classic movies for another blog once upon a time and would get similar kinds of comments. Throw all those things into a pot and I've been stewing for several weeks now about the nature of film snobbery/elitism.

The main thing that was jiggling about in my head was at what point does elitism stop being justified (which I think it is) and start simply to be condescending snobbery and nose thumbing? I'll admit it, I'm a bit of an elitist. I think I have the right to be. I studied film for four years, presented papers at conferences, read every book worth reading on the industry and then some, have been a paid script reader for going on three years now, worked for a film sales company, have written for many publications, had my blog tweeted by Roger Ebert and so on down the line. On top of that, I know more about film than most people. I may know more about film than a lot of the people who blog about it every day. It's not that I'm better than anyone, I've just built up an expansive wealth of knowledge/understanding/viewpoints/etc.

However, I've never really wanted to hold that above people (although I will be the first to shoot down ignorant or ill-informed statements), but rather I use it in order to try to meet people half way. I think that's the standard everyone who wants to write seriously about film should set for themselves: to have as vast and expansive a knowledge base as possible because, if you're not informed, your readers certainly won't be and if they are, it won't be long before they let you know that you aren't. My saying that I use as a measuring stick to evaluate whether or not someone is worth reading has been "Never trust a critic who doesn't know that Last House on the Left is a remake of an Ignmar Bergman movie."

The statement is admittedly elitist but let's break this down logistically. On one hand my statement is saying that knowing such an obvious tidbit (which can be found easily from a quick Internet search) shows that the person has a vast knowledge of film of all varieties (in this case American horror and that of the Swedish master), but it also digs down into a more personal level. What it is actually saying, in somewhat abstract terms, as maybe most great criticism does (but we won't get into that again), is that I know Last House on the Left is a remake of The Virgin Spring, so if you seriously want me to commit my time to you, than I expect you to at least know that, which is, just as much as me.

Although it sounds condescending (one certainly need not know anything about Bergman to enjoy Last House) when written using me as an example, it's a universal frame of mind: the people who we read should be able to teach us something, strive to want to make ourselves better writers and so on. That's why the statement isn't condescending at all. It's putting a positive spin on a negative outlook. I've put so much time, energy, love and thought into film that why do I want to settle for the opinions/viewpoints of someone who couldn't be bothered to have the drive or determination that the best have, which is the standard I have set for myself? I instead want to surround myself with those are better than me so I can be pushed to better myself because they told me something I didn't know, made me look at something in a different light, made me jealous of their magnificent prose and so fourth.

In sum I want my critics to know what the heck they are talking about. That's not to say that everyone isn't entitled to an opinion and that those opinions shouldn't be considered and maybe even, in some cases, valued, but what it means is that there's so much garbage in the world, so many people filling it up with meaningless and empty nothingness that benefits no one that why waste time and effort on something that will ultimately provide nothing of worth? I've probably been guilty of this from time to time (I think we are all every now and again) but I always revert back to that magical quote from 8 1/2 about how it is better to destroy than create what is meaningless. It's not snobbery to want/expect someone who writes about film day in and day out to have actively sought out such milestones as Rocky, Citizen Kane, The Godfather, whatever the usual suspects are, and put thought into what makes them so great/seminal. These are the works that defined film. You'd expect someone who truely loves film to have had the desire at some point in life to check them out. Critics should, after all, be writing out of a love of film and not self. And if, of course, you are young and growing, to be seeking those titles and and striving to provide new and interesting commentary on them.

To sum up, what struck me as strange was when Rachel, not to keep picking on her, admitted that she didn't even like classic movies. I understand, in such a case, why people may be willing to pick her apart over such a detail for, if I am reading reviews of classic films, I want them to be from the informed mind of someone who lives and breathes classic film and can shed new and interesting light on it. Essentially, regular criticism has become redundant because the abundance of blogs on the Internet has caused the saturation of valuable critical thought. By the time the week is out and everyone has logged their reviews of the week's big titles, there's next to no variation left to be found: no interesting ideas left to put on the pile. The discussion has died and we have moved on to killing the next one. I want to read the critic who lets the conversation live and breathe and grow on through the power of their mind and their pen (that's not to say they keep publishing on the same movie, but allow it to grow through an informed review).

I once left a comment for Sebastian Gutierrez (whose blog was then known as Detailed Criticisms), who had written a standard review of Ignmar Bergman's the Seventh Seal. Not criticising him as a person or shooting down his review, I pondered if there was really any worth in writing a standard review about performances and whatnot in a film as prolific, timeless and well worked-over as that one. Obviously he did because he wrote it and he achieved his goal but, did it ever seem a little fruitless, I wondered, to be approaching such a film at this intermediate level when whole acadmeic essays have been written about it's themes and concepts in relation to Bergman's career, theology, God, death, etc.? I thought so (not to say what dear Sebastian wrote wasn't worth the read because, obviously, I read it).Why breathe old life into something that's been resurrected and put into perspective so many times in so many interesting ways? You don't do yourself any value and the film doesn't much benefit either.

Now I've sort of veered off topic. If it sounds like I'm saying that everyone needs to reinvent the wheel or science or philosophy every time they write a review, I certainly am not. It isn't possible. But why not make them interesting, personal, knowledgeable, etc? Why not bring ideas about art, life, society into the mix, or, at the very least, try to say something clever and engaging. Leave 'em something to chew on. There's no excuse for boring film writing other than simply not have the ambition to gain new knowledge to share at every opportunity. The boring critics think they know it all and are simply taking up space. The valuable ones are striving to learn new things, not just about film but about the world around them. It reminds me of another of my favourite quotes from Conrad who said that "People don't write because they want to say something, they write because they have something to say." Some people don't have anything to say. It's not snobbery to not want to read it.

Alright, weigh in.

TIFF Red Carpets: Stone

There was a big decision to make Friday night. It was either stick around outside Roy Thompson Hall to catch a glimpse of Clive Owen and David Schwimmer for Trust or head over to the Visa Screening Room to check out the Stone Red Carpet. Having never been to the Elgin, we decided Goodfellas trumps Friends so we headed for Elgin.



The first thing to say about Elgin is that it sucks. I haven't been to the Ryseron theatre so I have no idea if it is worse than this one, but this is pretty bad. You stand across the road on the Yonge St. sidewalk until cars start pulling up and then everyone runs for the barricades. 20 minutes later was when the cops decided it was time to close the road and as a general rule, most stars get out of the car on the right side towards the entrance and not the left towards the crowd and head right for the press. Unfortunately I was using my girlfriend's camera which is about 5 years old and doesn't take good pictures in the dark. I'll do better next year.

Unbeknownst to me, we really weren't prepared on Friday, Beautiful was playing at 8:00 at Winter Garden (which is in the same building as Elgin). So somewhere in that crowd is Javier Bardem.

To be quite honest, at the time I knew nothing about Stone other than that De Niro was in it and Edward Norton had a goatee, and as a general rule, Norton's best movies are the ones where his character sports the goatee. Therefore I had no idea Milla Jovovich was in it or that it was she I was taking a picture of.

Edward Norton has a reputation of being difficult to work with but that didn't stop him from coming over to the road and signing autographs/shaking hands. He didn't do it for long but he seemed like a stand-up guy.

Edward and Milla. Unfortunately De Niro showed up 20 minutes late after they had already let the audience in. He turned and waved for a second and then rushed inside before his car had even gotten out of the way. No good pictures of him were captured

As an added bonus, Roger Ebert stopped for fans on Saturday afternoon as his cab pulled out of the Four Seasons. Here he is hoping his new show is a success.

A Step Forward in What Direction?

With the continuing advancement of technology those purists keep whining that human beings are getting lazier and lazier. Wall-E may have been a cute and magic cartoon but you could see the parallels on display there. Similarly, whether that assertion is correct or not, it seems that people who read film criticism are getting lazier too. I'll admit it, I'm one of them. Right now I'm reading a 700 page volume entitled American Film Criticism. It's a collection of the very best people who ever wrote about film putting their very best writing forward from the dawn of cinema right up to today. And so far, I've been reading every word of it. I've been reading every word of it for, oh I don't know, six months and I'm around Page 400. It's tough.

See, I'm now a part of a generation (although maybe once removed) in which film criticism is reduced to soundbites. I've indulged. Back in the day you picked up a newspaper because it had your favourite critic and you read everything they had to say because they wrote well and were generally more interesting than the movies they wrote about. Now personality is, (somewhat/mostly?) gone. Instead of reading full pieces by one or two favourite critics we read little snippets on Rotten Tomatoes or MetaCritic of every critic just to get a flavour. It has it's benefits. It is certainly nice to get a wide array of opinions instead of been burdened to just a select few and it is possible to read the entire review from RT if you come across something you like. It also helps those whose only goal in reading film criticism is to know if people generally like it or not in order to decide if it's worth seeing.

Now criticism has gotten even simpler: Why read through all the snippets when RT will summarize them all in a couple sentences for you. Although I am fully aware that they have provided 'Consensus" for some time, I've just recently been paying attention to it. Now I can log on to the main page, see the percentage rating beside the list of new releases on the left, roll my mouse over top the name and read quickly what the overall just of the reviews are about. All without leaving that one page.

Of course I could go on about how, as a writer, by favourite thing about reviews is not knowing what people think about the movies as much as reading great writing, but that's not the point and indeed it was a long build-up to get to my otherwise nothing point, which is that today I came across a perplexing Consensus on RT. It was for the new Jason Fiedberg/Aaron Seltzer (man it hurts to say) film Vampires Suck. I haven't seen it, but considering that I've sworn to never pay another cent to watch anything those two morons ever put their name on, my hopes aren't high. Right now it's sitting at 6% rating with 1 person out of 30 actually finding something to like. But now look at the Consensus: "Witlessly broad and utterly devoid of laughs, Vampires Suck represents a slight step forward for the Friedberg-Seltzer team."

What's going on here? If it's witlessly broad and devoid of laughs, what is it stepping forward from, killing Jews? Is it really saying, holy crap I can't believe one person actually liked this, that's the best yet or is it saying that this one feels less like getting murdered than just getting raped? Whatever it is it doesn't make sense. Can't we just call a dog a dog? I know a couple million people have read The Secret and want to look at the glass as being half full but really, a glass doesn't even factor into the equation when it comes to these filmmakers. I have no real point here other than to scratch my head and maybe laugh at myself for even being bothered to care.

But maybe there is something here. Armond White just told Slash Film that he thought Roger Ebert more or less ruined film criticism and, although I haven't listened to his reasoning, I assume it's because Ebert opened up criticism to a more mainstream audience. It made, so to speak, film geekery cool and stripped criticism of it's intelligence. I don't agree with that logic but in a sense, showed film loves that they could take criticism away from the intellectuals and give back to the moviegoers who could just as easily wage their own Siskel and Ebert style debates at home.

If that is true (and again, I don't think it is in the sense that it ruined film criticism) than what do we make of the whole of criticism being reduced to one sentence bites of information, especially when they seem widely implausible (based on this example of course, I can't qualify that statement with any other proof). Is this helpful? Is this criticism? Is that, ultimately, what we want?

Discuss.

One Minute Review: Year One (1 out of 5)

So if you don't know, I only tend to review movies that I see in the theater. It's mainly because the theater is the most ideal setting to engage with a film and when I go to the theater I am seeing (for the most part) a film I want to see. At home I'm more often than not just seeing one to add to my mental library, or database, or filing cabinet, whatever metaphor works best for you. So, since I'm strapped for time this month due to mounting school work, I've decided to do these one minute reviews, which try to sum up a movie to the best of my abilities with the fewest words possible. Let's see how it goes.

Rumour has it that, when Harold Ramis co-hosted At the Movies a few years ago when it was still Ebert & Roeper, as a fill in for Roger Ebert, he turned to Richard Roeper after taping was complete and said, "You call this work?" You could ask Ramis the same thing after seeing Year One, a stupid, lazy comedy from the man who made Groundhog Day. It feels like an uninspired Saturday Night Live skit that has been painfully blown up to feature length. Not to mention, as Biblical epic spoofs go, nothing in it are nearly half as funny as this:



Or this:

John Hughes

I just finished watching Don't you Forget About Me a documentary about a group of Canadian filmmakers who head for Chicago in order to snag a rare interview from iconic but reclusive filmmaker John Hughes who more or less disappeared from filmmaking in the late 90s and wasn't heard from again until his unexpected death last year.

The documentary itself isn't a great one; it really has no background on Hughes as a person or a filmmaker, it only focuses on his 80s teen comedy work neglecting his best film Planes, Trains and Automobiles or his later, lesser quality screenwriting efforts under a pseudonym, and of course, ends in anti-climax as Hughes does not accept to be interviewed.

However, one thing about the film struck me. The weight of the material comes from a combination of interviews with some of his actors (though Molly Ringwald is understandably absent), some other filmmakers who he inspired (Kevin Smith, Jason Reitman), critic and fellow Chicagonians Roger Ebert and Richard Reoper and a bunch of high school kinds in an effort to show that contemporary teenage comedies are vapid and shallow and don't reflect what it is really like to be a teenager. "I've never had sex with a pie," one kid says. "But I've defiantly skipped class before."

Smith, Reitman and Howard Deutch (who directed Pretty in Pink and Some Kind of Wonderful) along with all the kids interviewed throw the term realism around a lot in relation to Hughes' work. They say that Hughes was so influential because you could go to his movies on a Friday night and see yourself projected up on that screen. Some people claim they knew and were friends kids like the ones in Hughes' movies, and no one has ever gotten that formula quite right again.

I'll agree with the second point: no one indeed has ever gotten it quite right again (although I think there is may be more truth to some of the more tender moments in American Pie than the kid in question is letting on). Indeed, teenage comedies over the years have become shallow, juvenile, gross and stupid and do not reflect what it is truly like to be a teenager in the midst of growing up. There aren't movies about kids just hanging out anymore, having fun, wandering aimlessly, trying to find themselves when they can muster up the energy to do so, and so on. That was Hughes at his best within those teen films. A lot of people in the documentary say things like The Breakfast Club could never have been made today or people like Molly Ringwald could never be stars: it was too talky, too boring and she was too average, too ordinary; he persona didn't come with enough baggage to be flaunted in public. They are probably right.

All that is fine and dandy and, most of all, true. But I wonder just how much closer John Hughes actually got to reality than any other filmmaker ever does. My high school experience never mimicked anything like what is depicted in those films and this brings me to my reservations about using the word reality in regards to film.

Simply put, realism in movies doesn't exist. Critics talk about it all the time. Andre Bazin constantly touted realism in film and dismissed anything that came with even the slightest hint of artificiality (Jim Emerson posted a good article on this topic over at Scanners earlier today).

However, the realism that Andre Bazin and other critics talk about is not the realism of the everyday. It is cinematic realism. It's about finding something realistic within the context of a given film. Is the story plausible? Do the characters act in the ways we believe they would act in such a situation? I didn't believe a moment of The Dark Knight as creating a plausible, realistic world, but the film creates the aura that these people would genuinely exist in such a world and act in the exact manner in which they were acting up until the point when Batman and The Joker become real people. That's cinematic realism.

This brings me to a question that was posed to me in a grade 11 Media Studies class and I just found an answer to a few years ago. The question was whether art imitates life or life imitates art. It seems like one of those impossible questions with no right answer like what came first, the chicken or the egg? But then it becomes clear. The answer is that it's a two way street: each are a reflection of the other. In other words, we'd like to think we talk and act like they do in the movies and the movies would like to think they talk and act like we do in real life.

There's no doubt that, in those teen films, John Hughes was channelling people and places from his life and his youth, using something real as the template to cast his film against. However, are the films realistic in any sort of every day sense? I don't think so. Yet, the reason they are so affecting and people connect with them, enabling them to continue to live on these 20 years later, is because they offered an ideal portrait of what we wished out lives were like. To be as unique and innocent as Molly Ringwald, to be as hopelessly in love as Ducky, to be as rebellious...and so on.

John Hughes' method was then to create characters that represented types. They weren't typical teen characters: they were amalgamations of every kind of teenage archetype there was, and then put them into situations in which any teenager could possibly be confronted with: love, heartbreak, detention, an irate teacher, etc. However these things represented the ideals: the love was sweeter and more innocent than real life might be, the heartbreak more searing, the friendships more long lasting, whatever you will. These kids were the people we wanted to be, the friendships we wanted to have, the lives we wanted to lead.

John Hughes' films didn't so much create a portrait of reality because, let's face it, if the movies really presented accurate visions of reality we would never go to them. We go to them to see things as better than they are, funnier, more exciting, more tragic, more anything other than what we know in the day to day. John Hughes just so happened to present those things within a world that didn't feel as if it was completely unattainable; that it just existed outside the grasp of human possibility. That's what Hughes did at his best. That's what made him special. That's true cinematic realism.