The first of a four-part examination of zombie movies through the lens of Hobbesian political theory. Part two. Part three. Part four.
The Running of the Dead – Christian Thorne | Commonplace Book
Tag: criticism
Recent juxtapositions
A cluster of articles that came up in life and/or the RSS reader within the span of a couple days, without my looking for them. There are no coincidences:
- Caglia on Gaga. [sigh]
- A friend was semi-outraged by the NPR review of Katy Perry’s “Teenage Dream”. “Singing in a clear, strong voice about how exhilarating it is be clear and strong about what you want.”
- American Electra: Feminism’s ritual matricide – Harper’s Magazine. [$] The generational divide in the feminist movement(s).
- Critic’s Notebook: Lady Gaga, sexuality and 21st century pop. “Pop is where sex lives most openly in our culture, and that it’s not just a matter of surfaces, […] but of the depth and breadth of desire, frustration, satisfaction.”
(via)
There’s always something more interesting going on than whether I like something or not.
Bad poets just bore us, but bad critics mislead us.
Tommy Howells, a teacher at Whitman College from 1938 through 1987, on Twitter. I’ve been favoriting the crap out of that Twitter account, brought to my attention via Austin’s 5 recent reads.
The Obscure, the Forgotten, and the Unloved: 40 Critically Acclaimed But Little Seen Should-be Classics
A 2010 poll of committed cinephiles who hope to find, highlight, and promote films that have received a considerable amount of critical acclaim but have yet to find the audience that their evident quality deserves.
I’ve only seen Il Posto, but based on that alone, I’m inclined to trust these suggestions. With most things cultural, finding good filters is half the battle.
Then That’s What They Called Music! | The A.V. Club
“We begin a journey through pop’s recent past by examining the bestselling, major-label NOW That’s What I Call Music compilations.”
Pitchfork: Why We Fight: Why We Fight #1
“Why celebrate pretense and bold gestures in pop music, but get weirdly skeptical of them in the indie world?” See also part 2.
The Rules of the Game: A Fuller Thought on J. Hopper and Vampire Weekend
The critic, ever wary of a band like Vampire Weekend’s likely privilege, doesn’t look very far into what, if anything, they’re saying about class — so sure is she that her take on class issues will be more important and incisive. The critic, ever wary of the band’s interest in African music being dilettantish, doesn’t much ask how that influence is operating — so sure is she that her relationship with African music is deeper, more solemn, more respectful. And at some point we’re barely reading criticism anymore: we’re just watching the refereeing of a game we’re all too familiar with.
I think Jones suffers from a common problem some good actors have: the character she has created is so individual that you don’t really realize it isn’t a cliche. You know her, so you feel like she’s a type, even though she’s not. If this is a cliche, who was the last Betty Draper before Betty Draper? I’m not sure there was one.
Complexity, Beauty, and the Underappreciated January Jones. Most interesting character on the show so far, but then I’m only halfway through the second season.
There are three kinds of critics: those who have importance; those who have less importance; those who have no importance at all. The last two kinds do not exist: all critics have IMPORTANCE.
[…]
How could one imitate a Critic? I ask myself that. Well, at any rate, the interest in doing so would be rather thin–very thin: we have the original–HE IS SUFFICIENT.
A Hymn in Praise of the Critics: Those Whistling Bell-Buoys Who Indicate the Reefs on the Shores of the Human Spirit, by composer Erik Satie. Vanity Fair, September 1921 [pdf]. If you only know him via his Gymnopédies, you might not expect him to be such a goofball.
Reading through the histories of both jazz and rock, I am struck again and again by the fact that although women and girls were the primary consumers of popular styles, the critics were consistently male–and, more specifically, that they tended to be the sort of men who collected and discussed music rather than dancing to it. Again, that is not necessarily a bad thing (some of my best friends…), but it is relevant when one is trying to understand why they loved the music they loved and hated the music they hated.
Another selection from How the Beatles Destroyed Rock ‘n’ Roll. Over the past year or so, I find I’m more and more reluctant to condemn music I don’t like, maybe partly because I’m more willing to dance than I used to be.
One of the tasks of the film critic of tomorrow – perhaps he will even be called a “television critic” – will be to rid the world of the comic figure the average film critic and film theorist of today represents: he lives from the glory of his memories like the seventy-year-old ex-court actresses, rummages about as they do in yellowing photographs, speaks of names that are long gone. He discusses films no one has been able to see for ten years or more (and about which they can therefore say everything and nothing) with people of his own ilk; he argues about montage like medieval scholars discussed the existence of God, believing all these things could still exist today. In the evening, he sits with rapt attention in the cinema, a critical art lover, as though we still lived in the days of Griffith, Stroheim, Murnau, and Eisenstein. He thinks he is seeing bad films instead of understanding that what he sees is no longer film at all.
The Film Critic of Tomorrow. Rudolf Arnheim, 1935. Ah, the troubles of understanding and reconciling The New with the vast collection of Things We Already Love.
Trash, Art, and the Movies
Your required reading of the week: Trash, Art, and the Movies. This piece from Pauline Kael appeared in Harper’s, February 1969. I found it in the American Movie Critics anthology and couldn’t put it down. It’s a fantastic essay about high art and low art, what makes movies fun and what makes them tedious. Some good bits…
On connecting with like-minded people (It’s more fun to meet someone who also likes Footloose than to meet someone who also likes, I don’t know, Lawrence of Arabia.):
The romance of movies is not just in those stories and those people on the screen but in the adolescent dream of meeting others who feel as you do about what you’ve seen. You do meet them, of course, and you know each other at once because you talk less about good movies than about what you love in bad movies.
On schooling and aesthetic development (being taught vs. learning to discern):
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. And yet this is probably the best and most common basis for developing an aesthetic sense because responsibility to pay attention and to appreciate is anti-art, it makes us too anxious for pleasure, too bored for response. Far from supervision and official culture, in the darkness at the movies where nothing is asked of us and we are left alone, the liberation from duty and constraint allows us to develop our own aesthetic responses. Unsupervised enjoyment is probably not the only kind there is but it may feel like the only kind. Irresponsibility is part of the pleasure of all art; it is the part the schools cannot recognize.
On “redeeming” pop trash with academic jargon (just enjoy it, folks!):
We shouldn’t convert what we enjoy it for into false terms derived from our study of the other arts. That’s being false to what we enjoy. If it was priggish for an older generation of reviewers to be ashamed of what they enjoyed and to feel they had to be contemptuous of popular entertainment, it’s even more priggish for a new movie generation to be so proud of what they enjoy that they use their education to try to place trash within the acceptable academic tradition.
[…]
We are now told in respectable museum publications that in 1932 a movie like Shanghai Express “was completely misunderstood as a mindless adventure” when indeed it was completely understood as a mindless adventure. And enjoyed as a mindless adventure. It’s a peculiar form of movie madness crossed with academicism, this lowbrowism masquerading as highbrowism, eating a candy bar and cleaning an “allegorical problem of human faith” out of your teeth.
“The Gangster as Tragic Hero” – Robert Warshow on the Gangster Film
A notable selection from American Movie Critics: From the Silents Until Now, which I’m working my way through this week.
“The Gangster as Tragic Hero” – Robert Warshow on the Gangster Film
How Beautiful It Is and How Easily It Can Be Broken (review: 3.5/5)
How Beautiful It Is And How Easily It Can Be Broken collects some of the criticism of Daniel Mendelsohn. Books, movies, theatre. Mendelsohn is a Classics scholar so his work is constantly making connections with the old Greek and Roman tragedies and epics.
I didn’t read all the essays because sometimes I just wasn’t familiar with what he was criticizing. But among the ones I liked were:
- his wonderful critique of Brokeback Mountain, or rather, a critique of how the critical reception washed out what makes it special (An Affair to Remember);
- his pondering why Tarantino movies, Kill Bill in particular, can be so boring and lifeless (It’s Only a Movie);
- his thinking about “the way in which what happens becomes the story of what happens… the way in which history becomes drama” in a review of the movies United 93 and World Trade Center (September 11 at the Movies)
- his studies of productions of Tennesee Williams‘ plays (Victims of Broadway I and Victims of Broadway II)
- his takedown of Alice Sebold‘s sappy The Lovely Bones (Novel of the Year)
Daniel Mendelsohn had a good interview on NPR last month.
Strange as it may sound to many people, who tend to think of critics as being motivated by the lower emotions: envy, disdain, contempt even… Critics are, above all, people who are in love with beautiful things, and who worry that those things will get broken.
Something to shoot for:
What is the function of a critic? So far as I am concerned, he can do me one or more of the following services:
1. Introduce me to authors or works of which I was hitherto unaware.
2. Convince me that I have undervalued an author or a work because I had not read them carefully enough.
3. Show me relations between works of different ages and cultures which I could never have seen for myself because I do not know enough and never shall.
4. Give a ÄúreadingÄù of a work which increases my understanding of it.
5. Throw light upon the process of artistic Äúmaking.Äù
6. Throw light upon the relation of art to life, to science, economics, ethics, religion, etc.
This reminds me of Auden’s Notes on the Detective Story, by an Addict that was featured at Harper’s recently, wherein he dissects whodunits and argues for why they’re escape and not art… “The most curious fact about the detective story is that it makes its greatest appeal precisely to those classes of people who are most immune to other forms of daydream literature.”
Classical and pop reviews 2, Greg Sandow’s follow-up to his previous post on the topic:
Certainly we’re not immersed in classical music because we want to check whether the latest pianist to come along really knows what to do with Beethoven — whether her tempo in the slow movement of some sonata really is correct or not. And probably we’re not so deeply tied to this art because some work can be called “magnificent,” or because we identify a particular emotion inside some classical piece. We can go to the movies and get emotional. I think we’d say that the rewards we get from classical music go pretty deep. But I’m not sure we could say that reviews of classical concerts normally convey how deep and powerful those rewards can be. Whereas pop reviews pretty accurately convey what we get from pop, which among other things might mean — I think it does mean this, actually — that pop reviewing is easier. My own experience, writing both pop and classical reviews, is that I’ve had to work much harder to say what’s powerful in classical music.
Mark Larson 