Some Came Running

Some new entries for the "Dictionary Of Received Critical Ideas"

Tim Grierson, writing at Deadspin, allows that he "likes" Beasts of the Southern Wild, further generously admitting that he's impressed by the "boldness of its ambitions" and the "depth of its emotional pull." That's the good news. But Tim has some bad news too, which is that the movie exemplifies the five worst indie-film clichés EVER!

But does it really? I don't know Mr. Grierson, and up until now I haven't sampled his work much (thanks a pantload, Jeffrey Wells), but it's clear he went to school and learned a little jargon and has a kit bag from which he can produce terminology to prove his point. Or has/can/does he? My general counter-argument to Mr. Grierson's is that his agenda here and perhaps in general is to outsmart art, rather than to examine and describe it. And that, proceeding from there, he merely unpacks a bunch of received academic/critical ideas, throws them at Beasts, and figures they'll stick, mainly because his terminology is kid-tested/mom-approved. This is my nice/fancy way of saying I think his theses are full of shit. Let's look at them one at a time.

Grierson kicks off by accusing Beasts of "fetishizing 'authenticity'." If you know your Lacan and Zizek, and if you've read the occasionally feisty music critic lay out a lecture you on how, you know, Charlie Patton was actually a POP musician, you'll recognize in this phrase a very big double no-no. Lucky for us, then, that when marshalling proof for this claim, he only refers to promotional materials about the making of the film, not with what's actually on screen. "[P]eople lap up stories about how Zeitlin and his cast and crew essentially lived in the handmade world of their fictional Bathtub while making the movie," Grierson sighs (I assume). "Knowing that the filmmaker personally pounded nails into wood doesn't tell us a thing about how he did at making a movie." Agreed. I don't ever wonder if Godard got seasick while shooting Film socialisme myself. But, I'm sorry, you were saying Beasts of the Southern Wild fetishizes "authenticity." Are you suggesting that its hype is inextricable from the movie itself? Because if you are, that's a different argument. That you are also not making. 

Next, Grierson says Beasts "Tries Way Too Hard To be Gritty". Like a few of his other complaints, this definitely falls into the realm of the judgment call, although the extent to which one's argument that a film is "trying to hard" is effective is of course relative to the number of pertinent examples one lays out in support of the assertion. Here Grierson does not do as well as he might. He cites "stale art-house moves" such as "shaky handheld" and...and...and...oh, "other self-conscious camera tricks." Oh. Those. "Contrary to popular opinion"...UH-OH..."having the occasionally out-of-focus shot doesn't automatically suggest 'realness.'" Oooh, snap. OK, aside from the fact that the term "realness" has some Urban Dictionary cred and a vague peripheral connection to what some contemporary philosophers refer to as "the Real," it's a pretty vague term, and Grierson has little leg to stand on in assuming that it is the precise quality that Beast's director Benh Zeitlin was after. For myself, one of the things that impressed me with respect to the visuals in Beasts was a certain deceptive quality; that the way certain shots were set up, handheld or not, giving the viewer the expectation of something relatively mundane happening in the frame, and then something rather unexpected and thrilling and literally dangerous taking place, as in the scene in which a trailer catches fire, which literally had me holding my breath. This elaborate effect was all the more startling for being approached in such a seemingly offhand way, and in retrospect gives one the impression that Zeitlin is a filmmaker in very tight control over his effects, and that the "accidents" that one might take the "occasional" out-of-focus shots for are not accidents, or any such like thing.

The really rich seam of pernicious bullshit is contained in Gierson's assertion and argument with respect to supposed indie-film-cliché number three, "It Treats Poverty As Something Noble." The ostensible nobility of poverty is a complex and vexed issue, as Saint Francis would no doubt tell you were he to appear on earth at this very moment. But after making this assertion, Grierson declines to go directly there. Rather, he just writes: 'There have been eyebrows raised about the fact that Hushpuppy and Wink are black, while Zeitlin is white." Grierson then cites Richard Brody, who makes a not entirely laughable proposition—whether the movie taps into "magical, mythical blackness" is certainly worth arguing about, but not so much if you preface it with an admonishment concerning the film's "love for its characters," oy—and...that's it. Again, how convenient to have all these raised eyebrows at your disposal.

Fact is, there should not be a single eyebrow raised, and for the record, I just got off the phone with a film-savvy friend who was very taken with Beasts and didn't have a single idea as to the ethnicity of its director. Years ago, Anthony Burgess made some cranky noises at the forces of what is incorrectly termed "political correctness" and asserted that as an artist, he had every right to imagine himself into the world and voice of a homosexual, which he was not, or of a black man, which he was not. (He did exactly that in the novels Earthly Powers and M/F, respectively, if I'm not mistaken.) To deny the artist his or her imaginative prerogative on the grounds that the artist is not the thing that he or she is imagining is a form of aesthetic totalitarianism, pure and simple, and if that's the way Grierson wants things that's fine but he should at least be honest about it. But where were we? Oh, the "poverty as something noble" bit. Again, it's a judgment call. I think the residents of the movie's "Bathtub" who refuse to clear out are a bunch of loony drunks, myself. Yes, the film sets them apart as unique, and depicts the forces that come to clear them out in a way that's almost as sinister as the Orwellian campaign van in Altman's Nashville. But with respect to nobility, or a desirable way to live, I don't see how Beasts is actively selling that. Yes, its subjectivity deals with how its protagonist Hushpuppy perceives/survive the insanity and physical calamity around her, and the things within that matrix she's become attached to, but that's hardly the same thing as validating/valorizing a way of life. Again, the baggage here is not the film's but the perfectly insipid counterintuitive don't-love-me-I'm-really-not-THAT-kind-of-liberal non-response Grierson's so invested in erecting. 

Bringing us to four, "It Confuses Simple Characters For Memorable Ones." I wonder, had Grierson been on the set of the film, and then in the editing room, at what point he could have said to Zeitlin, "Hey, wait a minute, you're making a mistake..." But again, Grierson doesn't make the argument. Instead, he says that the young girl who plays Hushpuppy is "undeniably captivating" but that the "filmmakers don't really give her a character to play." Huh? It's pretty clear she's a resourceful resilient very young person in an impossible situation, and she's certainly mythologized at least a bit, I can't deny that, but you know, she does also have a kind of quest, that being a reconnection with an absent and herself somewhat mythologized mother. But that's not enough "character" I guess. Further evidence that Grierson's assembling a straw man comes when he bitches that her "banal voiceover musings" are "treated as cockeyed wisdom." Well, they are in voice-over, so they clearly have some significance to them. Does the film make a church out of them? No. The girl is five goddamn years old. The viewer is meant to weigh the pronouncements against the fact that they're coming out of a five year old. Finally, Grierson lays the hammer down and damningly compares Hushpuppy to Forrest Gump, clearly one of the least memorable characters in all cinema, indie or studio, Nyah. Nyah. Nyah. (I'm not even going to get into the assertion that by putting a five-year-old in the lead role Zeitlin was self-consciously "critic-proofing" the movie. No more adorable children in movies, indie filmmakers; that's CHEATING.)

God, I'm exhausted.

Fortunately, we are up to cliché five, which I believe Orson Welles would characterize as "Impossible! Meaningless!," and it is that the film "Touches On Real-Life Events Without Saying Anything About Them." I know I've bored the tits off of most of you with my reiteration of Nabokov's "or still worse, 'What is the guy trying to say?'" So I don't need to get into that again. I'm not a big fan of "allegory" myself, but I don't argue that it ought not exist. Grierson's assertion that Beasts "tries to have it both ways" with respect to Hurricane Katrina is, one more time, more to do with the baggage he wants to load the film down with than anything that actually occurs when the film itself is onscreen.

It occurs to me that I went through a whole lot of trouble here when the sheer shittiness of Grierson's project here is handily epitomized by the way he uses the phrase "Sundance darling" in his headline. 

Finally, I am more in sympathy with David Edelstein's review of the movie. And if you consider Edelstein to be precisely the "type" of critic who would be suspicious of a movie coming in on Beast's wheels of promotion, well, that's kind of my point. 

UPDATE: On his Twitter feed, a critic friend notes: "So I guess the new rule is: 'Privileged' people shouldn't make art about themselves (Girls) or anyone else (Beasts)." Hmm, pretty much. Although I suspect there may be an exception codicil for Louis C.K.. (No disrespect to Mr. C.K., who is indeed great.)

"Ted" talks

Some HAS to have used that hed already, right? They've had to, right? No?

My review for MSN Movies here.

Conversion narrative

I admit to entering a screening of Beasts of the Southern Wild with not a little skepticism, but walked out feeling, as they say, genuinely transported. Here is the story of my road to Damascus moment (okay, that's kind of an overstatement), for MSN Movies. 

More about Andrew

Ace compiler and commentator David Hudson, now doing his thing on Fandor, has been collecting all manner of excellent writings on the late Andrew Sarris, I recommend you go here and explore from there. 

I was honored when my friend Kent Jones asked me to contribute some memories of Andrew for a multi-contributor eulogy he was compiling for the Film Comment website. It just went up (David H.'s post was not updated to reflect this as I was composing this) and is here, and also contains wonderful short pieces by Kent, Geoffrey O'Brien, Phillip Lopate, and Robert Horton. So far. I have reason to believe more will be added. 

Moral/historical/aesthetic relativism

How can I come down so hard on Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter and still be a big fan of Inglourious Basterds? It's an interesting question, maybe, which I address, along with the Lincoln movie itself, in my review for MSN Movies. 

Three films by Dan Sallitt

I hope I'll be indulged if I hew to a journalistic convention that, for reasons that remain obscure to me, has fallen into disfavor in recent years, and begin by making a disclosure. The writer and filmmaker Dan Sallitt and I are friendly acquaintances. We run in a couple of the same social circles and hence see each other at parties as well as at some screenings. We have "done" karaoke together, once. 

That said, we're not "close." There's quite a bit I don't know about him. Until recently, for instance, I was unaware that he's also a musician, and plays in a band, which information I found moderately irritating, as I had been hoping to "corner" the "market" in film-critic-types-who-also-have-bands. While I admire Sallitt's writing on film, we differ in taste more than a bit, and I frankly find myself exasperated by certain of his critical enthusiasms. 

Sallitt has made three feature films since the late '90s; his latest, The Unspeakable Act, plays in New York as part of BAM's CinemaFest on Sunday, June 24. I think it's an absolutely remarkable film, one of the best of the year so far, and if you're around, you should definitely see it. I'm hoping it gets wider distribution, because, not to be crass or anything, I think it more than establishes Dan's bonafides in terms of deseving a wider audience, funding for more films, and all that sort of thing. If you're already familiar with Dan's films, or even if you aren't, this lengthy "conversation" at MUBI is worth reading; and below are some of my observations on Dan's work so far. 

Made in 1998, Sallitt's first feature, Honeymoon, is clearly the work of a real film artist, albeit one who is testing his fully-formed voice against his technical facility. Let me talk about its strengths first. The movie tells an unusual New York story; Michael and Mimi (Dylan McCormack and Edith Meeks, seen above) longtime friends who toil in mid-level positions in publishing, are best friends who impulsively decide to marry without, not to be crude or anything, having established whether they can get it up for each other. One of Sallitt's immediately visible strengths as a writer and director of actors is his ability to comprehensively portray an actual social type (one that was more plentiful in 1998 New York than it is in 2012, admittedly): what I used to refer to as the Too-Brilliant-Copy-Editor, e.g., the genuinely gifted and genuinely sensitive and aesthetically attuned soul that never breaks through what you might want to call a glass ceiling for reasons that are entirely their own and are not unrelated to a certain social awkwardness. This social sect is the only one, I believe that could contain non-religiously committed individuals who would marry without even getting a sense of what their sex life could be.

The resultant spectacle of two painfully smart people tormenting themselves and each other in the most civilized way possible has its farcical aspects, naturally, but Sallitt doesn't caricature his characters, and many of the scenes operate on a low-frequency but definitely palpable level of emotional pain and physical mortification that's incredibly absorbing even while largely cringe-inducing. There’s a knife-edge on which the performances teeter between naturalistic and weirdly clumsy, and at times this actually messes with the suspension of disbelief you might need to fully invest in the action. That said, the two leads are remarkable, particularly Meeks, a woman who's not necessarily conventionally attractive and yet is able to exude, in performance, a demanding, even querulous sexuality that's seemingly at odds with her intellect and politesse and preferred mode of living. 

Sallitt's shooting and editing style here is surface-plain but, as with one of his cinematic heroes Eric Rohmer, deceptively canny, but total control occasionally eludes him; now and again in a shot you get the feeling of the performers having a too-acute awareness of the camera, holding themselves back so as not to get too close to it, and so on. None of this finally compromises the film's cumulative power, which it accrues by continuously threatening to send one of its characters into a Pialat-style rage blowout but...well, I don't want to spoil it for you. You can acquire the movie for viewing in various formats/platforms at Dan's home page. 

Dan's second film, All The Ships At Sea, made in 2004, displays more directorial assurance from its very first, still shot. It also displays Sallitt's admirable powers of compression perhaps to a fault, as 64 minutes is a pretty unusual length for a feature film. This is a fully-realized work though, once again featuring the extraordinary Meeks in a lead role. She plays a woman recently escaped, or expelled, from a religious cult, and the attempt of her Catholic theologian sister (Strawn Bovee, in the still above), to reconnect with her, and help her put her life back together. 

In a sense this picture harks back to Rohmer's 1969 My Night At Maud's, a feature-length chat about religious philosophy disguised as a sex comedy. Although Ships has neither the sex nor (for the most part) the comedy (there is a fair amount of mordant humor, as when a character you don't expect this kind of language from says "Ohio, Iowa, what the fuck's the difference?"). "We believe that a lot of the spiritual turmoil in the world is happening for a reason," Meeks' Virginia tries to explain to her sister Evelyn. Eventually we come to understand that at issue here is not belief or difference of belief or lack thereof of any of the above but plain and horrific disconnection, exemplified in the simple-as-death confidence Virginia confides to Evelyn about a childhood treehouse: "No one knew about it. I built it myself." Nevertheless, Sallitt gets a lot of implied spookiness out of the shadow of the cult that hovers over Virginia. I believe it is a testimony to Dan's equanimity as a person that he has not even considered, as far as I know, taking a polo mallet to the kneecaps of the makers of Martha Marcy May Marlene.

 Still courtesy of BAMcinemaFest/Static Prods.

The Unspeakable Act is a fully realized—sure, I'll say it—masterwork, an emotionally wrenching character study that puts its uncomfortable truths forward without recourse to conventional psychology. That is, the powerful attraction super-precocious teen Jackie (Tallie Medel) feels for her older brother, the equally brilliant but possibly more well-adjusted and socially accomplished Matthew, doesn't "make sense," yet makes total sense in the context Sallitt creates for it. And once again, that context has its roots in an actual (or is it "probably actual"?) social milieu, the shabby-genteel bohemian Brooklyn that's been priced out of the Heights and whose diaspora, such as it is, extends to the likes of Ditmas Park, where the film was shot. 

Using a variety of dislocation techniques (some of which are discussed at length in Sallitt's talk with Keller), the movie brings us uncomfortably into Jackie's world, and her bedrock obsession, to the point that, fifteen minutes in, when Jackie admits "I've never slept with anyone," the sigh of relief from the viewer is apt to be seismically palpable. Once what's at stake is laid on the table, Sallitt deploys his characters in what I can only describe as alchemical chess moves. Particularly upside-the-head-smacking is how we're shown the way that the amiable and ostensibly sane Matthew actually gets off on the attentions of Jackie. When a therapist enters the picture (she is played, beautifully, by Caroline Luft, who, I should disclose, is a friend of myself and my wife's, albeit one we don't see as often as we would like; in fact, I did not recognize her on my first viewing of the film), that character gets to play not-quite-irresistable force to Jackie's seemingly immovable object. Rarely does cinema treat us to the spectacle of a person inflicting what can only be called metaphysical damage to him or her self (despite its topic, the last thing Sallitt is making here is a "social problem" picture). One of the wonders of Tallie Medel's performance, besides the way she uses her slightly-sexually-ambiguous physicality, is how she documents that damage as vividly as if she were actually physically cutting into herself, even as Jackie the character believes she's giving nothing away that she doesn't want to. 

The movie is dedicated to Rohmer, but it is entirely a Dan Sallitt work. I hope his next film comes sooner than six to eight years from now.

Andrew Sarris, 1928-2012

The New York Times' obituary.

The only thing in my mind right now is what Jean-Luc Godard said of Orson Welles: "All of us will always owe him everything."

The current cinema

One could pick nits, and from what I gather many have already done so, but I found that Woody Allen's new To Rome With Love, featuring, among others, Ms. Penelope Cruz as pictured above, went down pretty easy and was reasonably clever in terms of mixing up the standard Allen tropes. Also the jokes were pretty funny, I felt. For more, my review at MSN Movies. 

I was also pretty taken with Brave, the most Disney-like of all Pixar movies so far, but one that takes the feisty-princess tale into a realm that could best be called eccentric. As an experiment in critical and social engineering, my review does not discuss the odd turn its story takes in detail. I'm sure we'll be hearing all about it over the weekend though. 

"I see it all now, it's a plot."

Indeed. The late Victor Spinetti, above with the late Robin Ray, the late Wilfrid Brambell, the late George Harrison, Paul McCartney, the late John Lennon, and Ringo Starr, in A Hard Day's Night, Richard Lester, 1964.

Also: "I'm quite happy to be replaced."

Also: "I won an award."

"A likely story."

"I have it on the wall. In my office."

A friend writes...

Hello,
 
You sir are a moron.  Your criticism of the 10 worst Adam Sandler movies is well at best moronic.  Do people really pay you for your opinion?  If so they need to call the BBB on you cause you are ripping them off.  Seriously?  The Waterboy?  Big Daddy?  Mr. Deeds?  If you think these are some of his worst movies i would hate to see what you think of Dont Mess with the Zohan or what you think of Spanglish or any of the other truly wretched sandler flicks.  Im not gonna lie he has done some absolute terds for movies but your choices are WAY off in outer space.  Did you actually attend school when you went to college or did you just pay 50 bucks and print your diploma?  Honestly You wouldnt know what a bad movie was if it was your sister and slept with you every night.   You should give up your job as a shitty film critic and try something youre probably gonna be better at: Fry cook at Mcdonalds.  Ofcourse, you probably would fuck that up too.
 
Regards