Issue #309: The Art
Not to hype it up too much, but work on my Albums of 2023 feature is ongoing. I didn’t send out 2022’s until the end of last January, so you can expect it before the end of the month. As always, it’s been incredibly fun but tremendously difficult to write. This will be the last time I’ll mention it until you read it.
There’s plenty else to talk about. It’s award season. I care, to a point. I even had the Golden Globes on in the background while taking down my Christmas tree last night. I don’t even know why they keep doing it. Some of the wins, though, were remarkable. The four winners in each best picture category were Oppenheimer, Poor Things, The Boy and the Heron, and Anatomy of a Fall, a pretty impressive list of films. It speaks, perhaps, to the overall quality of film released in 2023. Lily Gladstone took home a best performance Golden Globe as the first Native performer — I would prefer to see her win an Oscar, and hopefully I will. Paul Giamatti won for The Holdovers, which was a welcome surprise. Succession won big, for Best Television Series: Drama and Best TV Performance: Drama for both Kieran Culkin and Sarah Snook. Matthew Macfadyen also won Best Supporting Performance. This seems like as good a time as any to remind people I wrote about Succession’s last season week by week while it was airing.
The biggest topic of concern to me related to the Golden Farce, though, is their Cinematic and Box Office Achievement award for which the Taylor Swift concert movie was nominated. How can this possibly be an award that a work of art would receive in a field of trophies supposedly handed out for artistic quality? Isn’t the “winner” of such a dubious honor, in fact, self-evident? The film that made the most money is already sitting atop plenty of listicles and honored among those whose personalities are inextricably connected to the financial success of the movies they like.
But, I guess if I would prefer to remain in ignorance about the Golden Globes at all, I don’t need to be worried about their award categories. They could give out awards for most sour patch kids eaten during a movie or shows with the highest ad buy cost for all I care.
The Peloton Mockery Heard Around the World
Christopher Nolan is in the news again. He won the award for best director for Oppenheimer at the New York Films Critics Circle. His acceptance speech was brilliant enough that I am writing about it today, in the interest of exploring his point of view on film criticism. But, it’s funny. The headlines for the articles about him winning an award where he, in turn, accepted it by discussing the merits of film criticism as an art and profession, look a little bit confusing.
In the course of stating his appreciation for film critics, he shared an anecdote where his Peloton instructor made fun of Tenet. Nolan recounts:
I was on my Peloton. I’m dying. And the instructor started talking about one of my films and said, ‘Did anyone see this? That’s a couple hours of my life I’ll never get back again!
He tried to cover for himself, but it’s obvious Tenet is the movie the instructor was talking about. The internet is savvy enough, they found the clip:
Frankly, as far as I am concerned, the situation is cute. There has been some good natured back and forth between the two, seems to be no bad blood, a fine story. I can see why Variety has highlighted it in their reporting. But what has been underserved is the substance of Nolan’s point in his speech.
Nolan’s points, as I see them, are: the capacity to critique film should be cultivated with practice and the cultural value of film criticism is such that it should be a viable profession. He says:
In today’s world, as filmmakers you can’t hide behind authorial intent … You can’t say, ‘This is what I intended.’ We live in a world where the person receiving the story has the right to say what it means to them. I for one love that. It means the work should speak for itself. It’s not about what I say it is. It’s about what you receive it to be. In that world, the role of the professional critic, or the interpreter and the person who tries to give context for the reader … it’s incredibly important. I’ve never been so grateful for careful, considered and thoughtful writing about one of my films as I was for Oppenheimer.
There’s a lot to consider here about the substance of what the film critic does, but what’s immediately striking is the esteem Nolan has for his critics. This, to my mind, is a bit unusual. The relationship between directors and critics is sometimes understood to be adversarial. Or, at the very least, directors look at critics as beneath them. Take, for instance, Hitchcock and Truffaut’s discussion in their book length interview:
F.T. It’s sometimes said that a critic, by the very nature of his work, is unimaginative, and in a way, that makes sense, since imagination may be a deterrent to his objectivity. Anyway, that lack of imagination might account for a predilection for films that are close to real life. On seeing The Bicycle Thief, for instance, he’s likely to think this is just the sort of thing he might have written himself, but that thought couldn’t possibly occur to him in connection with North by Northwest. This being so, he’s bound to attribute all kinds of merit to The Bicycle Thief and none whatever to North by Northwest.
A.H. Since you mention it, I might tell you that The New Yorker critic described that picture as “unconsciously funny.” And yet I made North by Northwest with tongue in cheek; to me it was one big joke. When Cary Grant was on Mount Rushmore, I would have liked to put him inside Lincoln’s nostril and let him have a sneezing fit. By the way, since we’re being so critical of the critics, what line were you in when we met for the first time?
F.T. I was a film critic. What else?
A.H. I thought so. You see, when a director has been let down by the critics, when he feels that his work has been passed on too lightly, his only recourse is to seek recognition via the public. Of course, if a film-maker thinks solely in box-office terms, he will wind up doing routine stuff, and that’s bad, too. It seems to me that the critics are often responsible for this attitude; they drive a man to make only so-called public-acceptance pictures. Because he can always say to himself, “I don’t give a damn about the critics, my films make money.” There is a famous saying here in Hollywood: “You can’t take a review to the bank!” Some magazines deliberately select critics who don’t care about films, but are able to write about them in a condescending way that will amuse the readers. There’s an American expression; when something’s no good, they say, “It’s for the birds!” So I pretty much knew what to expect when The Birds opened.
While Nolan may be flattering his audience of critics, I for one am gratified by his appreciation of the work. I’m, regrettably, not a professional critic. But my ability to critique film is something I cultivate here in this newsletter. And I do it with the belief that I can do justice to a film by bringing something to it that, perhaps, is not immediately apparent. That, in turn, might make the film more enjoyable, gratifying, or thought provoking to someone else.
Though it doesn’t really serve as a deterrent, I figured most directors think of high minded critics as nuisances. I have certainly gotten a wide range of reactions from directors whose movie’s I have written about, but I wouldn’t say any have been appreciative. Nolan is just one guy, but he is the guy. And if it took a funny Peloton story to get his words about critique into the zeitgeist, that’s fine by me.
What Makes a Favorite Film
I don’t really maintain a list of favorite films. For all the documenting of my activity, running favorites just don’t feel necessary. I like a lot of movies. Depending on who asks me, or when they ask me, I might give a different response about what my favorite movie is. When I was a kid, I recorded the audio of Rush Hour 2 (2001) on a cassette using a Fisher Price recorder. This recorder:
Since I wasn’t allowed to have a television in my room, a parental decision I am earnestly thankful for now, but liked the idea of watching a movie while going to sleep, my homemade Rush Hour 2 audio cassette was the thing. So, yeah, it’s one of my favorite movies.
In high school, I saw Do The Right Thing (1989) for the first time. I remember buying it and a number of other Spike Lee films dug out of the bottom of a Wal-Mart bargain bin like this:
It was definitely one of these metal ones. I still have all the flicks, always watched late night in a big group in my room at my mom’s house. We watched half of Spike Lee’s oeuvre, Breakin’ (1984), Krush Groove (1985), Double Impact (1991), Double Team (1997). All Wal-Mart come ups. But what really made me appreciate Do The Right Thing was watching it on the big-ish screen, an auditorium showing for my senior year film class. The unit was on color. My teacher, Trish, explained the way the film was organized by the vivid colors and filters. I can’t say I remember the specifics of the lesson very well, but the idea of examining a film at this level, I think, is what elevated Do The Right Thing for me. It was already a great film, but became one of my favorites.
Relatively recently, though, it was Letterboxd that called upon me to assemble a top four favorite films when I made the account in 2019. As representative works, I chose four: Vertigo (1958), Malcolm X (1992), Noroi (2005), and Born in Flames (1983). Do The Right Thing and Rush Hour 2 didn’t make the cut. That top four has remained unchanged until today. Vertigo has been replaced by a film I watched over the weekend, The Sword of Doom (1966). Instead of talking about why The Sword of Doom might be the greatest film of all time (I’ll get to that another week), I want to consider the logic of fandom and favorites. Why were those four movies so enduring in that privileged position on this social media account? Alfred Hitchcock and Spike Lee are among my favorite directors, Denzel Washington is one of my favorite actors, I love small budget horror films, and I love movies that are able to blend social commentary with cinematic art. These preferences, I think, are more or less communicated by listing Vertigo, Malcolm X, Noroi, and Born in Flames as favorites.
I have strong emotional attachments to each, too, though I think no story about my relationship with these four films are as good as the ones about Rush Hour 2 and Do The Right Thing. But liking something and telling someone else you like something are vastly different.
One’s individual preference for a film is neither entirely arbitrary nor deterministic. A movie impacts its viewer, but there are plenty of elements exterior to the movie that may have an enduring impact on how much a person likes it. What kind of screen, who were you with, were you in a good mood, were you hungry… and other things, cultural incentives to like or dislike something, a belief about how you should feel about a movie that is a classic or a known bomb.
To then share that point of view, however, adds complexity. Being a fan of something, representing one’s self as someone who likes a thing, is as much about expressing a belief about one’s self as it is communicating an opinion or idea one has about a film. My point is, whether I know it or not (and I happen to know it, even if I don’t always think about it at the time), favorites are chosen to send a message. At its most simple, it’s this: “if your taste resembles my taste, we have something to talk about.”
When I was in high school, there was a widespread sentiment about wearing a Beatles t-shirt. Namely, that it was stupid. Why would you bother? “Everyone likes the Beatles.” To wear the shirt is to send a social signal that is redundant, could already be assumed. Regardless of the truth of falsity of this view when it comes to the specific band or the idea of representing yourself as a fan of something that is universally popular, I internalized this message. I think, in retrospect, that is part of why The Sword of Doom has unseated Vertigo. I like movies, you can already assume I like Hitchcock. What you might not know is that I like The Sword of Doom.
So, it joins a pantheon of movies that, all together, have probably half as many people naming them as favorites as Vertigo.
That’s my MO I guess. A popular, widely acclaimed, universally adored film could only survive among my list of absolute favorites for so long. Vertigo is just waiting in the wings to take its spot back. But, if you haven’t seen it yet, go watch The Sword of Doom.
Weekly Reading List
I apologize for sharing the work of influencers whose naive thesis is “travel makes you a better person,” but this video about an unknown (to me) Chinese city created in the spitting image of Paris, France was just too fascinating.
Until next time.