Michael Brooke
10-12-2001, 13:02
His initial childishness aside, Tinder made some valid points in his recent contributions to the <I>Moulin Rouge</I> thread, so I thought I’d respond to them in more detail in a separate one. I’ve cut some of the repetition, but I hope I’ve tackled all the main points.
<B> ....my main objection to critics is how they always seem to dissect whatever they are reviewing into its component parts....approaching the whole subject like it was some sort of technical project... </B>
I think you’ve got it the wrong way round – speaking personally, I always look at the film as a whole and then, if it’s failed to be totally satisfying, attempt to find out <U>why</U> it didn’t work for me. This is a key function of good criticism – you can’t just say “I hated it” or "I loved it" without giving reasons. Or rather, you can, but it doesn’t offer that much to the reader.
It’s a lot more constructive to examine the film and work out which bits work and which don’t. I doubt anyone would deny that the cinematography and design elements of <I>Moulin Rouge</I> are absolutely outstanding by any yardstick – but I have my doubts about whether the rapid-fire editing helped or hindered the film as a whole, and many superb actors were woefully under-used. Is this “some sort of technical project”? I don’t think so – merely an attempt to explain why I responded to the film in the way that I did.
<B>...it also astounds me just how much critics seem to believe what they write is gospel because they believe it to be. They often write as if the opinion they have formed is the only valid one, frequently slating what may have been the pride and joy of the artist in question..... </B>
I really don’t care how much a film is an artist’s “pride and joy” if it demonstrably fails to convey that passion to the final audience! Ed Wood’s <I>Glen or Glenda</I> is about as good an example of “an artist's pride and joy” as you can come across, and yet by any normal objective standard it’s awful.
In any case, when it comes to this medium, “the artist” is almost invariably a large number of people, many of whom often disagree with each other as to the direction it’s going in, with the result that the film ends up seriously flawed – it might have wonderful individual elements but fail to gel as a whole.
<B> ...listen up guys....if you really believe me to hold some 'absurd hatred' of critics as you put it, you must be further up yourselves than i first imagined.....i do not consider critics to be worthy of 'absurd hatred' ,as you put it....as a matter of fact i hardly consider them at all....... </B>
I don’t think it’s a question of hatred (absurd or otherwise) as a fundamental misunderstanding of what critics do. Like many anti-critic posters, you lump “the critics” together as though they’re an undifferentiated, anonymous mass – and <U>that’s</U> what’s absurd.
As with any other medium, there are good critics and bad critics, optimists and cynics, people whose views tally with yours and people who reach wildly different conclusions. You yourself admit that “you hardly consider them at all” – and, with the greatest possible respect, it shows in your comments!
<B>....I am, however, glad that i've given you some food for thought, even if you's have chosen to use sarcasm to score points rather than trying to address any of the points that i raised....</B>
Given your initially rude and aggressive tone, are you surprised? If you want a constructive discussion, it helps if you <U>start</U> by making constructive contributions!
<B>as i stated previously , How can a breed that makes a habit out of criticising others work, be so touchy when someone criticises theirs? </B>
I don’t see that that’s happening at all. Cap’n Al started the thread in the first place because he was interested in others’ opinions. If I seemed “touchy”, it’s because you were rude and silly and (initially, anyway) showed more interest in personal abuse than making useful and relevant comments, and I suspect my colleagues felt the same way!
<B>Your attitude to this whole conversation more than re-affirms my belief that reviews of any medium are little more than exercises in the reviwers own hubris. </B>
This may be true of a small minority of reviewers, but absolutely not true in the case of most others. My own rationale for what I do is that my contributions for <I>DVD Times</I> are a logical extension of what I’ve spent my entire adult life doing, whether as a repertory cinema manager, distributor, producer or critic – I’m discovering and promoting work that may well have been ignored or marginalised by others, as well as shooting down a few overly sacred cows in the process.
<B>.....I'll just go now and leave all of you critics to live in peace and harmony in your own little world where everything you write goes unchallenged....meanwhile I'll be forming my own opinions.</B>
On what basis? You can’t possibly sample everything yourself, and unless your range of interests is identical to that of your friends and acquaintances, it’s unlikely you can rely too much on them either! As for “going unchallenged”, I welcome and indeed encourage intelligent responses to what I write, as my active participation both in these forums and the comments section of my reviews demonstrates all too clearly. I don’t welcome abusive and silly comments, but that’s because they usually say more about the person making them than about anything else.
<B>....well thanks, but no thanks....as stated previously, I do not need someone I know nothing of, to influence me what to read/watch/listen to… I am perfectly capable of forming those opinions on my own or by listening to people I know to have similar tastes and preferences to myself....these are the people whose opinions I value, not someone who fancies himself as some sort of semi-professional critic,</B>
I don’t understand the distinction that you’re making here – if you read a particular critic regularly, you are, in effect, “listening to people you know to have similar tastes and preferences to yourself”.
I’ve been reading my colleagues at DVD Times long enough to know that I’ll usually agree with Gary Couzens, I’ll often agree with Mike Sutton and Cap’n Al, and I’ll usually disagree with Raphph (adding the obligatory “no offence, mate”, if he’s reading this). I’ve only met Gary face to face (and that just once), but I think I know the others well enough to value their opinion, not least because it’s usually intelligently expressed. Even if you’ve never come across their work before, it’s easy to look up previous pieces, so you can see if their opinions match yours when it comes to films that you’ve already seen.
Also, what happens if you’re interested in work that your friends either aren’t interested in or have yet to discover? I can’t possibly afford to take a chance on everything that sounds vaguely interesting, especially given my wide range of film-related enthusiasms, so I rely on intelligent criticism to point me in the right direction. Similarly, I hope my coverage of the Ruscico project (120 Russian DVDs over the next two or three years) will help others sift the wheat from the chaff, as there are some real gems there that have received virtually no promotion elsewhere. In quite a few cases, I have been totally unable to uncover <U>any</U> pre-existing criticism in English of these films, either detailed or sketchy – and I doubt too many people are going to subscribe to all 120 discs just on the off-chance!
<B>but in all probabilty has about one tenth of the talent ( if that) of the person he is criticising.</B>
What kind of talent are you talking about? A talent for intelligent criticism is very different from a talent for making good films – Pauline Kael and Kenneth Tynan were unquestionably great critics, but neither was much cop when it came to creating original film and theatre works. Does that devalue their work as critics? Not at all, any more than the fact that the work of David Lynch and Tim Burton is devalued because they’re pretty lousy when it comes to articulate analysis and criticism of their own or indeed other people’s work. All four just happened to have ended up in the right jobs!
Lest this sound overly defensive, my 35mm debut (as co-producer) - <I>Paradise Grove</I> should be released next year, but I sincerely doubt that direct personal experience of either film-making or indeed distribution and exhibition (which goes back over a decade) is at all relevant to whether or not I’m any cop as a critic. If anything, the effect is likely to be negative, since I’d be more inclined to excuse factors that really shouldn’t be excusable when set against the film itself.
<B>My argument is with those whose opinions are given from the view point that they are not so much opinions as 'expert opinions', when the person giving them is no more, or only fractionally more, an expert than the man on the street. </B>
I would seriously take issue with a claim that, say, Mike Sutton knows “fractionally more” about 1970s American cinema than the average man in the street. I read his work precisely because he’s a genuine expert in the subject – and the same is true of many of my other colleagues, not to mention other critics whose work I read regularly. I would also hope that much the same is true of my own pieces on French, Italian and Eastern European cinema, Gary Couzens’ on Australian cinema and so on.
The crucial difference between us and the average man in the street is that we’ve taken the trouble to study not just certain aspects of film culture, but also the historical and cultural context from which they came. True, anyone can have an opinion – but in order to have an <U>informed</U> opinion, you need information. And where do you get that information from if your friends can’t provide it and you don’t have the time to go check all the original sources?
<B>For example, How many of you film critics have made a film that has seen general release or been successful, critically or otherwise?, yet you have no qualms about slating the work of someone who has put much time, effort and skill into creating something, which although perhaps not to your taste, may be someone elses holy grail. </B>
If a film is well made but not to my taste, I generally say so in the review. Similarly, if I’m aware that my opinion is likely to be a minority one, I also say so, and give my reasons. If I’m aware that a film’s defects are caused by external circumstances such as an unrealistically low budget, I try to acknowledge this – my review of <I>Dark Star</I> being a case in point (the original <I>DVD Times</I> reviewer completely failed to mention that it was essentially a student film).
But a bad film is a bad film is a bad film, regardless of how much time, effort and money has been spent on it – and it’s equally important to be honest about that. Otherwise you’re not writing independent criticism, you’re just an extension of the film’s marketing department (and a worrying number of critics seem to be just that!)
<B>To paraphrase the saying that 'those who can do, and those who cant, teach', how about changing it to ' those that can create do, and those that cant create, criticise'.</B>
Because that’s an absurdly simplistic reduction of what the critic’s role is – not least because it totally fails to acknowledge that great criticism is as much a product of considerable creative and technical effort as great film-making.
Pauline Kael is an excellent case in point – she’s one of the most distinctive and influential writers of the last fifty years and has created a massive body of work that’s been collected in a dozen volumes and anthologised in dozens more (she also pops up in quite a few quotations dictionaries). In what way is this any less a creative endeavour than creating a film?
And then Tob wrote:
<B>Some critics are a bit high and mighty but the thing I hate is the trend for cynicism that is creeping into more and more (especially amateur) critics. It seems no one bloody enjoys films anymore! I just take most critics with a pinch of salt. I think the trick is to find one who you agree with and who has similar tastes to your own.</B>
I totally agree – though I’d expand on that by suggesting that you also read people with different tastes, provided you’re aware of how and why their tastes differ. For instance, negative reviews from Chris Tookey (<I>Daily Mail</I>) or Alexander Walker (<I>Evening Standard</I>) or indeed our very own Raphph are just as likely to get me interested in a film than rave reviews from elsewhere.
The crucial point, though, is that you absorb the <U>argument</U> as well as the opinions. I deeply dislike the practice of awarding star ratings and marks out of ten to films, because it inevitably leads to people jumping to over-hasty conclusions about its merits.
A good recent example was Tookey’s review of <I>The Piano Teacher</I> – the two-star rating suggests it was unfavourable, but the actual review was much more intriguing (and in no way put me off): he appreciated the film’s merits while disliking its subject matter and conclusions, which is the kind of verdict that’s almost impossible to encapsulate in a figure or a grade!
As Tinder so rightly says, everyone has an opinion – but a rather smaller number of people can turn those opinions into the basis of an intelligent and worthwhile argument that explains and justifies those opinions. And that’s why professional (or experienced amateur) critics have more to offer than the Beavis & Butt-Head “it’s cool/it sucks” brigade.
Any and all <U>worthwhile</U> comments appreciated!
<B> ....my main objection to critics is how they always seem to dissect whatever they are reviewing into its component parts....approaching the whole subject like it was some sort of technical project... </B>
I think you’ve got it the wrong way round – speaking personally, I always look at the film as a whole and then, if it’s failed to be totally satisfying, attempt to find out <U>why</U> it didn’t work for me. This is a key function of good criticism – you can’t just say “I hated it” or "I loved it" without giving reasons. Or rather, you can, but it doesn’t offer that much to the reader.
It’s a lot more constructive to examine the film and work out which bits work and which don’t. I doubt anyone would deny that the cinematography and design elements of <I>Moulin Rouge</I> are absolutely outstanding by any yardstick – but I have my doubts about whether the rapid-fire editing helped or hindered the film as a whole, and many superb actors were woefully under-used. Is this “some sort of technical project”? I don’t think so – merely an attempt to explain why I responded to the film in the way that I did.
<B>...it also astounds me just how much critics seem to believe what they write is gospel because they believe it to be. They often write as if the opinion they have formed is the only valid one, frequently slating what may have been the pride and joy of the artist in question..... </B>
I really don’t care how much a film is an artist’s “pride and joy” if it demonstrably fails to convey that passion to the final audience! Ed Wood’s <I>Glen or Glenda</I> is about as good an example of “an artist's pride and joy” as you can come across, and yet by any normal objective standard it’s awful.
In any case, when it comes to this medium, “the artist” is almost invariably a large number of people, many of whom often disagree with each other as to the direction it’s going in, with the result that the film ends up seriously flawed – it might have wonderful individual elements but fail to gel as a whole.
<B> ...listen up guys....if you really believe me to hold some 'absurd hatred' of critics as you put it, you must be further up yourselves than i first imagined.....i do not consider critics to be worthy of 'absurd hatred' ,as you put it....as a matter of fact i hardly consider them at all....... </B>
I don’t think it’s a question of hatred (absurd or otherwise) as a fundamental misunderstanding of what critics do. Like many anti-critic posters, you lump “the critics” together as though they’re an undifferentiated, anonymous mass – and <U>that’s</U> what’s absurd.
As with any other medium, there are good critics and bad critics, optimists and cynics, people whose views tally with yours and people who reach wildly different conclusions. You yourself admit that “you hardly consider them at all” – and, with the greatest possible respect, it shows in your comments!
<B>....I am, however, glad that i've given you some food for thought, even if you's have chosen to use sarcasm to score points rather than trying to address any of the points that i raised....</B>
Given your initially rude and aggressive tone, are you surprised? If you want a constructive discussion, it helps if you <U>start</U> by making constructive contributions!
<B>as i stated previously , How can a breed that makes a habit out of criticising others work, be so touchy when someone criticises theirs? </B>
I don’t see that that’s happening at all. Cap’n Al started the thread in the first place because he was interested in others’ opinions. If I seemed “touchy”, it’s because you were rude and silly and (initially, anyway) showed more interest in personal abuse than making useful and relevant comments, and I suspect my colleagues felt the same way!
<B>Your attitude to this whole conversation more than re-affirms my belief that reviews of any medium are little more than exercises in the reviwers own hubris. </B>
This may be true of a small minority of reviewers, but absolutely not true in the case of most others. My own rationale for what I do is that my contributions for <I>DVD Times</I> are a logical extension of what I’ve spent my entire adult life doing, whether as a repertory cinema manager, distributor, producer or critic – I’m discovering and promoting work that may well have been ignored or marginalised by others, as well as shooting down a few overly sacred cows in the process.
<B>.....I'll just go now and leave all of you critics to live in peace and harmony in your own little world where everything you write goes unchallenged....meanwhile I'll be forming my own opinions.</B>
On what basis? You can’t possibly sample everything yourself, and unless your range of interests is identical to that of your friends and acquaintances, it’s unlikely you can rely too much on them either! As for “going unchallenged”, I welcome and indeed encourage intelligent responses to what I write, as my active participation both in these forums and the comments section of my reviews demonstrates all too clearly. I don’t welcome abusive and silly comments, but that’s because they usually say more about the person making them than about anything else.
<B>....well thanks, but no thanks....as stated previously, I do not need someone I know nothing of, to influence me what to read/watch/listen to… I am perfectly capable of forming those opinions on my own or by listening to people I know to have similar tastes and preferences to myself....these are the people whose opinions I value, not someone who fancies himself as some sort of semi-professional critic,</B>
I don’t understand the distinction that you’re making here – if you read a particular critic regularly, you are, in effect, “listening to people you know to have similar tastes and preferences to yourself”.
I’ve been reading my colleagues at DVD Times long enough to know that I’ll usually agree with Gary Couzens, I’ll often agree with Mike Sutton and Cap’n Al, and I’ll usually disagree with Raphph (adding the obligatory “no offence, mate”, if he’s reading this). I’ve only met Gary face to face (and that just once), but I think I know the others well enough to value their opinion, not least because it’s usually intelligently expressed. Even if you’ve never come across their work before, it’s easy to look up previous pieces, so you can see if their opinions match yours when it comes to films that you’ve already seen.
Also, what happens if you’re interested in work that your friends either aren’t interested in or have yet to discover? I can’t possibly afford to take a chance on everything that sounds vaguely interesting, especially given my wide range of film-related enthusiasms, so I rely on intelligent criticism to point me in the right direction. Similarly, I hope my coverage of the Ruscico project (120 Russian DVDs over the next two or three years) will help others sift the wheat from the chaff, as there are some real gems there that have received virtually no promotion elsewhere. In quite a few cases, I have been totally unable to uncover <U>any</U> pre-existing criticism in English of these films, either detailed or sketchy – and I doubt too many people are going to subscribe to all 120 discs just on the off-chance!
<B>but in all probabilty has about one tenth of the talent ( if that) of the person he is criticising.</B>
What kind of talent are you talking about? A talent for intelligent criticism is very different from a talent for making good films – Pauline Kael and Kenneth Tynan were unquestionably great critics, but neither was much cop when it came to creating original film and theatre works. Does that devalue their work as critics? Not at all, any more than the fact that the work of David Lynch and Tim Burton is devalued because they’re pretty lousy when it comes to articulate analysis and criticism of their own or indeed other people’s work. All four just happened to have ended up in the right jobs!
Lest this sound overly defensive, my 35mm debut (as co-producer) - <I>Paradise Grove</I> should be released next year, but I sincerely doubt that direct personal experience of either film-making or indeed distribution and exhibition (which goes back over a decade) is at all relevant to whether or not I’m any cop as a critic. If anything, the effect is likely to be negative, since I’d be more inclined to excuse factors that really shouldn’t be excusable when set against the film itself.
<B>My argument is with those whose opinions are given from the view point that they are not so much opinions as 'expert opinions', when the person giving them is no more, or only fractionally more, an expert than the man on the street. </B>
I would seriously take issue with a claim that, say, Mike Sutton knows “fractionally more” about 1970s American cinema than the average man in the street. I read his work precisely because he’s a genuine expert in the subject – and the same is true of many of my other colleagues, not to mention other critics whose work I read regularly. I would also hope that much the same is true of my own pieces on French, Italian and Eastern European cinema, Gary Couzens’ on Australian cinema and so on.
The crucial difference between us and the average man in the street is that we’ve taken the trouble to study not just certain aspects of film culture, but also the historical and cultural context from which they came. True, anyone can have an opinion – but in order to have an <U>informed</U> opinion, you need information. And where do you get that information from if your friends can’t provide it and you don’t have the time to go check all the original sources?
<B>For example, How many of you film critics have made a film that has seen general release or been successful, critically or otherwise?, yet you have no qualms about slating the work of someone who has put much time, effort and skill into creating something, which although perhaps not to your taste, may be someone elses holy grail. </B>
If a film is well made but not to my taste, I generally say so in the review. Similarly, if I’m aware that my opinion is likely to be a minority one, I also say so, and give my reasons. If I’m aware that a film’s defects are caused by external circumstances such as an unrealistically low budget, I try to acknowledge this – my review of <I>Dark Star</I> being a case in point (the original <I>DVD Times</I> reviewer completely failed to mention that it was essentially a student film).
But a bad film is a bad film is a bad film, regardless of how much time, effort and money has been spent on it – and it’s equally important to be honest about that. Otherwise you’re not writing independent criticism, you’re just an extension of the film’s marketing department (and a worrying number of critics seem to be just that!)
<B>To paraphrase the saying that 'those who can do, and those who cant, teach', how about changing it to ' those that can create do, and those that cant create, criticise'.</B>
Because that’s an absurdly simplistic reduction of what the critic’s role is – not least because it totally fails to acknowledge that great criticism is as much a product of considerable creative and technical effort as great film-making.
Pauline Kael is an excellent case in point – she’s one of the most distinctive and influential writers of the last fifty years and has created a massive body of work that’s been collected in a dozen volumes and anthologised in dozens more (she also pops up in quite a few quotations dictionaries). In what way is this any less a creative endeavour than creating a film?
And then Tob wrote:
<B>Some critics are a bit high and mighty but the thing I hate is the trend for cynicism that is creeping into more and more (especially amateur) critics. It seems no one bloody enjoys films anymore! I just take most critics with a pinch of salt. I think the trick is to find one who you agree with and who has similar tastes to your own.</B>
I totally agree – though I’d expand on that by suggesting that you also read people with different tastes, provided you’re aware of how and why their tastes differ. For instance, negative reviews from Chris Tookey (<I>Daily Mail</I>) or Alexander Walker (<I>Evening Standard</I>) or indeed our very own Raphph are just as likely to get me interested in a film than rave reviews from elsewhere.
The crucial point, though, is that you absorb the <U>argument</U> as well as the opinions. I deeply dislike the practice of awarding star ratings and marks out of ten to films, because it inevitably leads to people jumping to over-hasty conclusions about its merits.
A good recent example was Tookey’s review of <I>The Piano Teacher</I> – the two-star rating suggests it was unfavourable, but the actual review was much more intriguing (and in no way put me off): he appreciated the film’s merits while disliking its subject matter and conclusions, which is the kind of verdict that’s almost impossible to encapsulate in a figure or a grade!
As Tinder so rightly says, everyone has an opinion – but a rather smaller number of people can turn those opinions into the basis of an intelligent and worthwhile argument that explains and justifies those opinions. And that’s why professional (or experienced amateur) critics have more to offer than the Beavis & Butt-Head “it’s cool/it sucks” brigade.
Any and all <U>worthwhile</U> comments appreciated!