film criticism

In our upcoming semester of intense genre study, one topic will be how critics use and interpret genre. In that discussion, it is hard not to bemoan the drastic weakening of the critical voice -- writing about film was once a literary art, now it is mostly a matter of digit manipulation. It is no wonder that the public, and therefore the studios, have lost interest in the critic's opinion. But once upon a time, Manny Farber, James Agee and, later, Pauline Kael walked the Earth. I quote from an old Time magazine piece on Kael: When Quentin Tarantino was 15, he saw something on TV that changed his life: Pauline Kael. The New Yorker movie critic was being grilled by Tomorrow host Tom Snyder on her rave review of Philip Kaufman's Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and she refused to back down. "I thought, Who is this wild old woman?" the writer-director of Pulp Fiction recalls, "and soon I was going to the library to find her books. She was as influential as any director was in helping me develop my aesthetic. I never went to film school, but she was the professor in the film school of my mind."

Are any of you currently reading reviews today that make you feel like you're in film school?
Actually what inspired this post is that I did read such a review this morning -- I have long maintained that when A.O. Scott of the NY Times truly "gets" a movie (which is not as often as I'd hope) he can write so precisely that is actually improves one's enjoyment of the film. So take a moment today and read his review of "No Country for Old Men." Here's what I'm talking about:

"'No Country for Old Men' is purgatory for the squeamish and the easily spooked. For formalists — those moviegoers sent into raptures by tight editing, nimble camera work and faultless sound design — it’s pure heaven.

So before I go any further, allow me my moment of bliss at the sheer brilliance of the Coens’ technique. And it is mostly theirs. The editor, Roderick Jaynes, is their longstanding pseudonym. The cinematographer, Roger Deakins, and the composer, Carter Burwell, are collaborators of such long standing that they surely count as part of the nonbiological Coen fraternity. At their best, and for that matter at their less than best, Joel and Ethan Coen, who share writing and directing credit here, combine virtuosic dexterity with mischievous high spirits, as if they were playing Franz Liszt’s most treacherous compositions on dueling banjos. ...

The script follows Mr. McCarthy’s novel almost scene for scene, and what the camera discloses is pretty much what the book describes: a parched, empty landscape; pickup trucks and taciturn men; and lots of killing. But the pacing, the mood and the attention to detail are breathtaking, sometimes literally.

In one scene a man sits in a dark hotel room as his pursuer walks down the corridor outside. You hear the creak of floorboards and the beeping of a transponder, and see the shadows of the hunter’s feet in the sliver of light under the door. The footsteps move away, and the next sound is the faint squeak of the light bulb in the hall being unscrewed. The silence and the slowness awaken your senses and quiet your breathing, as by the simplest cinematic means — Look! Listen! Hush! — your attention is completely and ecstatically absorbed. You won’t believe what happens next, even though you know it’s coming."

Wow. So Kudos to Mr. Scott this morning for giving us that film school feeling, fleeting as it will be.