Weekly Rant: The Blind Side

Because most sports movies are mediocre, and because most movies starring Sandra Bullock are worse than that and because I have read the book upon which it is based, I had no intention of seeing The Blind Side. That’s why I spent my lunch hour last Friday clicking through Metacritic to read about it: I wasn’t worried that my own experience with the film would be colored by my prior exposure to these reviews, because this wasn’t a film I was planning to experience. But the more reviews I read, most of them negative, the more interested I became. At a time when Precious, a sensationalistic story about a black woman who is used as a dramatic punching bag, is being widely celebrated as worthwhile art, The Blind Side, the true story of a black man who rose from homelessness to a career in the NFL with a lot of help from a white family, has been derided by some as condescending toward black people. That I had to see to understand.

And so I saw The Blind Side, only to leave the theater as confused as when I went in. Is the film offensive? Yes. If Precious takes itself too seriously, The Blind Side doesn’t take itself seriously enough. This is a film with a high school football coach who doesn’t use the headset hanging around his neck but does take a cellphone call on the sideline during a game. It’s a film in which a teenage Michael Oher (Quinton Aaron), now a starting tackle for the Baltimore Ravens, gets whipped into shape by an elementary school kid. It’s a film in which Bullock’s saintly yet spicy Leigh Anne Tuohy confronts a threatening gang leader by threatening him right back – in his neighborhood, on his porch, in front of his homeboys. More often than not, The Blind Side adopts an air of preposterousness that suggests it’s more comfortable emulating a made-for-Lifetime melodrama than approximating reality. For me, at least, that’s offensive. As for the film’s supposed condescending treatment of its black main character, that’s where things get tricky.

In The Village Voice, Melissa Anderson suggests that The Blind Side “peddles the most insidious kind of racism, one in which whiteys are virtuous saviors, coming to the rescue of African-Americans who become superfluous in narratives that are supposed to be about them.” Scott Tobias of the AV Club argues that The Blind Side “finds a new low” in the sports genre’s “long, troubled history of well-meaning white paternalism, with poor black athletes finding success through white charity.” Both critics support these arguments by citing scenes in which white people must act upon Oher in order for him to act for himself. They also note how the film treats Oher, in Tobias’ words, as a “gentle, oversized puppy in need of adoption.” Frequently their arguments are compelling. Tobias notes that the Tuohy family “literally picks (Oher) up from the streets during a rainstorm, like a stray,” quipping: “All that’s missing are the children pleading, ‘Mom, can we keep him?’” One only needs to read such descriptions to see how neatly The Blind Side rests within the shamefully deep mold created by all the tactless “whiteys”-as-“virtuous saviors” films that have come before it. But I’m not sure that means that The Blind Side is automatically as tactless or shameless as its predecessors.

The thing that struck me about John Lee Hancock’s film is how faithful it is, a few indulgences aside, to Michael Lewis’ nonfiction book. Does that mean the film is capital-T True? Of course not. As I suggested, the film has a wink-wink demeanor about it that manages to undercut even the things that are factually accurate. Nevertheless, if Lewis’ account of the story can be trusted at all, many of the elements that might seem especially condescending toward black people are in fact based on truth. Indeed, Michael Oher was taken in by a rich white family. He did attend an almost all-white school. He was given special treatment by some of his white teachers to help him along. He did have a white tutor who guided him through high school and even college. He was inward and slow to reveal his feelings and history. He had been homeless. He did lose a father he barely knew to a sad death. He did have siblings he hadn’t seen in years, if ever. He didn’t take to football immediately and really was coached to equate offensive line play with the protection of one’s family. Perhaps most important of all, the black Oher really did form a bond with the white Tuohys, and they became a genuine family in the process – not just during high school, not just for the span of the film, but then and now. Any way you slice it, Oher was in fact “rescued,” in almost every sense of the word, by white people who, through their acts, were both “virtuous” and “saviors.”

None of this is to suggest that the film doesn’t take liberties in the specific depictions of these broader truths. Nor is it to suggest that The Blind Side gives us the “whole truth,” whatever that is. Furthermore, I don’t mean to imply that this is a good film. (When the professional actor playing the high school coach delivers a performance more forced than that of the career college football coaches who make cameos in this film, you’ve got problems.) Yes, it’s true that we leave The Blind Side better understanding Leigh Anne Tuohy than Michael Oher. But explain to me why this isn’t her story as much as his? Seems to me that without a Leigh Anne Tuohy we'd never have heard of Michael Oher. Sure, it would be condescending to depict Oher as the family pet being taught to sit, stay and play football. But I’m not convinced the film portrays him that way. I’d suggest the film portrays Oher as a young man in need of a mother and a lot of guidance, which by virtue of the formula means that Oher is placed in the role of a child. Is that offensive? If untrue, I suppose. But here’s the thing: What if it's accurate? Has our political correctness gotten so out of hand that stories about whites saving blacks are now taboo? That doesn’t sound like progress.

More than a decade ago, then living in Oregon, I eagerly followed the development of another sports-related film: Robert Towne’s Without Limits, which proved to be the better of the two Steve Prefontaine biopics released almost simultaneously. One thing I remember from the prerelease buzz is that Without Limits, which dedicates quite a bit of time to Prefontaine’s efforts to medal at the 1972 Olympics, didn’t score well with test audiences. Their complaint? Prefontaine didn’t redeem himself by winning gold at the 1976 Olympics. Why? Because he died in 1975. In that instance the real story – one of promise unfulfilled – wasn’t the story that (many) audiences wanted, but it was the story of what really happened. I have a feeling that something similar is happening here. In this era of heightened sensitivity to political correctness (which is a good thing for the most part, don’t get me wrong), The Blind Side is indeed hampered by Hancock’s sometimes overly simplistic approach to his subject matter. Just as often, though, what hurts The Blind Side isn't the depiction of its subject matter but the realities of it.

Weekly Rant: The Demonizing (of) Armond White

If you’ve ever found yourself wishing that New York Press critic Armond White would be eviscerated with the kind of predatory viciousness that colors so many of his reviews, his recent interview on The Film Talk’s weekly podcast won’t do anything to satisfy your bloodlust. In fact, it has the potential to increase it. Podcast hosts Jett Loe and Gareth Higgins produce an extremely professional movie debate program on their own dime each week (for now), so it isn’t a terrible surprise that their interviewing style is network-friendly. With White they take an angle of approach that is less Frost-Nixon than Hannity-Palin. (It’s one thing to ask nonconfrontational questions. It’s another thing to also help answer them.) But in a way that’s enough, because White has some Colonel Jessep in him. He wants to talk. (We want him on that wall. We need him on that wall.) And so even without a Lieutenant Kaffee grilling him, White says some incriminating things.

Of greatest interest to me is his response to his reputation as a contrarian. Loe and Higgins seemed ready to let the interview end, but with the contrarian topic on the table White seized the opportunity to set the record straight: “That is garbage,” he said. “That whole phrase is simply, I think, a symptom of a kind of culture that has turned into automatons, where people think they are simply supposed to like whatever Hollywood dangles in front of them and that anyone who thinks for themselves is wrong. You know, in America we’re supposed to be a democracy. There’s supposed to be this thing called freedom of speech that we respect and expect of people. How is it that when someone expresses themselves that has their own opinion, they are demonized as being a contrarian? I have no interest in being contrary. My interest is in writing film criticism that helps me to understand movies better. And that’s why I keep doing it. If I was going to write movie reviews or movie critiques that said the same thing everybody else was saying, there would be no point to it. I wouldn’t do it. The only reason I do it is because I’m trying to express myself. In a civilization that says it values independent thought, that’s supposed to be the ideal. But instead when you speak for yourself about movies people think something is wrong with you. They think you are simply being contrary.”

At issue here, for me, isn’t whether White is or isn’t a contrarian. What’s interesting to me is that White objects to being “demonized” as a contrarian just a few sentences after he suggests that our culture is plagued by “automatons.” The thing that offends me about White’s criticism isn’t his tendency to break from the pack, even when he seems to be doing so out of desperation, indeed to be a contrarian (more on that later). What offends me is his habit of demonization, taking down people and films. You don’t have to do much searching to see what I’m talking about. In his recent review of Precious, White suggests that Tyler Perry and Oprah Winfrey signed on as producers because the film about a black woman being horribly mistreated by black people “helps contrast and highlight their achievements as black American paradigms.” In his review of The Men Who Stare at Goats, White writes that George Clooney is “among those media stars who presume that having Liberal biases make them radicals.” These observations – severe or not – have little to do with the film he’s reviewing. They are merely drive-by hits. White is a name-caller. He’s a schoolyard bully. He is talented enough and intelligent enough to review films without taking these venomous detours, but he doesn’t. (It isn’t uncommon for White to pause in the middle of a film review to take a one-sentence swipe at some other film that he hasn’t reviewed.) More than being contrary, that’s his thing. He demonizes.

I could rant at length about what I perceive to be desperation and insincerity in White’s reviews. As the above quote implies, he has painted himself into a corner – made it so that any film that gets majority support from fans or critics cannot possibly be worthy of such acclaim. I could rant about the ludicrousness of his “Better Than” lists (which are entirely contrary, by the way), the most recent of which suggests that Happy-Go-Lucky was without critical support. I could rant about how reckless he can be in the name of a takedown – such as when he describes the characters in 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days as “abortionhorny.” I could even rant about how uncomfortable it is to listen to White, promoting a new book of essays about Michael Jackson, talking about the difference between “a real film critic” and someone who does it as a “hobby” while being interviewed by two guys running a pledge drive to stay afloat. But I won’t do that. I don’t want to lose sight of the big picture.

In the big picture, White makes a lot of astute arguments. Love or loath his reviews, they are often conversation starters, and I’m always in favor of passionate film discussion, regardless of how it begins. Do I doubt the sincerity of White’s motives? I do. Do I think he’s wasting his talent by using his reviews as the forum for cheap shots? I do. Do I think that White should quit condemning others for being sanctimonious when that word so often describes the tone of his reviews? I do. Do I think he has lost the right to object to his “contrarian” label when he routinely uses harsher words for others? I do. But I don’t think we should demonize White. It only gets us closer to the thing we’re demonizing.

Wrestling With The Reader

“Oscar-worthy” wasn’t the term running through my mind upon seeing The Reader in early January, prior to the movie picking up Academy Award nominations for Best Picture and Best Actress (among others). “Disappointing” was the word it inspired. Here is a film that is tantalizing in stretches but ultimately frustrating. It ends about 30 minutes too late, using that excess time for some extremely ill-advised plot developments that sour an otherwise respectably assembled film. In the final act, Lena Olin suffers through a scene that attempts to go so many directions at once that it ties itself in a knot. Meantime, poor Kate Winslet is forced to cap off a mostly engaging performance by donning heavy makeup and adopting a hunchback in order to portray decades-worth of aging, while the character opposite hers is played by two men almost 30 years apart. Oscar tends to like that kind of stuff, but I cringed at the indignity of it.

To the degree I was offended by The Reader, it was for those sins, and nothing more. I intended to write a review of the film at the time, but I found myself too busy. Days and weeks passed, and I was prepared to leave the film uncommented upon here … until I caught up on some reading. Earlier this week, I learned that there are others who were greatly disappointed by The Reader, and who, like me, are anything but excited about the prospect of the film picking up some golden hardware on Sunday. But that’s where the similarities end. Ron Rosenbaum for Slate has suggested that The Reader is the “The Worst Holocaust Film Ever Made,” while Rod Lurie for The Huffington Post writes that the film “gives ammunition to Holocaust negationists, to the Archbishop Williamsons of the world, to the people who would tell us that the Shoah is a mass exaggeration.”

These are heavy charges. In lieu of a typical review, I’d like to provide some thoughts in response. (Warning! Nothing but spoilers ahead.)

Before I go any further, take a moment to read the Rosenbaum and Lurie pieces linked above. Go ahead. I can wait. Ready? OK.

Let’s begin as Rosenbaum does, with the implication that The Reader is “The Worst Holocaust Film Ever Made.” He might be right about that. See, I don’t think of The Reader as a “Holocaust film” in the first place.

What is it about? I think The Reader explores two interesting topics, the first having to do with identification and the second having to do with ethics. When Michael (David Kross) learns that Hanna (Kate Winslet) was a guard in the SS who was complicit in the deaths of at least 300 people, his first emotion is shock. Hanna’s SS sins were committed before Michael knew her, before she comforted him when he was sick, before they became lovers, before he formed a youthful admiration of her. His first conundrum is to rectify these two disparate realities. Truth: Hanna is an accessory to mass murder. Truth: Hanna was nothing but a friend to Michael. This presents an interesting scenario with universal appeal. What would you do if you found out that someone you greatly admire had a checkered past? Would you disown your relationship with this person? Would you forever look at it differently? Should you?

Michael doesn’t know. He also doesn’t know what to do with his knowledge that Hanna willingly accepts a prison sentence that is based on an inaccurate charge. This is his ethical debate: Michael knows that Hanna is being judged incorrectly, but he thinks she is being punished fairly. (When it comes to the murder of hundreds, does it matter whether you acted alone or stood by with a half-dozen others?) But is this Michael’s decision to make? Does his previous relationship with Hanna, and his firsthand knowledge of her positive attributes, oblige him to come to her defense? Or does Michael owe his allegiance to those victims who aren’t alive to testify against Hanna? Aren’t some crimes so abhorrent that they can never be forgiven?

These are the issues of The Reader. In exploring these elements, yes, the plot structures itself around the Holocaust – an atrocity so well known that it doesn’t need further explanation (that’s why it’s handy). But does that make The Reader a “Holocaust film.” When you think about it, Michael’s ethical dilemma isn’t too far off from the one explored in A Few Good Men. Is that a film about the Marines? In a way, sure, but not at the heart. Same here.

Rosenbaum goes on to suggest that a New York Times article calling The Reader a story about “personal triumph” is a “depressing indication of how the film misreads the Holocaust.” But, wait. Wouldn’t it be more accurate to say that the New York Times misreads The Reader? And if The Reader isn’t even a “Holocaust film” in the first place, isn’t Rosenbaum misreading the film as well?

I don’t disagree with Rosenbaum entirely. He argues that Hanna’s illiteracy provides an all too convenient (partial) pardon for her sins. I agree. But then he goes a step further, suggesting that Hanna’s illiteracy is a metaphor for “the German people and their supposed inability to ‘read’ the signs that mass murder was being done in their name, by their fellow citizens.” In other words, Rosenbaum believes that Hanna’s illiteracy pardons all of Germany. But this is rubbish. First, this reading ignores that the movie is told from Michael’s perspective and that even he doesn’t absolve Hanna. Meantime, Hanna doesn’t forgive herself. She accepts her sentence, rather than fight it, and upon earning her freedom she kills herself. These things suggest guilt, not innocence.

Still, I respect Rosenbaum’s discomfort when he calls The Reader (and Downfall) “revolting” for portraying the laypeople of Germany as “poor, unknowing … victims.” Yes, Hanna is a victim of sorts in The Reader. Yes, the character is made more appealing thanks to the beauty of Winslet and the use of “manipulative nudity” (though it’s hardly unusual to see unusually attractive individuals in movies). Yes, Hanna experiences a “triumph” late in the film as she learns to read. Yes, that triumph is an ill-advised development, first because it’s a sloppily executed distraction from the film’s established themes, and second because it creates doubt about its intent by briefly showcasing this mass murderer in an endearing light. But these things never made me fond of Hanna. I never felt sorry for her. And she ends the film remembered by Michael not as a lover but as an instrument of mass murder. This didn’t escape me. So why is Rosenbaum convinced it will escape everyone else?

It’s here that Rosenbaum’s case against The Reader gets messy. He quotes a Barnes & Noble summary of the novel that inspired the film that calls Hanna’s illiteracy “a secret more shameful than murder.” Yes, that’s irresponsible and sickening. But that’s a book distributor’s synopsis of a novel, any faults of which shouldn’t be held against Stephen Daldry’s film. Likewise, Rosenbaum is potentially misleading when he describes Daldry’s justification for why the church fire isn’t portrayed in the movie. Rosenbaum writes: “As I learned from the director … the scene was omitted because it might have ‘unbalanced’ our view of Hanna, given too much weight to the mass murder she committed, as opposed to her lack of reading skills.”

Please note that “unbalanced” is the only word Rosenbaum directly attributes to Daldry. The rest, at least potentially, is his interpretation of what that word means. Yes, it could mean that Daldry was afraid we would feel worse about Hanna’s injustices as an SS officer than about her illiteracy. Or it could mean this: Daldry wanted us to be able to see Hanna through Michael’s eyes. Remember, it’s Michael’s story. If the audience witnesses murders that Michael must force himself to imagine, then we might fail to relate to Michael’s conflict. According to Daldry’s design, our view of Hanna is the same as that of the main character: First we fall for Hanna, and then we learn about her past. Somehow we, like Michael, must figure out how both these Hannas could be halves of the same whole. Not depicting the church catastrophe enhances the mystery of the story and its ethical debate.

But Rosenbaum and Lurie don’t want debate. More than anything, they seem offended that Hanna is allowed to be painted with shades of gray, that she is anything less than a stereotypical red-blooded, Jew-hating Nazi. Essentially, they take issue with the fact that Hanna is humanized. This mystifies me. Isn’t the humanness of Holocaust orchestrators a key element of what makes their inhumanity so haunting? Aren’t we obligated to learn from the Holocaust precisely because these almost unthinkable atrocities were carried about by “regular” people? To this effect, Lurie quotes Winslet quoting Daldry saying, “These were young men and women who didn’t know what they were getting into.” It sounds overly understanding, I know. But both Winslet’s comment and Daldry’s are conveniently out of context. Couldn’t Daldry have meant that many World War II era Germans failed to imagine the full magnitude of Hitler’s ethnic cleansing, even if they were aware of it? (Never mind, by the way, that Winslet’s interpretation of the film and the film itself are two different things that should be tried separately.)

In my mind, if the Holocaust wasn’t started by “normal people,” we have less to worry about. Then we can just be on the lookout for psychopaths. The reality is that Nazis weren’t born with some unique genetic makeup. They were conditioned into a belief system that made evil seem permissible. This doesn’t make their actions acceptable in hindsight. It makes them terrifying. And while Rosenbaum and Lurie are busy ravaging The Reader for failing to provide us with yet another one-dimensional Nazi Jew-killer, they miss that perhaps The Reader is a metaphor for recent history instead.

Sure, there are few, if any, atrocities in the history of the world that are on par with the Holocaust, so maybe The Reader is too careless with its references. Nonetheless, perhaps Rosenbaum and Lurie need to see Errol Morris’ Standard Operating Procedure. What they’ll find within that documentary are “normal” people who enlisted in the military and wound up doing abnormal, horrific, shameful things – things that were done in our name, whether we were aware or not, whether we endorsed their methods or not. (Does that make each of us culpable?) Certainly Lurie is correct that Hanna is “not guilty of the crime for which she is sentenced.” But she’s still guilty. The Reader makes repeated efforts to get that point across. And in the meantime many Americans who ordered, performed or condoned torture at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere have avoided being charged with anything. But the guilt still applies. At least Hanna does time.

Lurie argues that The Reader is to blame because its audience, “many of them young people uneducated about the Holocaust, will take as fact what they see on screen.” If this is true – if this R-rated film is the only window to the Holocaust that we give “young people,” and if these “young people” are taught that this film is “fact” – then we’re the ones at fault. If people are so uninformed that The Reader could have such a profound effect on the definition of the Holocaust, we should be ashamed not of the film but of ourselves. In the end, blaming The Reader is a little too convenient. Almost like telling the story of a mass murderer who is made quasi-endearing through her sexuality and quasi-helpless due to her illiteracy, I’d say.

What say you?

The Experiment Continues

The Cooler is a year old today. For the author of this blog, the anniversary inspires conflicting reactions: “Already?” and “Only a year?” I’ve been writing about movies for a limited but faithful audience for some 12 years now. Over the past four years I’ve written reviews of most of the new releases I’ve seen in the theater. In that respect, publishing my writing on a blog hasn’t been all that significant a life change, and yet the past year of movie writing has been more rewarding than the previous five put together. Easily.

When I launched the blog, I called it an “experiment.” My fear was that I’d lose myself to it. Given my media background, I have a heightened sense of timeliness and deadlines (more heightened, alas, than my attention to grammar), and so in my mind there was a very real risk that starting a blog would mean sentencing myself to a second job, rather than enhancing an adored recreation. I had nightmares about pressuring myself to write reviews the day after a movie opened, and I knew from experience that the Internet is a forum with an insatiable appetite. What if my love affair with film criticism burned out trying to feed the monster?

That hasn’t happened. Cooler buddies Mark and Hokahey, who offered the strongest encouragement (er, nagging) to launch a blog in the first place, suggested that blogging could be what I wanted it to be – as much of a job or recreation as I desired. I wasn’t sure I believed them, but I decided it was time to try. One year later, it’s clear they were right.

The Cooler isn’t the best single-author movie site in the blogosphere. I’m sure of that. But I couldn’t tell you which blog deserves that honor, and that’s the secret to my satisfaction. The wonderful truth is that the blogosphere offers something for everyone. There are movie blogs that post a few times a month, some that post dutifully every day and some that post multiple times a day. Some are thoughtful, some are silly. Some are serious, some are sarcastic. There’s no right way to do it. If it were up to me, I’d post entertaining and thoughtful commentary almost daily, as Ed Howard does at Only The Cinema. But I don’t have the time. In fact, I don’t even have the time to keep up with reading Ed’s daily posts, much as I’d like to. So I comfort myself with the knowledge that while “real life” might cause me to go a week without posting, there must be readers like me for whom that pace is perfect. If the whole point of bringing my writing to the blogosphere is to share it with others, I post at a pace that is conducive to following along. I envy Ed’s output, I do, but I don’t feel compelled to compete with it. I can’t compete. I know that, and I’m totally okay with that. For me, that means I’m doing this thing right. (I didn't start blogging to be competitive.)

Speaking of Ed, I wasn’t familiar with him a year ago or even nine months ago. Now we’re not only fans of one another’s work, we’re collaborators. Last month, our first installment of The Conversations, coauthored give-and-takes on film, debuted at The House Next Door. (The second installment is in the works right now.) Likewise, before I ever traded thoughts with Ed, I debated documentaries with Fox, another blogger whose work I discovered within the year and who graces The Cooler with regular comments. At my blog or his, Fox and I tend to agree on only one thing: that we enjoy disagreeing with one another. Cyberspace is full of vitriol, but Fox and I have had countless passionate debates while fostering mutual respect, rather than forgetting it.

I could go on, but it’s safer to stop here – knowingly leaving out the names of many Cooler regulars and favorites, rather than risking the accidental snubbing of one or two. A year ago I wrote, “I believe this blog will be measured by what my readers bring to it.” I still think that. To all those who have left thoughtful comments and used my writing as the starting point to a larger conversation, thank you! Sincerely. As far as I’m concerned, that’s what it’s all about. It’s somewhat fitting, actually, that this post should follow my review of Darren Aronofsky’s latest film, because in the past year I’ve found that bloggers are a tight-knit, mostly supportive group with a camaraderie that reminds of the locker room scenes in The Wrestler. (That we do all this almost foolishly – for love and not money – only strengthens the comparison. Not to mention that I suspect that many of us do it half-naked, but that’s another story.)

Speaking of blogger camaraderie, an overdue point of blog business:

A few weeks ago Getafilm's Daniel Gatahun honored me with a Dardos Award that, due to a hectic real-world schedule, I have yet to acknowledge. Now, as I see it, there are three ways to respond to such recognition, two of them incorrect: 1) Get cocky and feel overly self-important, failing to realize that the Dardos exercise is more or less a chain e-mail of warm fuzzies; 2) Get cocky and act as if too cool to recognize a genuine compliment because it comes in a chain-esque form; 3) See the Dardos Awards for what they are at best: an opportunity to encourage and thank your peers. I choose No. 3.

On that note, I humbly accept my Dardos Award (more information at the end of this post), and I eagerly look forward to the second part of this exercise, which is bestowing the award on five other bloggers. I’m going to attempt to present the award to five bloggers who I don’t think have received Dardos Awards to this point, or who at least haven’t accepted them on their blogs, as far as I know. So, Dardos go to the following:

Craig of The Man From Porlock, who writes not enough for how much I enjoy him.

Ed Howard of Only The Cinema, who writes too often for how much I enjoy him (I can't keep up).

Fox of Tractor Facts, who is just so constantly wrong about everything, but who I begrudgingly read anyway (I jest).

FilmDr of The Film Doctor, whose daily reports of a two-week student filmmaking course still has me smiling.

Mystery Man of Mystery Man on Film, whose recognition of all the ways Indiana Jones sucks makes up for the fact that he admires the screenplay of Gran Torino.

Thanks, gents!

In the spirit of recognizing others, I’d also like to welcome a new blogger to the neighborhood. More accurately, I'd like to congratulate this blogger on moving out of The Cooler’s basement in order to have a place of his own. Cooler regular Hokahey, who has contributed countless comments and collaborated on a handful of posts here over the past year, is now blogging at Little Worlds!

In recent weeks, Hokahey has been plagued by some of the same concerns I had before launching The Cooler. But now he’s committed. I hope you’ll go over and check him out and leave him a fruit basket or something.

And with that, “the experiment” continues. The coming year is sure to lead to more collaboration, more passionate exchanges, another blog-a-thon and who knows what else? Whatever it is, you can cue up the Sinatra, because I’ll be doing it my way.

A heartfelt thank you to all the readers and commenters who have made an otherwise forgettable movie year so enriching.

-- Jason Bellamy


The Dardos Awards

The Dardos Award is given for recognition of cultural, ethical, literary, and personal values transmitted in the form of creative and original writing. These stamps were created with the intention of promoting fraternization between bloggers, a way of showing affection and gratitude for work that adds value to the Web.

Recipients are supposed to do the following:

1) Accept the award by posting it on your blog along with the name of the person who has granted the award and a link to his/her blog.

2) Pass the award to another five blogs that are worthy of this acknowledgment, remembering to contact each of them to let them know they have been selected for this award.

Bad Movies: To Quit, or Not to Quit?

“How long should you sit through a bad movie?” That’s the way Friend of The Cooler Mark titled his e-mail last weekend when he forwarded a link to Roger Ebert’s blog post called “Don’t read me first!” In the post, Ebert defends his review of Tru Loved, a small independent film he’d blasted in a 735-word review despite watching less than 9 minutes of the movie. That Ebert admitted as much in the original review was the basis for his defense of his 1-star review. That Ebert was literally less than upfront about his early exit (he didn’t reveal prematurely quitting the movie until the last full paragraph) is what drew criticism – first from an editor at the Chicago Sun-Times, and then from his blog readership, which has logged in with more than 500 comments on the issue.

As Mark predicted, I’d already seen Ebert’s blog piece (and thus also Ebert’s original review of Tru Loved). However, I hadn’t seen Ebert’s entry in the light in which it was now forwarded to my attention. Until then, I was caught up on the journalistic ethics of it all: Was Ebert’s review fair? (Sort of, I had decided. Ebert had been honest, if not perfectly explicit, in noting the amount of the film he viewed. And I suspect his written reactions to those 8 minutes were nothing short of sincere. But Ebert hadn’t practiced good journalism. His reaction to Tru Loved produced a story but not the story. Like all too many active journalists, Ebert had opted for sensationalism over good old-fashioned reportage.) This pondering of Ebert’s critical approach was absolutely appropriate. All the while, though, a more basic and yet equally worthy debate was right in front of me, and I was blind to it. Indeed: how long should you sit through a bad movie?

It’s a question that’s relevant on two levels: (1) as it applies to the critic (professional or unpaid), and (2) as it applies to the average moviegoer just out for a good time. For the critic, tradition and general respect would suggest sitting through the entire picture. But is it absolutely essential to see every minute of a film in order to pass judgment on it? In response to condemnation from his blog readership, Ebert reversed course and gave Tru Loved a full viewing. That inspired a longer (1,808 words), more detailed review that’s barely more praiseworthy than the first one. As a report for consumers trying to determine whether to see all or none of Tru Loved, Ebert’s second review is more valuable. But as a criticism of art, does the second review have any greater value than the first? Given that in his original review Ebert revealed the portion of the movie he was evaluating, I would say no – the same way that an appreciation or condemnation of a specific scene in a film is no less relevant than a critique of the entire body of the film.

But what about the average moviegoer? Does he or she owe a film a complete viewing? I would struggle to argue yes, because it’s the consumer’s time and money being invested. When I go to an art museum, I’m far more likely to spend time lingering in front of paintings than in front of sculptures, as I simply prefer one medium to the other. If I’m free to speed through the sculptures, or bypass them altogether, why shouldn’t a moviegoer be able to bail early on a film that’s failing to entertain or inspire? Then again, a movie is designed to be appreciated in its entirety. If you’ve only seen half of a movie, have you really seen it?

Ever since I started writing about movies (on and off) more than 10 years ago, I have made it a policy never to walk out of a theatrical screening. I’ve broken the rule twice, most recently with Friend of The Cooler Hokahey at Rules Of Attraction. In both cases the early exits had as much to do with wanting to make better use of precious time with a friend as it did with my dissatisfaction with the film itself. When I really think about it, I could probably stand to walk out early on a few films each year. But, like quitting midway through a workout, there’s a real danger that it becomes an awful habit. In what so far has been a disappointing year at the movies, I would have been more than happy to quit on as many as 10 films. But I stuck with them, and I’m glad I did. (At least, I think I’m glad.) In many cases – Appaloosa, most recently – I saw a film’s greatest moments only because I was willing to keep my butt in the seat. Such late windfalls rarely redeem an entire movie, but sometimes they do. And, in the meantime, they remind me of why I showed up at the cinema in the first place.

For all movie lovers, I think, movie-going is like an endless cycle of blind dates. Each time we show up at the theater hoping that this is The One – the movie that will sweep us off our feet like none has before. Odds are that it won’t happen. But we keep coming back, living for the possibility and enjoying those precious yet fleeting moments of magic in between. Many a love story – in real life and on screen – would never come to fruition if we stuck to first impressions. Some romances take time. Sometimes our initial instincts are all wrong.

But now I ask you, Cooler readers: When is the last time you quit on a movie? Do you regret it? If not, how would you react if a friend told you that he/she quit early on a movie near and dear to your heart? Would you feel the movie had been given an adequate chance?

Getting It Wrong Is Right

I had missed the first 20 minutes, but that was okay. I’d seen that stretch of the movie three times before. And, besides, I was channel surfing. I didn’t plan on sticking with the flick playing commercial-free on AMC, or whatever it was, on that lazy Sunday afternoon. I was just passing the time. But then 5 minutes of watching turned to 10, turned to 20, turned to 30. And the next thing I knew the movie was over. Save that missed first portion, I’d watched the entire thing and sat enthralled throughout. And I was stunned.

The movie was Robert Altman’s The Player, and it was love at fourth sight. In my three previous attempts at watching the film – all of them on video – I hadn’t made it more than halfway through. Each time I had found the movie dry and dull. It made me feel as detached as Tim Robbins’ glassy Griffin Mill. At one point in that span of failed viewings I’d even received the DVD of The Player as a birthday gift and promptly exchanged it for something else. For all its acclaim, Altman’s noirish Hollywood satire just wasn’t for me, I had concluded. Until that fateful Sunday, that is, when suddenly it was.

What was the difference? I couldn’t begin to tell you. Perhaps my first three viewings had been spoiled by misconceptions about what The Player would be, although for the life of me I can’t remember what those misconceptions would have been. The movie’s fatal flaw, in my mind, was that it was uninteresting. Simple as that. And yet when I stumbled upon The Player a few years later, on TV no less, I was genuinely and effortlessly engrossed. The film hadn’t changed, and considering that the movie was released in 1992 (hardly olden days) the context hadn’t changed much either. I had changed, in ways simple enough not to be able to identify and yet significant enough to alter my perceptions.

Had I written a review of The Player after my first partial viewing and called it icy and emotionless, I wouldn’t have been altogether incorrect, but I would have been far from right. As I look back on it now, at the time I had only a tourist’s understanding of the film’s culture. Thus dismissing The Player would have been akin to criticizing the diction of untranslated Dostoevsky. The art was in a foreign language that I wasn’t equipped to scrutinize.

The bottom line is that I had been wrong about The Player. And I mention all of this now because of a recent Q&A with Kenneth Turan of the L.A. Times in which he suggests that he never second-guesses any of his initial reviews, because he has no reason to do so. “I am not now nor have I ever been mistaken in my judgment about a film,” Turan says with admitted “unwise bravado.” Then he dismisses the concept altogether: “Let me explain why I feel that asking critics about what they got wrong, or for that matter what they got right, is to fundamentally misunderstand what it is we do and how we do it.”

If you’re a fan of thoughtful film criticism, this is where things get ugly. As a tool to support his argument, Turan notes that “critics were almost unanimously dismissive” of Vertigo when it was released in 1958, but that 44 years later Hitchcock’s tale of obsession finished second to Citizen Kane in a poll to determine the best film of all time. “What happened?” Turan asks. “Were those critics back in 1958 hopeless fools? To say that would be to arrogantly assume that today’s practitioners have reached some ultimate pinnacle of knowledge that neither past nor future generations can hope to equal. The reality is that critics are creatures of their particular time and place, that even the most rarefied criticism is at its core opinion shaped by all the personal and societal forces that shape anyone’s tastes.

“Just as you can’t be wrong or right if you prefer Italian food to Chinese, it’s hard to be right or wrong about what we like in a film, no matter how much we think we can. What criticism offers, ideally, is informed, thoughtful, well-written opinion, an expression of personal taste based on knowledge, experience and insight that helps readers both decide what to see and understand what they have seen. And the closest I’ve come to making a mistake has been when I haven’t trusted my own instincts about a film.”

Then Turan quotes Robert Warshow from The Immediate Experience: “A man goes to the movies … A critic must be honest enough to admit he is that man.”

Sounds humble, doesn’t it? It isn’t. Oh, sure, Turan is right on the money when he says that critics must trust their instincts and write honestly. “In the final analysis, you’re a gang of one or you’re nothing at all,” he says. True that. But to acknowledge that criticism “ideally” offers “insight” to the common moviegoer and then to suggest that Turan’s initial judgments have never been mistaken is to reveal that Turan doesn’t see himself as Warshow’s “man” after all. If he did, certainly by now he’d have come across a film that he panned or praised only to read another piece of criticism that changed his mind and set him straight. That’s presuming, of course, that he thoughtfully reads other critics. And if in fact Turan doesn’t meditate on opposing viewpoints and/or has never once been won over by them, he’s operating as if he’s reached that “ultimate pinnacle of knowledge” and values no opinion but his own.

Don’t get me started, by the way, on Turan’s implication that one’s assessment of a film comes down solely to matters of taste, as in preferring Italian food to Chinese. According to that model, Italian food lovers would prefer undercooked Sbarro to expertly seasoned P.F. Chang’s. Turan takes excellence in execution out of the equation. Do moviegoers have tastes, biases, preferences? Of course! Are we influenced by societal or cultural forces around us? Certainly. Should a critic be as mindful as possible of these factors in order to write the most honest piece of argument-driven, evidence-based criticism possible? Absolutely. But to see a critic reduce criticism to an evaluation of whether or not we “like” a movie is disheartening for those of us who seek something deeper.

That said, there’s a degree to which Turan has the right idea by suggesting that his original judgments are infallible, because as reflections of his first viewing experiences such reviews are indeed faultless. Then again, his perfectly honest reviews could still be perfectly misguided, and I’m shocked that Turan is reluctant to acknowledge as much. On his way to dumbing down the essence of criticism and while implying that he’s just one of the masses, Turan reveals himself to be a movie evaluating elitist after all.

Because, let’s face it, we all make mistakes. Fail to grasp a film’s intent and chances are you’ll be left on the outside looking in. I’m thinking now of In The Valley Of Elah, and the rush by many critics to view it through the prism of Iraq War commentary rather than take it as a story of one man’s suffering and disenchantment. I’m thinking of seeing Brick and walking out of the theater listening to two guys slam the movie because they thought Rian Johnson’s Sam Spade dialogue was an oblivious error (“I don’t know any high schoolers who talk like that!”) rather than a stylistic choice. I’m thinking even of No Country For Old Men, which captivated me on first viewing only to absolutely thrill me on the second when I could ignore the MacGuffin well enough to focus on the themes of fate. Sometimes it takes seeing a movie to know what to look for within it.

So while it’s rare for me to do complete 180 on a film, as I did with The Player, I proudly admit that to lesser degrees I get it wrong all the time. I read criticism not to have my judgments validated but to have them challenged, and I am nothing short of jubilant when I come across a contradictory viewpoint argued so effectively that it becomes my own. Accuse me of flip-flopping if you want. Charge me with bending to the crowd, if you must. But in my mind there’s a bigger sin than taste-testing the Kool-Aid from time to time. It’s getting drunk on stubbornness and self-veneration. Try though he did, Turan didn’t demonstrate modesty with his response. Seems to me he exposed his closed-mindedness.

So I ask you, Cooler readers: Care to share a time you got it wrong?

The Last Paid Picture Watchers?

It’s not quite an inconvenient truth, but it’s certainly an unfortunate one: The era of the paid local film critic is crumbling like an Antarctic ice shelf. This week at movie commentary sites like The House Next Door, Scanners and The Reeler, writers, bloggers and readers have been responding to news that critic Nathan Lee was let go by the Village Voice, after only 18 months of employment, for what Lee said were “economic reasons.”

The discussion of Lee’s dismissal (and I highly recommend you check out the above links) has rarely been about Lee himself but about what his ousting represents: a growing trend. Earlier this year the Detroit Free Press became “the most highly circulated newspaper in the country without a full-time in-house film critic” when it decided to buy out and then not replace Terry Lawson. The Freep and other newspapers nationwide have instead decided to run national wire copy from the likes of Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times and Roger Moore of the Orlando Sentinel, among others.

With newspapers across the country struggling to stay afloat, it’s somewhat difficult to fault the publishers. A blockbuster released in Manhattan is the same one that hits theaters in Nowhere, Kansas, so why not use wire copy? It’s available and it comes edited and ready for print. If magazines like the New Yorker can offer film criticism that’s as worthwhile for folks in Maine as folks in New Mexico, why can’t someone in Idaho get movie reviews in newsprint from a critic based in Florida? If a newspaper wants nothing more than to simply fill column inches it’s a poor business model to pay for original material.

Still, ignoring for the moment the conversation about what newspapers should be, this is a disappointing trend for those of us who enjoy reading thoughtful, well-crafted film criticism. Sites like metacritic.com and rottentomatoes.com have made it quick and easy to read critics from across the country on any given movie. But, the way things look now, in 10 years or so there might only be a handful of voices left to choose from.

The irony is that this is happening at a time when film criticism is enjoying a sort of renaissance thanks to the blogosphere. Just over two years ago, I wasn’t reading any movie blogs. Now I follow several of them daily. And I agree with a comment Matt Zoller Seitz made in the discussion over at The House Next Door: “I find these days that I'm more likely to find lively writing and original viewpoints on blogs than in print outlets.” But the movie blog universe has some obstacles, the most obvious being that there’s no great way to find new and exciting bloggers. Surely right now there’s an outstanding film criticism blog somewhere that I’ve never seen, and I get irritated wondering how long it will take before I discover it.

On top of that, criticism as unpaid avocation isn’t ideal. Sure, bloggers have the freedom to say whatever they want however they want and let their readership decide what’s appropriate, which has enormous potential value (along with potential danger). But your average movie blogger probably has a day job. If layman criticism becomes the norm, it stands to reason that criticism will lose something: depth, expertise, perspective, access and, one would hope, quality. My argument isn’t that professional critics need to have a PhD in film studies, it’s that someone making a living watching and writing about movies should be able to produce better material than someone squeezing it in on the side.

As someone who has been employed to write about sports, I know what it is to have one of those cool jobs that many people would sacrifice a limb for. But what’s interesting to me is that paid sports commentary seems to be increasing even though TV packages and the Internet have made straight sports news reporting almost obsolete. No one picks up the Sports page for the Who, What, When, Where, and Why anymore, because they know those details already. They pick up the Sports page or read online sports columnists or listen to sports talk radio for the Who Cares.

At a time when ESPN.com is hiring writers away from newspapers, sometimes to do little more than provide niche content, how is it that a publication like Entertainment Weekly hasn’t made a push to become the go-to outlet for film criticism? Is it a lack of competition? Is it a lack of initiative? Please don’t tell me it’s a lack of vision! Because the potential benefits seem obvious: Imagine several prominent film critics writing under the same masthead. Imagine these critics not having to waste their talents by writing reviews of three lousy February releases for the same Friday. Imagine being able to read your favorite critic as he/she dips back into the vault to write about films past. Imagine, in essence, if someone combined the best elements of paid criticism with the qualities of the best film blogs.

Can’t this happen? And can’t it provide money for the publisher daring enough to try it and provide a tremendous boost to film criticism for those of us who wish to read it? I think so. I can imagine that. What I can’t imagine given the current state of things is the paid local critic rebounding according to the existing model, and that’s disheartening. I used to tell people that being a paid movie critic was a tough gig to get because it’s the kind of job you hold onto until you die. Now, sadly, the jobs are dying faster than the critics.