Film Criticism

[colinr0380]

Very interesting! They could also have thrown in the lesbian-stalker thriller Windows (the only film directed by cinematographer Gordon Willis) in there too. If you want my opinion on Taxi zum Klo, its in the thread here (though sadly devoid of davidhare's comments now)

[hearthesilence]

Interesting to see a show like this, especially in 1982. (IIRC Dave Kehr who was at the Chicago Reader then did a write-up on the high profile burst of cross-dressing films at the time - he was not a fan of Tootsie but loved Victor/Victoria.) When Netflix did their doc on the history of trans representation, they also pointed out similar clichés - if you were trans or someone who had trans characteristics, you were typically killed, died by suicide or a murderer. I imagine being trans and being gay were often conflated on some level in mainstream culture, at least until recent years, so having similar narrative clichés in mainstream entertainment wouldn't be a surprise.

It's interesting to see the progress made in 15 years, but it really was a long, loooong road when put in a larger context - there was still a long way to go to where we are now, and still there are plenty of places in the U.S. that feel like they remain way behind. (I'm jaded by NYC but I still remember the culture shock when I first arrived.)

UPDATE: Forgot, a decade later, Kehr did another write-up on gay and trans representation in Hollywood in 1993. By then he was at the Chicago Tribune with Siskel.

[domino harvey]

I’ll quote my Partners write up as well, as the movie’s even worse than it sounds from their discussion, if that’s possible!

Partners (James Burrows 1982) If you are in the market for a comedy sure to make everyone regardless of political or sexual orientation uncomfortable, here it is. TV sitcom-vet Burrows directs Ryan O'Neal (straight) and John Hurt (gay) as two cops ordered to go undercover as gay lovers in order to catch a gay serial killer. O'Neal is such a manly stud that he constantly beds women just by being in their general proximity, and Hurt is such a prissy little queer that he starts getting jealous over these flings as though the two were an actual couple. If that sounds like a recipe for hilarity, keep it to yourself. This is a film with no conceivable audience because right away it alienates potential homosexual viewers with obnoxious gags like the police chief commissioning a lavender VW bug for the two, or the ha-ha-ha-ha-larious sight of a straight man being hugged by a naked gay man. Whoa, no way! That's BRILLIANT! And these gags reinforce the sense of Otherness regarding gay culture that would keep many of those who'd find this a riot out of the theatres anyways. The film of course talks out of both sides of its mouth and preaches understanding and how it's hard out there for a gay man, but still can't resist poking fun at all those effeminate homos, &c. If this film had any balls it'd follow the premise down and have both mismatched officers fall in love with each other rather than going for the regrettable choice of letting the gay one get a crush on the straight one. But that might have been actually progressive and entertaining, and not this, whatever this is. In the film's defense, they did wait about eleven minutes before using the word "faggot," which I would have lost a bet on going in.

This part of the New York Times review is hilarious, by the way (concerning the goddawful, "Wow, fuck this movie" last minute or so):

At the theater preview at which I saw ''Partners,'' a group of irate patrons hissed and booed the film's end. I assume it was not because they were disappointed that the film was over too soon.

[Never Cursed]

Not sure where to post this but an English translation of Serge Daney writing that was announced awhile ago is coming Feb 2022. Ignore the "buy" links as they aren't working yet.

https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/cinema-house-and-world

Now available for pre-order

[colinr0380]

The Mark Kermode and Simon Mayo Friday Film Review Show on BBC Radio 5 Live is coming to an end on the 1st April after 21 years. Which is perhaps not too unexpected given Simon Mayo leaving to work on a rival radio network and showing his lack of interest in the DVD of the week segment by monopolising the segment for excruciatingly drawn out jokes!

[hanshotfirst1138]

Damn. I’m sure Kermode will find another home though.

[Dr Amicus]

That’s essentially what they’ve said, they’re moving elsewhere but haven’t said where to, unless I’ve missed it.

[Finch]

Speaking of moves, the A.V. Club let much of its old guard go when they told everyone it was either up sticks to California or leave. I hope A.A. Dowd and everyone else finds a new home quick. I removed AV Club from my bookmarks after sampling some of the new writers' output.

[hearthesilence]

Speaking of moves, the A.V. Club let much of its old guard go when they told everyone it was either up sticks to California or leave. I hope A.A. Dowd and everyone else finds a new home quick. I removed AV Club from my bookmarks after sampling some of the new writers' output.

Did that have anything to do with the Onion getting bought by Univision (much to the staff's chagrin)?

[Finch]

It might have, but I don't know for sure.

[Dr Amicus]

Mark Kermode and Simon Mayo new podcast for Sony Podcasts. Starts May 5th with a (if I've read it correctly) an additional spoilery podcast if you subscribe via Apple.

Presumably similar to their BBC show, but now also covering TV. And of course they can be rude about Trump and Johnson to their hearts' content - and plug their own books (all of which would get bleeped out by the sound of birdsong on the BBC).

[hearthesilence]

Speaking of moves, the A.V. Club let much of its old guard go when they told everyone it was either up sticks to California or leave. I hope A.A. Dowd and everyone else finds a new home quick. I removed AV Club from my bookmarks after sampling some of the new writers' output.

More details on what happened.

[Finch]

Nice find!

The company offered the Chicago-based staffers $5,000 each to cover relocation costs, but no salary raises despite the higher cost of living in Los Angeles. They were given a month to make their decision. One said that had they not been unionized, they wouldn’t have even been offered the severance.

This sort of behavior makes my blood boil.

[colinr0380]

Along with this quote:

“It’s clear that G/O wants these veteran employees to leave so the company can replace them with workers paid at the salary minimums as stipulated in the union contract—minimums that were bargained based on Chicago rates,” the union representing A.V. Club staffers wrote in an online statement.

Whilst it is terribly sad this mostly reminds me of the heady days of the late 2000s when I would ping-pong between this forum and the AV Club articles for all my film news. That pretty much stopped exactly a decade ago with the first tranche of departures. I'm also quite incensed at the brief remark that the change in software forced by new owners before these new owners "effectively annihilated" the comment section of the site, which was one of the most vibrant ones I can recall. It scares me (and should scare anyone wanting to get a historical sense of internet culture of a certain time. That's social history right there, even if is just comments under an episode of an old TV show or a music review) that such material can be so easily treated as disposable detritus, as compared presumably to the articles by the named and paid staff above the line. There were many situations where I would actually gain more insight and entertainment from the comments underneath an article - adding context or countering something said in the main text, or just bringing up tangential subjects - and that stuff should be valued, not causally binned, and would seem to show a certain disrespect from those in charge of the site towards those who made it what it was even before the focus turned towards the actual salaried staff members.

And also the comment that 'it would have happened in 2020 if not for the pandemic' hits quite hard, as I get the impression that quite a few people got a temporary reprieve from the hammer dropping whilst the higher ups hid away in the early days of Covid and put their nefarious plans on hold. But you'd think that if nothing else the pandemic proved that you didn't need to force people to make a move to clock in at a central LA office.

[colinr0380]

Mark Kermode and Simon Mayo new podcast for Sony Podcasts. Starts May 5th with a (if I've read it correctly) an additional spoilery podcast if you subscribe via Apple.

Presumably similar to their BBC show, but now also covering TV. And of course they can be rude about Trump and Johnson to their hearts' content - and plug their own books (all of which would get bleeped out by the sound of birdsong on the BBC).

It appears that there might be a separate pay subscription podcast as well. It will be interesting to see if that catches on, but they have taken pains to say that it is just extended banter rather than entirely exclusive content.

Having just started listening to the first episode of the Kermode & Mayo's Take podcast it was somewhat comforting (after the Nord VPN ad read, of course) to have Showgirls be the first film name dropped on the show!

[hearthesilence]

The Wall Street Journal is looking for a new film critic.

[Computer Raheem]

I have no idea where else to put this, but this Inverse article about the dire straits of the VFX industry is a good read. If the mods find a better place for it (or find it better to delete it outright), that is ok by me

[ballmouse]

I have no idea where else to put this, but this Inverse article about the dire straits of the VFX industry is a good read. If the mods find a better place for it (or find it better to delete it outright), that is ok by me

I sympathize with those workers. And I'm not at all surprised by what they encounter. I do think it's one of those universal problems most employees or contractors encounter: too much work, unrealistic deadlines, competing on quality or time, and short term action vs. long term planning.

And of course, if the company isn't bankrupt, nothing's wrong! We don't need to spend resources on improving ourselves if we could spend those same resources on sales or billable work instead.

But all this stems from us, our expectations, and our lack of knowledge of how things within our ecosystem but outside our direct line of sight actually work. It's really incredible how interconnected people and companies are, and how little we know of how things work from beginning to end, even within our own industry.

[hearthesilence]

Alan Rickman wrote quite a few diaries, and he apparently filled them with some pretty succinct film critiques among other things.

[The Pachyderminator]

I think appeals to ethics are largely a way to lend weight to claims about art that are at bottom matters of taste.

Seeme to me you would paint yourself into some awkward corners trying to defend this position consistently. I'm not prepared to dismiss ethical critiques of Birth of a Nation or Gone With the Wind, or Truffaut's famous remark on the difficulty of making a truly "anti-war" film, as matters of taste. (Forgive me for citing extreme examples. The purpose of doing so isn't to throw a bombshell in, but to find historical films whose moral faults are fairly undeniable and are inseparably linked with the films' failures as history.) In most cases, assessing a film's ethics which will be much more fuzzy and problematic, and it's silly to claim that historical inaccuracy is unethical in and of itself. But I don't know how to approach cinema or any art without reserving at least the possibility of legitimate ethical critique.

[Mr Sausage]

No worries, Pachyderminator: "largely" ≠ "in all cases", and, technically, "appeals to ethics" ≠ "ethical critiques". Just my pithy way of dismissing how people tend to use ethics as a rhetorical device in arguments while also not being drawn into a debate about Shakespeare I have no interest in.

I've always disliked Truffaut's remark. On top of inviting No True Scotsman fallacies, it's fundamentally confused about art. Not to get into long tortured arguments, so I'll be pithy again: if, say, Platoon can't be anti-war because it's exciting to watch, then Psycho can't be anti-murder. Or, to get classical, since this all goes back to Aristotle, does Euripides' Medea being exciting make it pro-child-murder? Kinda dumb. War movies are not meant to give the experience of what it's like to be in a war; they're meant to give the experience of what it's like to, for example, sit on a couch in your living room watching others experience war. It's a long-standing observation (again, Aristotle) that we can enjoy situations in art that we would never be able to enjoy as real experiences. And this fact doesn't affect the truth value of the propositions a piece of art is putting forward (look at me sounding all philosophical). Truffaut's remark is a fine bit of social signalling and not at all a fine contribution to aesthetics and ethics and whatever.

[The Pachyderminator]

I've always disliked Truffaut's remark. On top of inviting No True Scotsman fallacies, it's fundamentally confused about art. Not to get into long tortured arguments, so I'll be pithy again: if, say, Platoon can't be anti-war because it's exciting to watch, then Psycho can't be anti-murder. Or, to get classical, since this all goes back to Aristotle, does Euripides' Medea being exciting make it pro-child-murder? Kinda dumb.

I'll try not to make this long and tortured. The biggest difference, in a nutshell, is that I suspect very few if any people have been enticed to commit murder by the likes of Psycho - at least I would find this hard to believe. Whereas I don't find it at all hard to believe that large numbers of people have been enticed either to fight in or support wars in part by the influence of media that makes war cool and entertaining. I admit that if this is true of war movies, it's equally true of most war stories going back to the Iliad, and condemning a vast body of literature about a core human experience can't be the right response, so I'm not leading up to a conclusion that people shouldn't watch these films. I can only think we should remember that art has effects in the real world and can change real people's lives for good or ill.

In that connection, I don't think it's absurd to suggest that fictional stories about real people take on a certain responsibility that should be handled cautiously, more or less so depending on many factors, including whether the subject is still alive and how relevant the subject is to a given audience. Since The Social Network always gets trotted out in these discussions, I'll note that I don't have a particularly high opinion of Zuckerberg in real life, but if the film presents an unflattering picture of him that's factually inaccurate in certain key ways, and many viewers will leave the film under the impression that these fictions are literally true, it's hard not to feel a glimmer of sympathy. I still like and admire the film, but... I don't know, I have some lingering discomfort here that the sweeping dismissals of factual or ethical concerns are doing nothing to alleviate.

[Mr Sausage]

The biggest difference, in a nutshell, is that I suspect very few if any people have been enticed to commit murder by the likes of Psycho - at least I would find this hard to believe. Whereas I don't find it at all hard to believe that large numbers of people have been enticed either to fight in or support wars in part by the influence of media that makes war cool and entertaining.

This is unequal stacking. You picked a single movie on the one hand and then contrasted it with the whole of culture on the other. Not a fair comparison. (Also, to repeat myself from the Haneke trilogy thread, art is bad changing human behaviour, but good at changing human values and beliefs).

Truffaut's argument is not whether a militarist culture in aggregate can convince people to go to war, it's whether it's possible to make an anti-war film if on some level war films are invariably thrilling to watch. The moment you abstract his argument and put any other genre in its place, you see how absurd it is. Raiders of the Lost Ark is a supremely exciting movie: does it have a hard time being anti-nazi? Does Jaws have trouble being anti-eaten-alive-by-sharks? Claiming this very thing for war films is special pleading. The fact that a movie is exciting to watch does not de facto lessen the truth value of any of its propositions. Not unless you've made a fundamental confusion, ie. that watching a movie either does or ought to provide the exact same experience as what's depicted on screen (it doesn't and shouldn't). Truffaut is wrong; you can make anti-war films. (You can also make pro-war propaganda whose violence is horrible and shocking and not at all thrilling, eg. Went the Day Well).

[The Pachyderminator]

The biggest difference, in a nutshell, is that I suspect very few if any people have been enticed to commit murder by the likes of Psycho - at least I would find this hard to believe. Whereas I don't find it at all hard to believe that large numbers of people have been enticed either to fight in or support wars in part by the influence of media that makes war cool and entertaining.

This is unequal stacking. You picked a single movie on the one hand and then contrasted it with the whole of culture on the other. Not a fair comparison.

I didn't mean to do that - "the likes of" is doing a lot of work there. My claim is that films about murder, as a whole, are likely less harmful than films about war, as a whole.

(Also, to repeat myself from the Haneke trilogy thread, art is bad changing human behaviour, but good at changing human values and beliefs).

Yes, I read that thread though I didn't post in it, and the distinction you drew has never made sense to me. Our values and beliefs determine our behavior. To change one is to change the other.

Truffaut's argument is not whether a militarist culture in aggregate can convince people to go to war, it's whether it's possible to make an anti-war film if on some level war films are invariably thrilling to watch. The moment you abstract his argument and put any other genre in its place, you see how absurd it is. Raiders of the Lost Ark is a supremely exciting movie: does it have a hard time being anti-nazi? Does Jaws have trouble being anti-eaten-alive-by-sharks? Claiming this very thing for war films is special pleading. The fact that a movie is exciting to watch does not de facto lessen the truth value of any of its propositions. Not unless you've made a fundamental confusion, ie. that watching a movie either does or ought to provide the exact same experience as what's depicted on screen (it doesn't and shouldn't). Truffaut is wrong; you can make anti-war films. (You can also make pro-war propaganda whose violence is horrible and shocking and not at all thrilling, eg. Went the Day Well).

We're not on the same wavelength somehow, because I don't think this has much to do with what I said. The truth value of a movie's propositions (insofar as narrative films have "propositions" at all) isn't what I'm concerned about! Nor is whether a film provides the same experience as a real-world activity, since obviously no film can do that. Watching a fight scene is nothing like fighting; watching a sex scene is nothing like having sex; watching The Passion of Joan of Arc is nothing like hearing voices from heaven and being fully convinced that you have a divine mission to save your country. That's okay. The concern is that stating an anti-war proposition isn't the same as having an overall anti-war effect on viewers. Since you mention Raiders of the Lost Ark, of course that film is anti-Nazi, because the Nazis are only the villains of the film, not its raison d'être and organizing principle. For a truer analogy, you could ask: since Raiders depicts action-adventure heroics that ultimately prove meaningless before the power of God, and a quest that ends unsatisfyingly for the hero, is it therefore anti-Indiana Jones-type adventures? Clearly not.

[Mr Sausage]

I didn't mean to do that - "the likes of" is doing a lot of work there. My claim is that films about murder, as a whole, are likely less harmful than films about war, as a whole.

Because of data or just, like, vague feelings? I mean, my feeling is neither are particularly harmful because films in general aren't particularly harmful, however we're defining harmful. This sounds to me like another variation of 'Doom creates school shooters' and 'backwards messages in Judas Priest songs get kids to kill themselves'. They don't.

Yes, I read that thread though I didn't post in it, and the distinction you drew has never made sense to me. Our values and beliefs determine our behavior. To change one is to change the other.

Our values and beliefs don't actually predict for specific behaviours, tho'. You already know this. If you met someone who changed their behaviours every time they watched a movie, tv show, or commercial, you'd think they were insane. Your actual lived experience tells you what I'm saying is true. Just for some reason you seem to be confusing yourself on what it means for media to actually guide behaviour. The media might do a great job of convincing you that, for example, it's ok that there's a war going on, or that it's ok that America invaded another country, or that it's not a big deal America is policing the world. But it does not reliably convince people to join the military. If it did, recruitment campaigns would have a staggering success rate and most able-bodied individuals would be in their respective militaries. Media is bad at producing specific behaviours, but it may do a good job at influencing values and beliefs over time to the point where certain actions might gain more support. For example, media would have a hard time convincing people to go out and commit hate crimes, but it might make people more likely to support hate crimes, which in turn might embolden people who already want to commit hate crimes. So yeah, media has an effect, but it's not the 1:1 thing you're claiming here.

We're not on the same wavelength somehow, because I don't think this has much to do with what I said. The truth value of a movie's propositions (insofar as narrative films have "propositions" at all) isn't what I'm concerned about! Nor is whether a film provides the same experience as a real-world activity, since obviously no film can do that. Watching a fight scene is nothing like fighting; watching a sex scene is nothing like having sex; watching The Passion of Joan of Arc is nothing like hearing voices from heaven and being fully convinced that you have a divine mission to save your country. That's okay. The concern is that stating an anti-war proposition isn't the same as having an overall anti-war effect on viewers. Since you mention Raiders of the Lost Ark, of course that film is anti-Nazi, because the Nazis are only the villains of the film, not its raison d'être and organizing principle. For a truer analogy, you could ask: since Raiders depicts action-adventure heroics that ultimately prove meaningless before the power of God, and a quest that ends unsatisfyingly for the hero, is it therefore anti-Indiana Jones-type adventures? Clearly not.

Narrative films absolutely make propositions about the world. This is how they produce meaning, and also how we evaluate that meaning. Whenever you paraphrase a film to show what it means, you're listing that film's propositions. The Blonde thread is people listing that film's propositions about the world and then arguing about them.

What do you mean "the concern"? I said I disagree with Truffaut's argument that there can be no anti-war films because war films are inherently glorifying or whatever. I gave my reasons, I assume you're trying to refute them, and yet here I am being accused of missing the point of my own argument. Again, to insist that war films inherently glorify war because they can't help making it exciting is to make a fundamental mistake about how art works. Aristotle pointed out the apparent contradiction that an audience can enjoy watching the most horrible events on stage. The reason for that is that we do not share the emotions and experiences of the people in the play; we have a separate experience. War being more exciting to watch on screen than it is to experience is not some great insight, it's the state of art in general. So, unless Truffaut also thinks Sophocles is glorifying incest and parricide by writing an extremely thrilling play about them, he's engaging in special pleading.

There seems to be some confusion over what makes a movie anti-war. A movie is anti-war if it advances the proposition that war is bad and ought not to occur. Truffaut argues that a movie cannot pragmatically advance this because it cannot avoid making war look exciting, thereby undermining that proposition. I find this unconvincing for a number of reasons, which I've already listed. What doesn't define a movie as anti-war? Whether it pragmatically changes people's minds. That has nothing to do with it. All that tells you is whether the movie is persuasive as a piece of rhetoric. It doesn't tell you if it's advancing a proposition or not. The meaning of a proposition is not defined by its effectiveness at persuasion.

As for whether films have "anti-war effects":

A. I kinda addressed this in my previous paragraph, but just to hammer it home: let's play a language game. Consider the sentence "Thinking of pink rabbits is bad". Reading that, you're more likely to think of a pink rabbit than not. As an attempt to influence your behaviours, it's ineffective; obviously I'm naive and don't understand human psychology very well. But is my sentence therefore pro-pink rabbits? Is it actually advancing the opposite meaning, that they're good and one should think of them? No, right? Obviously not. How effective that sentence is at producing a certain behaviour means nothing about its actual content. However poorly it has influenced your behaviour, the meaning remains. Pink rabbits suck

B. Are we discussing film as an art, or a form of activism? I'm doing the former. I assume you're here for the same thing: that what's meaningful for you in film is not its use as an activist tool.

C. Prove it. Prove that for any given anti-war film, statistically more viewers leave the theatre convinced that wars are good than the opposite (to make it easy on you since you actually seem to think anti-war movies convince people to outright join the military). Unless you have actual stats backing that up, there is no reason to believe it's true. Just sounds like bias to me. And while I can't know and mostly don't care what message people took from Apocalypse Now, The Deer Hunter, and Platoon, I'd be genuinely surprised if most people came away with the opposite idea than what the films advance.