The Worst Criterion Critic

[lacritfan]

Conversations: Ingmar Bergman and John Simon

[Michael Kerpan]

Conversations: Ingmar Bergman and John Simon

So who do you think is the worse critic of these two?

;~}

(I'd award a tie to Simon and Bergman here. The latter may have been a genius as a director -- but he strikes me as one of the worst film critics ever. Simon routinely placed maintenance of his wise-ass persona over thoughtful reflection and commentary).

[domino harvey]

At least Bergman liked Fucking Åmål. Broken clock, etc

[Michael Kerpan]

At least Bergman liked Fucking Åmål. Broken clock, etc

A stopped clock is right two times a day.

;~}

[tavernier]

He's still around to annoy everyone.

[matrixschmatrix]

Does anyone have a link to Simon's incomplete review for Stop Making Sense? I was looking around for it but can't track it down- to me, it's a pretty good encapsulation of what I don't like about him. He walked out of the movie, remarks that 'intellectual rock' is an oxymoron', and makes fun of Pauline Kael for bothering to take notes. The whole thing comes entirely out of what seems more like a cultural elitist's sense of deliberately cultivated contempt rather than any attempt to experience the movie on its own merits.

[wattsup32]

How did you get this:

In other words, if you are interested in other art forms, you can't be interested in films.....only film buffs need apply, I guess.

From this:

That's my biggest problem with him: he was unable to approach film criticism from a cinematic perspective. Which is why he was incapable of writing intelligently about the image. He reviewed films the same way he reviewed plays. Actually, he and Kael were very similar in this regard, but Kael was ten times the writer and much more humorous.

?

I don't wanna put words in his mouth, but I think the complaint is that Simon is incapable of understanding filmic image a function of the inherent nature of cinema. If he had been able to do this in addition to brining his other interests to bear on a review, my guess is people might take him more seriously as a film reviewer.

As it stands, his review of "Stop Making Sense" says all one could hope to say about him as a reviewer. Committing ink to paper to review a film he didn't actually sit though is, at a minimum, a breach of integrity unless his review simply states "I cannot review this film because I did not see it in its entirety."

[domino harvey]

I picked up a John Simon book on a whim and he is hilariously rude and short-sighted (and not someone I think I’m ever going to agree with beyond the odds of dumb chance, but from whom I think I could certainly read much more). Here’s some random bon mots from it and elsewhere to give a proper taste:

Before considering more closely Dassin’s perfectly awful film, let us examine on what his widespread international reputation as a leading filmmaker is founded. It cannot be his American films, like Brute Force or Naked City, since they represent nothing more than what Howard Hawks or Otto Preminger have turned out time and again, and no one outside the Cahiers du cinema and in his right mind would consider these men artists.

The Little Soldier (1960), Godard’s second film, is a reduction of the Algerian crisis to a witless game of cops and robbers, interspersed with the customary Godardian philosophomorizings. Arab agents and Poujadiste reactionaries are chasing, torturing, and killing one another all over Geneva, ostensibly to influence the war in Algeria, but actually to give Godard a chance to masturbate on screen. Typifying the level of the film, the hero pursues his designated victim through the busiest sections of Geneva with a huge gun sprouting from his paw, without the victim, the police or the numerous bystanders finding anything amiss. Typical, too, is Godard’s slobbering here (as also in Alphaville and most of his other films) over his utterly untalented ex-wife, Anna Karina, who never plays a part, only languidly toys with it. A film-maker who confuses casting and directing with proto-sexual self gratification, and screenwriting with bang-bang-you’re-deading, is hardly to be taken seriously, no matter what minor, peripheral felicities he may occasionally stumble on.

My Life to Live, the latest film of Jean-Luc Godard, is interesting only as a repository of every defect the New Wave at its worst can muster up : crass and pointless experimentation for its own sake, tiresomely indiscriminate revival of silent-film techniques, perverse disregard of the audience, pretentious dabbling with pseudoprofundities, deliberate trampling of psychology in the mud of wantonness. Possibly the best way of describing this piece of legalized abortion is to say that if the boys from Cahiers du cinéma and the kids from Film Culture were each of them to shoot five minutes worth of film, and the whole were spliced together in an order determined by dice, the result would be roughly comparable.

And they’ll probably get around to that one, too.

I shall pass over the fact that Judy Garland's face has become that of a wizened child— rather like what Mae West used to call Shirley Temple, “a 5-year-old-midget” — and that her figure resembles the giant economy-size tube of tooth paste in girls’ bathrooms : squeezed intemperately at all points, it acquires a shape that defies definition by the most resourceful solid geometrician.

The Exterminating Angel is an unsound and unsightly mixture of spurious allegory and genuine craziness, whose human beings are uninteresting, story unconvincing, and cinematography mediocre.

Daisies concerns two teeniest-brained teenyboppers who decide that the world is rotten and so will they be. We are now taken on a round of escapades, disconnected, silly, and essentially uneventful, in which these cretinous beatniks cavort in a manner derived from the dregs of silent comedy, Godard, and Warhol (who has nothing but dregs). Not only is all this uproariously unfunny, it is also unconscionably dragged out. The amateur actresses are, furthermore, supremely untalented and reasonably unattractive, and the whole thing is further embellished with surrealist touches a la Hans Richter, himself a considerable purveyor of dregs.

What makes this film particularly distasteful is its idiot yearning for Western beatnikdom, its slobbering (and, I suspect, lesbian) adulation of its ghastly heroines.

A few bits of slapstick are genuinely hilarious, but they are so very rare that one experiences Tati’s company not as that of a truly witty person, but as that of a bore who has memorized several good jokes. Routines are stretched out and repeated endlessly, gags fatally resemble other gags of just a few minutes before, what is ridiculed is often a cliche (bossy Germans, sheeplike American tourists, a drunken Texas millionaire brashly treating everybody), much of the humor is not firmly based in reality, and absolutely everything outstays its welcome. Tati himself ambles about as Hulot, not only acting but even looking like a man who has used up his last comic resources. Several other figures crisscrossing the film are equally lackluster, and Barbara Dennek (a bovine German au pair girl whom Tati picked up to play the heroine) looks scarcely good enough for the casting couch, let alone the screen.

There are two bigger problems yet. First, a twice-repeated gag has someone open a soulless glass door to reveal in it a reflection of the Eiffel Tower or Sacre Coeur, which the person blithely ignores. This makes me wonder : In the name of what does Tati lampoon modern architecture and society ? Are quixotic eccentricities like the Eiffel Tower and Sacre Coeur that much better than regimented efficiency ? Is the bumbling Hulot really superior to the despotic headwaiter or pedantic bureaucrat ? And, further, can one still make films that are copies of silent comedies ? Can one still compose even good imitation Beethoven symphonies, paint even impeccable Rubens nudes ?

Lola Montés, the last film of the late Max Ophuls, who had the taste and mentality of a chambermaid along with a talent for kitsch barely equaled even by Vadim and Chabrol. This film that brazenly announces in an epigraph that it is a new departure in cinematography is nothing of the sort; it has much the same gimmicky frame as Ophuls’s vulgar La Ronde, the same dime-store sentimentality as his Earrings of Madame De... and Letter from an Unknown Woman, plus lavish over-production whose stifling opulence merely underscores the exiguity of Cécil St. Laurent’s script and the blatant insufficiency of Martine Carol in the lead.

And people claim I’m too negative!

[denti alligator]

Ha! So what does he actually like?

[domino harvey]

Bergman, at least, as I picked up his Ingmar Bergman Directs as well. He only focuses on four of his films though (Sawdust and Tinsel, Smiles of a Summer Night, Winter Light, Persona). I saw a positive review for Hud and also for Pretty Poison (which seems like the last movie this guy would enjoy). I’m sure there’s at least a few more, but he really does hate almost everything

[agnamaracs]

Well, he was fired from his job. And he is 79. Doesn't have much longer to be an ass.

He's still around to annoy everyone.

To the people seeing this thread pop up and wondering if he is still alive:

As of November 24, 2019, no

[domino harvey]

Okay, one more:

A disciple of Jean Luc Godard’s, a certain Marin Karmitz (the son of a millionaire businessman protege of King Karol of Rumania) has made a piece of inept agit-prop called Comrades, teaching the workers how not to try to reason with management but simply take over the factories.

I’ve seen this movie and it is not good but it’s objectively hilarious to critique labor strikes in this fashion

[DimitriL]

There's an episode of the classic sitcom Taxi that features the nastiest, most smug critic imaginable, and it's widely believed it was directly modeled on John Simon. ("Bobby and the Critic")

[domino harvey]

Here’s a real classy one for Last Summer (spoilers)

Spoiler

The kids themselves, with the exception of Cathy Burns (Rhoda), are not particularly good actors, and Barbara Hershey (Sandy, and not a kid anymore) looks, regrettably, much better with her bikini top on than off. Miss Burns, on the other hand, is an extremely accomplished little actress, but also insuperably homely — she looks, in fact, like a pink beach ball with a few limbs and features painted on it. There is no excuse for Rhoda’s being a positive freak, and making us feel she is damned lucky to have been raped at all.

[therewillbeblus]

Well holy shit

[HardNight'sDay]

What the fuck did I just read.

[therewillbeblus]

I hope you've seen the movie already, no one should read that if you haven't (or, really, even if you have)