I have a recurring dream—not an uncommon one, I’ve gathered—in which I’m forced to go back to high school. A clerical error is discovered, some minor oversight, and it turns out I was a few credit hours shy of graduation, that I have to put in another semester, and that everything else that’s happened since has to be put aside so that I can skulk through the halls of my alma mater again, slinging a bookbag over a stooped 32 year-old shoulder.

I had a similar chilling feeling this week when I learned that I was apparently still a Voice Media Group contributor—this despite my not having appeared in the paper since the 20^th of February. The news came courtesy my friend and colleague Steve Dollar—soon to star as Robert Altman in my film about the making of O.C. & Stiggs—who’d seen my name on the masthead in a NY Magazine item on the departures of VMG staff writers Nick Pinto and Tejal Rao. The same piece also summarizes the recent wave of defections and firings at the flagship Village Voice: New editor-in-chief Will Bourne and deputy editor Jessica Lustig resigned earlier in the month in protest to staff reductions proposed by the VMG’s Phoenix-based owner, Ming the Merciless, dismissals which were promptly carried out regardless. Once the smoke had cleared Michael Musto, theater critic Michael Feingold, and food critic Robert Sietsema had all received the heave-ho.

Most of the reportage on the employee shedding by Voice Media Group has been accompanied by some variation on the caveat “Disclosure: I used to work there,” which goes to show how essential a coming-of-age ritual logging some time at the Voice has been for aspiring New York journos. A reflection on this very point was recently posted by Zach Baron, a fellow alum I met briefly at a Voice Christmas party in 2008 or 2009. (At the last Christmas party I attended, in ’12, I think I was one of a dozen people over 23.) The piece, understandably perhaps, achieves a distance that I have not yet been able to muster—Mr. Baron left the paper in 2011, and since has placed his byline regularly in high-profile papers and magazines. I know continuing to give a fuck must but horrible for my health, yet I can’t sign off on Baron’s philosophical “So it is, so it has been, so it always shall be” thesis, which discounts the fact that things really can be ruined irreparably, and that there are people who should be held accountable for doing the ruining. I return, as I often do, to a line from Decline and Fall, Otto Friedrich’s account of the last years of The Saturday Evening Post, which folded not long after the last gasp of the New-York Tribune, in 1969:

“If all things in our system were as interchangeable as twopenny nails, this system might work better than it does, but the laws of profit make no allowances for time and tradition…”

The laws of profit, galloping greed, and the worship of Mammon are lately well-represented at the cinema with the appearance of a crop of lavish movies which have acquisitive lust as their subject, movies where the celebration of excess acts simultaneously as a critique of same, in much the same way that every anti-war movie can be said to be, for its visceral excitement, covertly pro-war. The old DeMille ethos rides high: Six reels of sin, one of salvation! Among the newly-erected cinematic Babylons are Harmony Korine’s Spring Breakers, Michael Bay’s Pain & Gain, Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby and, Coming Soon, Sofia Coppola’s The Bling Ring, about the operations of a real-life gang of teen girl burglars who, robbing from the rich and giving to the rich, terrorized the Hollywood Hills in the late aughts. (I was sure it was to be a split-screen endeavor, as I’d seen a chair set aside with Coppola’s name on it at a MoMA showing of Robert Aldrich’s Twilight’s Last Gleaming some time ago, and assumed she could only be there to take notes.)

Luhrmann employs every other cinematic effect in the book, and his CG pop-up book vision of North Shore Long Island and Manhattan c. 1922 is quite the creation; as I wrote in a review for Sight & Sound, his Gatsby is suitably intoxicant, with a core of real, rueful sadness. My enthusiasm for the film seems to put me in the minority among cinephiles; I can take some solace, however, in having America’s newest critic-of-record in my corner.

No, you dummy, it’s not a woman! I am talking, of course, about James Franco of VICE Magazine, a publication that has done so very much to further the blase, shrug n’ smirk, couldn’t-be-bothered voice in American letters, establishing itself as a tastemaking organ while never discernably taking a hard critical stance on anything other than, say, deciding to pimp the Billysburg coke-party vacuity of A.R.E. Weapons. Franco has to date filed reviews of both Gatsby and Leviathan. For the actor/director/producer/novelist/artist/celebrity chef Franco—whose “Look at my shee-it” monologue in Spring Breakers has been frequently compared to Gatsby’s home tour and display of beautiful shirts by people with a passion for pointing out the obvious—nothing is worth doing if it’s not worth doing sloppily and haphazardly. His latest critical effusion, not quite up to the standards of most Letterboxd prose, is a pretty piece of work in which the 35-year-old adjunct English professor at UCLA includes the observations “I’m the biggest Moby Dick fan ever,” “I mean, WTF? How? How did the film’s makers achieve this poetry?”, and “At some point, a huge crowd of Israeli women filed in and overpowered the Daft Punk emanating from my headphones.”

It’s Franco, arguably the biggest dick ever, who actually has the spit-screen movie coming, an inevitably slapdash adaptation of As I Lay Dying, the 1930 novel by William Faulkner, who periodically headed to Hollywood from Mississippi homestead Rowan Oak to alleviate his money troubles with hackwork and to carry on a slightly dismal affair with Howard Hawks’s script girl, Meta Carpenter. Rest assured that Franco’s genius, unlike Faulkner’s, will not have to wait for wider recognition and compensation. And unlike the Voice, which never made any convincing effort to adapt to the new rules of the Internet, VICE is a well-oiled and beautifully integrated brand. (I fondly remember their mock Sell-Out issue of 2004 or so, which sent up blind obeisance to celebrity culture!) Through the reliable metrics that measure quality in the pageviews era, I can tell you that Franco’s review of Gatsby has to date accrued 903 Facebook Likes, while the Voice Film Club’s Twitter account (@VoiceFilmClub) sputters along with a measly 383 followers, thus we can reliably look forward to more such fine content from VICE for a long time to come. But I shouldn’t lay blame for the sorry state of things at the feet of the World Wide Web—why, only last night, my Twitter feed recalled to me this Faulkner-penned quote, from Hawks’s Land of the Pharaohs, spoken by Joan Collins’s Princess Nellifer: “I’m well aware of your hostility and enmity. May I say that the feeling is mutual.”

I mean, WTF?

Nick Pinkerton is a regular contributor to Sight & Sound magazine and sundry other publications. He lives in Brooklyn, NY. Follow Nick on Twitter @NickPinkerton.

Can you smell the cannonades? A long-fomenting revolution is underway! Movies are going to be fun again!

Was the Lexington moment when Dan Kois pushed away a steaming plateful of cultural broccoli—that is, the works of art, specifically movies, that are supposed to be good for you, but which no-one really likes—at the NY Times Magazine back in 2011? Certainly it set the think pieces a-marching, and since Stephanie Zacharek has struck back against the perceived dictatorship of opinion surrounding the critical reception of The Master with a manifesto in favor of gut-opinion and against shame-enforced re-viewing, while someone called Jason Bailey at The Atlantic’s website has waved the banner of “Film Culture Isn’t Dead; It’s Just More Fun.” Something like the Voltaire to this American Revolution, Pauline Kael—she of “If art isn’t entertainment, then what is it? Punishment?” fame—is cited explicitly in Bailey’s piece, and implicitly in every sentence that Zacharek has ever written. Watch the tweedy opposition starting to break rank!

A bit of background: As everyone knows, formal, academic, and experimental film have held American pop culture in a stranglehold for—well, for as long as I can remember. I can only relate my personal experience, in hopes that some greater truth can be gleaned through it.

I was born in 1980, a little under a year before the first MTV broadcast, in a medium-sized city in the Middle West of the United States. Growing up in a cable-free household, we only had three networks, public television, and terra incognita of the UHF band to choose from. This was the era of the Sunday matinee, and week after week after week the film programming was the same—in fact, most of my readers can probably recite the names along with me: Straub-Huillet, Bresson, Alexander Kluge, Marguerite Duras, Michael Snow, Hans-Jurgen Syberberg. If you got left of the dial you might dig up something trashy—early Bergman, say—but for a most part, the stranglehold was inescapable.

There was little enough relief to be found in taking a trip to the nearest multiplex. This was the 80’s: Raul Ruiz, Manoel de Oliviera, and Agnieszka Holland were lining them up around the block; Maurice Pialat was on The Tonight Show almost as often as Ed McMahon; Kings Island, the amusement park that I frequented as a lad, opened a six-inversion steel looping roller coaster based on Alain Resnais’ Mon Oncle d’Amerique. How could you hope to hear about the contemporary successes of Paramount Pictures (Flash Dance, Top Gun, Beverly Hills Cops) when Variety was still running front cover stories on the Zanzibar group?

Of course the works of John Hughes, the Footlooses—“MTV Generation” movies displaying the “pop” sensibility—they were out there, but if you didn’t have an art house or a university film society with an in-the-know programmer within reasonable distance of your home, good luck trying to see them. These are the films that would become the Samizdat texts of an entire generation, swapping bootlegs and quoting Back to the Future to one another, much as early Christians would trace half of a fish in the sand when meeting a possible confrere… And so we waited for the moment when the senescent cultural commissars would be caught dozing…

See what I did there?

The argument whereby a writer positions himself as a plucky standalone David against the Goliath of po-faced film culture is roughly as valid as Bill O’Reilly’s War on Christmas. It is fundamentally false, boorish, and unnecessary, and belies a profound lack in the person making it. “Any serious filmgoer must wrestle with a pervading sense of guilt and fear,” writes Bailey—I would say that guilt and fear are probably universals, though I gather he is talking about the perceived atmosphere of intellectual intimidation around the New York Film Festival. Apparently “serious filmgoer” is functioning here as a synonym for “person with a serious lack of confidence in their opinion.”

As we’ve been repeatedly reassured that film culture, in its self-serious, chastity-belt incarnation, is going the way of the dinosaur, a stagnant pond which has ceased entirely to feed into the great coursing river of pop monoculture, it is curious to note how anxious some are to deal it the coup de grace, as though the very continued existence of such a thing is unforgivable. Thus ever has it been since the days of La Kael, from whose body of work one might very well have taken away the idea that there were an army of academics and bluestockings—her beloved “a professor friend…” straw men—laying siege to the lobbies of America, ready to batter down the doors and pronounce an ukase on fun.

There is a signature moment in the “What do we want? Entertainment!” think-piece where the author pulls the reins and scatters a few sophisto names before their reader, as insurance that they not be taken for mere bumptious lowbrows. For cultural carnivore Dan Kois, it’s Edward Yang’s Yi Yi (A One and a Two); for Zacharek, it’s Ornette Coleman, Albert Ayler, and John Coltrane; for Bailey, NYFF pans like Resnais’ You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet and Leviathan are counterbalanced with measured praise for selections like Antonio Mendez Esparza’s Here and There (“Quietly powerful”), Christian Petzold’s Barbara, and Christian Mungiu’s Beyond the Hills (“riveting yet low-key”). Though Bailey has read enough previous iterations of his manifesto to go them one better, adding an extra later of self-conscious reflexivity: “ I can tick off my favorite obscure art films in an attempt to deflect that argument (I even liked the Leviathan directors’ previous effort Sweetgrass—a leisurely documentary about sheepherding), but it’s bound to sound like someone insisting he has plenty of black friends when called on a racist joke.”

In that spirit, I will fess that, per James Chance, “I (basically) prefer the ridiculous to the sublime”—witness this week’s NYFF communique, in which I use Fritz Lang’s The Tiger of Eschnapur as a tawdry, spangled mallet with which to punish Michael Haneke’s Amour, which I have amused myself by rechristening, MAD Magazine-style, A Snore and A Bore. I also hope that I have kept before me the immortal words of Sean Carter—“What you eat don’t make me shit”—and not too freely flung accusations of canting hypocrisy at those who claim to like what I do not like.

I have, incidentally, already used the phrase “canting hypocrisy” recently in this column, as I have compulsively used it in conversation since reading the historian Ben Wilson’s Decency & Disorder 1789-1837, which makes a panoramic study of culture in what Lord Byron called the Age of Cant, and comes to the following conclusion:

“Accusations of cant should be used sparingly. Those who see hypocrisy everywhere and impute it indiscriminately to their opponents place themselves on shaky ground. If cant was so endemic, then what put them in the privileged position of being honest and candid? Those who detested the temper of the age and wanted to be free of hypocrisy and affectation all too often resorted to overacting their part. Their contempt of prudery made them gratuitously obscene.”

This goes for me, you… and everybody who was just a little too excited to learn that Ingmar Bergman’s estate included copies of Ghostbusters and The Blues Brothers, like it actually meant something. C’mon.

Nick Pinkerton is a regular contributor to The Village Voice film section, Sight & Sound magazine, and sundry other publications. He lives in Brooklyn, NY.

The Internet has many uses, and foremost among these is providing multiple forums for people to register their flummoxed, spluttering indignence about one thing or another. Most of the outrage seems to involve changes in the Facebook layout, changes in the Facebook privacy settings, and embedded links with thumbnail .jpegs of one GOP Congressman or another. When the time comes to vent my own spleen, I generally try to confine myself to matters of which I know something about. These are limited to the State of the Arts, and to the state of the arts journalism which, in theory at least, drives the cultural dialogue.

Over the last week, much of the social media chatter among film folk has had to do with women, specifically with the role of women as drivers of that cultural dialogue. The testy Twitter badinage on that topic was interesting enough to make me want to make it the subject of this column—though, as a retrograde, Ralph Meeker-in-Kiss Me Deadly-esque knuckle-dragger, it seemed inappropriate to hold court on the subject by myself. As such, I’ve asked one of my very favorite working film critics—when prefixing “film critics,” of course, the word “working” is always relative—to visit and proffer her thoughts. This would be Violet Lucca of Film Comment, previously cited in this column for her insight into the feminist subtext of Delmer Daves’ Cowboy—informed, she later told me, by Norah Vincent’s Self-Made Man—and into Jerry Lewis’ sartorial commitment to character, or lack thereof. The column is hers to run wild with, though when the little dearie inevitably becomes nervous and tongue-tied in the face of the unaccustomed exposure on a stage of this size, I will step in to helpfully mansplain.

Violet: In the same week that Jerry Lewis confirmed that yes, he is still a misogynist, and rapist/Academy Award-winner Roman Polanski said that the leveling of the sexes was “idiotic,” a report by the Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film revealed that “top” male critics write 82% of the reviews that appear on Rotten Tomatoes. The critical community responded not with a series of rigorous self-criticisms in the Marxist-Leninst tradition, but instead with a few listicles about Female Film Critics You Should Be Paying Attention To. Whether Calum Marsh of Film.com or Jason Bailey of Flavorwire actively read the work of the women that they put their stamp of approval on, or if they simply alternated between Google and Rotten Tomatoes whilst looking for skirt for a few minutes, is not for me to speculate about. But does a pithy listicle a sexist make? Creating a “user’s guide” to female writers—their virtues summarized in roughly 50 words, in much the way you’d compose a list of printers you could possibly purchase—is an insincere and wrong-headed way of “solving” the problem. I defer to Kathleen Hanna’s RIOT GRRRL MANIFESTO: “BECAUSE we are interested in creating non-hierarchical ways of being AND making music, friends, and scenes based on communication + understanding, instead of competition + good/bad categorizations.”

Nick: What Calum-ny! (Ha. Ha.) Your barely-concealed jealousy at not being featured on that Flavorwire list is almost touching. Leaving Jerry aside for the moment—is it any great surprise that the author of The Ladies Man, whose oeuvre revolves around sexual insecurity and confusion, exhibits the same characteristics in life?—I’ll return to the news from the Center for the Study of Women in etc etc.

The most sensible reaction that I saw on the Twittersphere came from my friend Genevieve Yue: “Instead of presumed bias, I’d rather see corresponding compensation figures.” Genevieve’s recently completed her PhD in Critical Studies, and while I can’t speak to that particular department, I have certainly swum among possessors of XX chromosomes at gatherings of Art History PhD candidates. For whatever reason, such occupation-based gender disparities do exist. In the case of film criticism, something perverse in me asks if it isn’t indicative of the professional rise of women that they are less than ever represented in a line of work that isn’t exactly a growth industry—or indicative of why they aren’t flocking to cinephile culture itself. Using your “scene” analogy, the rep scene, with its proliferation of musky, menacing hobos and gynophobic nerds, might not exactly be a beacon for the creative-minded young woman looking for a space in which she can assert herself and make something cool happen. But, then, I am but a child in these matters.

Violet: I think you’ve really hit the nail on the head with the word “musk.” Even though I don’t like to make sweeping generalizations about either sex, it’s true that women don’t find the deathbed of film culture appealing, nor are they charmed by the clumsy, unwanted sexual attention and casual sexism of its insular pallbearers. Why would anyone choose to attend dinner parties filled with a roomful of poorly socialized rep fiends whose ideas about emotional verisimilitude and gender come almost exclusively from the male-dominated Hollywood dream factory? How could you possibly take their opinions seriously? Meanwhile the abovementioned study barely registered in non-film outlets. Even Jezebel, which solely runs “feminist think pieces” about Yahoo News stories and what dumbshit celebrities eat/say/wear, somehow tasked their (lone?) male writer with rewording the press release. It is, anyhow, worth noting that the gap in writers is slightly-less dire when taking into account print and radio outlets—i.e., older media staffed by older writers.

Nick: A film culture devolved into a circle jerk will, inevitably, be a barren film culture. Taking an uninitiated—that is to say, non-cinephilic—date to a MoMA screening is an experience only slightly less mortifying than the porno theater scene in Taxi Driver. I was talking the other day to Caroline Golum, a programmer and general NYC movie-scenester, about making the rep rounds as a solo woman. She said New York was at least better than her native LA for M-F ratios, and that best of all were the newer, off-the-grid screening spaces: Spectacle, Light Industry, etc. where a lady can find herself in the company of more than one other woman born after the Eisenhower administration. Again, there is the “scene” idea—I have a sense that the hip and inclusive film culture of the future will owe as much to the basement show as to the classic cinematheque. Maybe it’s like when the bully skinheads took over Washington DC hardcore in the mid-‘80s, and everyone who was invested in that scene as something other than a hermetically-sealed fraternity cut and ran to form a new scene of their own in the storied Revolution Summer of 1985? Maybe I am torturing this comparison to death?

Violet: Those who do not learn from the mistakes of the DC hardcore scene are doomed to repeat them. Right now, there is nothing being done (in New York at least) to slow the decay of film culture, microcinemas be damned. I’m reminded of the UnderWire/BFI competition that sought out previously unpublished female journalists to do original reporting on someone in the film industry. Though Miriam Bale (one of Marsh’s seven) derided it as a “contest to find the new Miss Sight and Sound”—perhaps more for the patronizing press release than the concept—I appreciated the effort to find new blood outside of the cronyism and interns-only mechanics of the current landscape, which is very much a step in the right direction. I doubt very much that editors of respected publications voluntarily sift through blogspot.com sites in search of the next hot young thing—the ones I know don’t.

Nick: At various points in my life as a critic I have been approached by editors who’ve asked me, in what I can only presume is earnestness, to recommend female critics. (I, of course, always decline, and nominate my bro pals instead.) When one adds to this something like that UnderWire/BFI contest—however tactless its press release may be—it’s hard to believe that there aren’t people out there with sincere intentions to remedy the bemoaned imbalance. Is the problem editorial chauvinism? Or is it that one cannot simply will into existence female film critics who write forcefully and with knowledge? I am of course kidding about the “who write forcefully and with knowledge” bit—we both know there’s no detectable correlation between this and the ability to regularly place material in paying publications. Maybe a little more indefatigable, indestructible egotism, regardless of talent, is in order? To paraphrase Gore Vidal, if you think you’re a good writer, you must tell people.

We seem generally to agree that the lack of well-placed female film critics is attributable to something endemic to film culture, to cinephilia in its present form—though to prove this thesis, comparative figures for critics in other media would be helpful. Apparently it wouldn’t take long to tabulate the art critics. What about music writers?

Speaking of which! As we’ve been swatting the shuttlecock back-and-forth for this column, word has arrived that Pitchforkmedia will be launching a new film reviews site in July, The Dissolve. (A rather death-of-cinema name, innit?) My first reaction to this news was smug self-congratulation at my own clairvoyance, for I’d made some comments, just over three months ago, in this little-traversed corner of the Internet, on the gradual Pitchforkification of film criticism. Whatever reservations I have about the cultural impact of Ryan Schreiber’s empire—and, really, I have almost nothing but—the announced roll-call of staffers and columnists to date includes some writers whom I personally like. By my count, there are exactly two women on the payroll. So one hopes the editorial staff of Keith Phipps, Scott Tobias, Tasha Robinson, and Genevieve Koski will use their opportunity to even the score, and clear the air of the steady drone of Halitosis-scented received opinion.

Violet: The Vidal quote is apt, because women are statistically less likely to ask for raises or promotions—they wait for their superiors to recognize their achievements, and award them accordingly. I think this Lacanian difference is best explained by the Dove commercial parody wherein average-looking men describe themselves to sketch artists as possessing Brad Pitt-level handsomeness. But, as a man with whom I was in a painful, dragged-out long-distance relationship once cautioned me—sometimes life gets in the way. Aside from my ovaries and quaint Midwesterness, which bombard my brain with anti-boast messages, I also have a Day Job that sometimes requires me to think and/or learn new things, and will always require me to be at meetings and sacrifice, at a moment’s notice, a few nights and weekends to it. Obviously, overdraft fees and poor credit scores transcend gender, and remind of the larger reality that, yes, this is an industry with rapidly decreasing paid opportunities. Why the hell would anyone choose to go through so much, for so little, with such jerks? I also caution men to carry a rape whistle and a thick book to ward off Anthology Film Archive C.H.U.D.s. Guys get violated, too, Nick!

As someone who has dipped her toe into several other industries, I can assure you that yes, jerks and low paying jobs are everywhere, but they seem to be proliferating in our line even as the twilight of film culture draws nigh. I never paid much attention to Pitchfork during its heyday, except when I vigorously disagreed with their reviews. (It’s worth noting that a woman authored this insensitive, artless review of The Fiery Furnaces’ Rehearsing My Choir that always jumps to my mind when thinking about the site.) Xeroxing Pitchfork is bad news for film culture because you can’t just half-listen to a leaked track while at work and determine whether or not you want to add the whole album on Spotify. Save grades for eggs and swots; they do not belong on movies. That’s certainly not a unique opinion—it was something Richard Corliss wrote in 1990 for Film Comment about “thumbs up film culture,” where he criticized the tendency for TV reviewers to be more performer than reviewer. Not surprisingly, the generation that grew up on those personalities embraced snarky prose over content. Even in their longer reviews, it seems as though the way that Pitchfork made a name for itself was encouraging writers to write as flamboyantly as possible. The tendency to use a sledgehammer instead of research to deal with a movie seems the norm now, even at quality outlets. But in the exasperating 24-hour cycle of reviewing—as evidenced by the poor souls who got up at 3am on Sunday to watch and then immediately pound out words on Arrested Development—who has the time? If it isn’t on the Internet, did it really happen?

Nick: In a Wall Street Journal piece that appeared alongside the announcement of The Dissolve, Pitchforkmedia president Chris Kaskie was quoted saying that, “No one is approaching film like Pitchfork approaches music.” If he means what I think that means, I’d have to say “Thank Christ, and ever may it be so!” However, if he means what I think he means—that there isn’t already a wealth of engaged, high-quality, online-specific film content out there—I’d have to say “Fuck you.” As noted in the article, though, Pitchfork “generates between $5 and $10 million a year in advertising revenue,” which means they’ve been able to monetize what I’ll broadly call arts journalism to a degree that no extant film site, not to speak of the remaining rock rags, has. Onward hip hegemony! And while underconfident would-be female critics continue to hem and haw while putting together their pitches, swaggering Pfork founder Ryan Schreiber today Tweets “It’s already the best film site on the web and it hasn’t even launched yet.” Slow down, buddy. So far you’ve got some smart hires and inevitably posh site design on your side; the rest is still your pooch to screw.

By the way, this week the newly-cleaned-up, no-more-kid’s-stuff newsmagazine Vice—whose house style, come to think on it, is every bit as idea-resistant and easily aped by interns as the jazzy backward-running patter of ‘20s “Timespeak” devised by Briton Hadden and Henry Luce—had their first Williamsburg screening in association with Martin Scorsese’s Film Foundation, a series founded so the kids could “get schooled on the great movies we skipped over on Netflix because their covers looked boring.”  Oh, you scallawags haven’t lost a fraction of your devil-may-care youthful insouciance! So it looks like the moment that every programmer and critic has pined for, when “the kids” will come out to screenings, and moviegoing will become a sexy, in-vogue pastime again, may happen sooner than later. The only trouble being that it will be bankrolled by some of the worst people in the world.

Violet: I could’ve gotten a job at VBS back in 2009—an acquaintance from undergrad had secured himself a job and a pool of barely-legal interns, and offered me the opportunity to edit live shows in their converted Williamsburg bunker. His most recent paramour was a former plus-sized model (read: normal-sized woman), who, as he excitedly explained to me over tacos one evening, like, didn’t know anything about movies or culture because she’d been modeling since she was, like, 12. But this is not a column about My Troubles With Men, or at least My Troubles With Men and Film. I never followed up on this lead, even though being involved in production and post-production was the reason I stayed in New York after finishing graduate school, long past the point of it making economic or social sense to do so. There was something distressing about the idea that a magazine was essentially trying to be a media conglomerate for things that fell within the realm of my taste. (I guess a neater way of saying that would be “Hipster Time Warner,” but that term means nothing exactly because companies like Vice have successfully colonized contemporary youth culture.) Now Pitchfork is trying to be all things to all young consumers, making serious bank in their ability to brand themselves as “quality.”

Not unlike dating someone you feel mentally superior to but think has a hot ass, the Internet can provide you with a false sense of how well you’re doing. Aggregators like Metacritic and Rotten Tomatoes place mature criticism next to knee-jerk reactions—sort of like putting Manohla Dargis, a lead critic for The New York Times, alongside Lisa Schwarzbaum, former Entertainment Weekly scribe, on a list of groovy women film writers. By billing a site or screening series as the quality alternative for the unwashed masses while flattering (instead of challenging or dialoguing with) their ADHD tendencies, your automatically invite an audience of dilettantes.

And speaking of mansplaining: I think that’s what you’ve been doing with whatever the hell this mess is every week. You expect someone to actually read all 5,000 words of your rambling man bullshit? Ever hear of an economy of words? Maybe you could actually write about A MOVIE once in awhile, or practice ACTUAL FILM CRITICISM? (Like I hadn’t read that argument about movie violence a million times.) Stop fellating the ghost of Tynan and write something of substance! Besides, how could anyone hold him as an emulatable hero? Oh, Calcutta! is unwatchable public schoolboy drivel that could’ve been punched up by one of those mouth-breathing rep-creatures you seem so eager to dismiss.

Nick: Tynan? If Ken Tynan were here, he’d take a crop to your impertinent backside, Missy. Tynan, you’ll recall—or, more likely, not—was a collaborator and great admirer of the man whom you describe in your fizzling opening salvo as a “rapist/Academy Award-winner.” That sort of flip dismissal is the kind of thing that you self-described “feminists”—a term so ubiquitous as to have lost any meaning whatsoever—invariably fall back on when you need to distract from the fact that your gender hasn’t produced any artist of comparable stature. (Well, I’ll grant you that Kathryn Bigelow does literally tower over noble Roman.) And I never thought I’d live to see the day when a woman chided me about structure. What was it that Tom Wolfe said of your great essayist, Sontag? A prose style with “a handicapped parking sticker valid at Partisan Review”? Maybe more applicable is the next part, on “McLuhan’s line about indignation endowing the idiot with dignity.” And of course you would bring the only man your sort of woman can seem to stand, old mummified Marx, into it. And the stale air of red-brick Manchester in the 1840’s along with him! There is a specter haunting your responses here—the specter of barely cross-examined attitudes, with nothing to buttress them. Serves me right for inviting a guest columnist in who’s clearly ragging. Oh, and I hate the fucking Fiery Furnaces, while Petrusich is one of the best Pfork ever had.

Violet: Only a gentleman scholar of your caliber would seriously suggest my arguments were a direct result of my wearing red underwear. I’d say you’re the one suffering from a wandering uterus. (Which was, in fact, a fashionable diagnosis for men in Georgian England, where most of your shitty attitudes about gender seem to come from.) Just like the mad men who successfully diluted feminism’s message of gender equality into “only pushy, man-haters are feminists” and “guys are overgrown children, so you can’t expect them to help you with housework,” you have just enough command of rhetorical arguments to turn your insecurities into pathos for idiots. But far from being the Don Draper of the critical scene, you’re barely a Lane Pryce. Any 12 year-old can Google inspirational quotes by dead (or nearly dead) straight white guys—maybe you should start a Tumblr instead of sullying Sundance’s brand with your weird rants. (I think most of your points could’ve just as easily been made using animated gifs of a baby goat kicking another goat in the head with “When film critics blog” written in 16-point Helvetica font above it.) Since you seem dead-set on pursuing a course of enmity, I suppose I shouldn’t feed your trolling anymore. There’s neither gold nor glory in it. In closing, I’d like to say that:

1)    women shouldn’t feel pressured to shave their pubic hair because it serves a sanitary puropose

2)    any critic who doesn’t read Amy Taubin isn’t worth shit

3)    cash rules everything around me, which is why Bleeker Bob’s awning is on sale for $100 on Craigslist.

Nick Pinkerton is a regular contributor to Sight & Sound magazine and sundry other publications. He lives in Brooklyn, NY. Follow Nick on Twitter @NickPinkerton.

What is Vulgar Auteurism? If a May 24 primer in the Voice Media Group’s New York City paper is any indication, it’s a shameless attention grab. A critical tool of any use? Not so much.

Yet all the world, or at least all the world’s editors, love a catchy tagline. So it was with the brief and fearful reign of Mumblecore over everyone but audiences, so it was in the days when media-savvy critics-turned-filmmakers launched the French Nouvelle Vague, whose architects “Vulgar Auteurists” frequently cite as predecessors. And now Vulgar Auteurism, a vaguely-defined idea whose moment of critical mass has arrived nevertheless, enters the conversation, despite the fact that no persuasive argument has yet been made for why the phrase should be vitally necessary to modify old, fuddy-duddy Auteurism.

The aforementioned VMG article is a mini flyweight hardly worth stepping in the ring with. It posits that “classical auteur” is “a designation still typically reserved for revered foreign and arthouse filmmakers, from Olivier Assayas to Jia Zhangke,” which is not true. It ballasts its rhetorical points with an abundance of scare quotes (“serious,” “unserious,” “pure”) It advances not one persuasive argument for the filmmakers it alleges to advocate; Justin Lin is praised for his “formal elegance,” while we’re told that his Fast Five “imagines Brazil as a multicultural mecca, and it remains one of the precious few Hollywood blockbusters to wholly embrace the racial diversity of its cast.” (The fact is that Hollywood doesn’t care much about any color but green, and checklist pandering does not a celebration of diversity make.) Even more galling is the assumed attitude that the VA position stands alone against a vast, unsympathetic critical conspiracy to marginalize and underrate the products of industrial filmmaking. The fact is that we live in a post-monocultural world, and it is very easy to find like-minded individuals who share any niche proclivity, whether aesthetic or sexual. The numbers, meanwhile, do not bear out claims of a highbrow conspiracy: Fast & Furious 6, which we’re assured is scorned by critics the world over, currently stands at 61% at Metacritic, above The Great Gatsby (54%), and within striking distance of arty jazz like Simon Killer and Post Tenebras Lux.

Of rather more use in grasping the VA phenomenon is the timeline sussed out at LabuzaMovies.com by proprietor Peter Labuza, which tracks the brotherhood’s historical development. It begins with the candidacy for the canonization of Tony Scott, which apparently swirled out of Canada like a Nor’easter in 2006 and only gained force from Scott’s subsequent suicide, as he died so that Vulgar Auteurism might live. The simultaneous release of P.T. Anderson’s The Master and Paul W.S. Anderson’s Resident Evil: Retribution is the movement’s Lexington and Concord moment. Your humble author wasn’t above seizing the moment to expound on the oeuvre of P.W.S.A., though I did so according to pretty standard auteurist terms.

Such half measures just don’t cut it. According to the VMG call to arms, the VA subscribers are “Much like the Young Turks of the French New Wave, who aimed in their Cahiers du cinéma writing to bring critical appreciation to Hollywood filmmakers widely considered unworthy.” Labuza, likewise, links VA to the “tradition of Cashiers [sic] Du Cinema’s auteurist moment in the 1950s, [and] Andrew Sarris’s Expressive Esoterica category in The American Cinema,” which Sarris reserved for, in his words: “the unsung directors with difficult styles or unfashionable genres or both. Their deeper virtues are often obscured by irritating idiosyncrasies on the surface, but they are generally redeemed by their seriousness and grace.”

The comparison becomes less persuasive when one recalls that Sarris’ Expressive Esoterica included not only action directors of the sort celebrated by VA, in kind if not in quality—Budd Boetticher, Andre de Toth, Don Siegel—but also a dramatist and master of precisely-calibrated mise-en-scene like Robert Mulligan, a women’s picture specialist like John M. Stahl, a tawdry satirist like Frank Tashlin, and the hard-to-pigeonhole Allan Dwan, whose sprawling career spanned from cinema’s infancy to its middle-age. (Dwan’s unruly oeuvre is the subject of an online dossier that appeared this week. Selflessly compiled by Gina Telaroli and David Phelps and hosted by the Spanish journal LUMIERE, its appearance is a bright spot for civilized cinephilia in dark days when vulgarians run amok.)

While “grace” was the greatest virtue Sarris could find in a film, “vulgar” was his favorite pejorative. The American avatar of auteurism as practiced by the critics of Cahiers and Movie, Sarris was dedicated to furthering the mission of his European predecessors: Equipping the open-minded viewer with glasses to see the elegant ideas and genuine artistry at work beneath the surface in superficially lowbrow entertainments, while diligently separating the exemplars of craftsmanship from, well, Sam Wood. The VMG piece rejects Sarris’ definition of vulgarity for a faux populi stance: “The ‘vulgar’ part of vulgar auteurism doesn’t refer to crudeness,” its author writes, “but to commonality.” But the point of Sarris’ project, and Cahiers’, and Movie’s—was not to celebrate vulgarity per se, either in the sense of crudity or commonality, but to point out that refined and rare feelings existed within common, demotic texts. Auteurism elevated the movie to the level of art, which the film critic was expected to be conversant with; the addition of ‘vulgar’ implies the critic naughtily hunkering down at to the lowest-common-denominator level. It stinks of smarmy slumming, like the ubiquitous cop-out descriptor “batshit.”

Auteurism in any manifestation has generally been a sausage-fest, which Pauline Kael alluded to in her “Circles & Squares” essay, identifying what she saw as the “sex and glamor and fantasies of the high school boys’ universe” of Only Angels Have Wings. Elsewhere in that notorious broadside against Sarris, she deplored the collector card auteurists who flocked to “the kind of action movies that the restless, rootless men who wander on Forty-Second Street and in the Tenderloin of all our big cities have always preferred just because they could respond to them without thought.” Vulgar Auteurism seems no different, though I have located an evident VA partisan called Sara Freeman at the blogspot The Vulgar Cinema, which has been running a symposium on the Farrelly brothers—artists so despised by the mandarins of criticism that their Me, Myself, & Irene was relegated to the cover of Film Comment in 2000, and written about by proto-Vulgarian Kent Jones, who also addressed VA fave Michael Bay around the same time. (I am willing to bet that most card-carrying vulgarians didn’t yet have their driver’s licenses when Armageddon came out, and thus may earnestly believe in the novelty of their position.) And while Labuza has it that Vulgar Auteurism was “founded on message boards instead of coined by a major critic or theorist,” one critic has written about and praised many of the movement’s benighted figures—Bay and Neveldine/Taylor and W.S. Anderson, for example—a critic who, whatever you may think of him, is a figure of undeniable import. I am speaking of Armond White, who apparently has been disinvited from the VA party because bashing White is something of a tradition among milquetoast young journos looking to take a stand on something without fear of reprisal. I wonder if White hasn’t been namechecked in this discussion, or nominated as the Father of Vulgar Auteurism, only because he can’t be of any use to anyone’s career.

Behind Vulgar Auteurism, as it is currently defined, a false tautology exists: Because the Cahiers auteurists championed despised or déclassé filmmakers, many of whom worked through the conduit of the Hollywood studio system, it follows that the Vulgar Auteurists are natural inheritors to that tradition, rescuing the despised or déclassé filmmakers of their day from the hoity-toity double-domes. While, generally speaking, the “That which has been is that which will be” of Ecclesiastes 3:15 is a helpful way to view life, it shouldn’t be taken absolutely literally. The quantity of brilliance in the world probably doesn’t greatly vary from generation to generation, but this doesn’t mean that brilliance will predictably follow the same channels, any more than that the cinema of today, in its popular and rarified forms, occupies the same cultural position it held in the postwar world.

Let us accept as fact—which I do—that at one point a number of world-class geniuses of visual narrative art were convened in Hollywood, Los Angeles, California, USA, working as studio craftsmen in the medium of genre filmmaking. Let us also accept that a group of intellectuals decoded their artistry, which had been otherwise overlooked because of cultural snobbism. Just because it happened in 1947 does not necessarily mean it’s happening in 2013. Yet rather than attempt to find the new channels into which genius is flowing today, Vulgar Auteurism wants to re-enact the certifiably heroic moment of film culture. One can understand why the young critic would want to believe that each weekend will bring a fresh masterpiece—the Internet needs such inexhaustible enthusiasm to generate content fodder! It is my belief, however, that the middle-range of American genre moviemaking is much poorer than it was during the “auteurist moment” of the Cahiers critics, and certainly that Hollywood’s dab-handed adherence to dramatic unities, which led Eric Rohmer to trumpet the postwar period as “The Classical Age of Cinema,” has long fallen by the wayside.

The explosion of time, space, character, and screen geography in many a contemporary blockbuster is no problem for the dedicated Vulgar Auteurist. Labuza makes one very pertinent point: “Vulgar Auteurist critics seem most fascinated by the images that these filmmakers create—and perhaps not the image, but the screengrab.” “The death of Tony Scott,” Labuza continues, “led to a series of pieces that pushed for his work to be seen in the tradition of the avant-garde.” He is referring to Ignatiy Vishnevetsky’s “Smearing the Senses: Tony Scott, Action Painter,” and “Inner Image Collage (for Tony Scott),” a short eulogy and photo spread prepared by MUBI’s Daniel Kasman, which appeared in issue 54 of Cinema Scope magazine, in which stills from Man on Fire were arranged across two pages, to underscore their resemblance to frenetic avant-garde compositions.

These resemblances are, to my thinking, superficial at best, for there is such a thing as earning your aesthetic. Last weekend I attended a program of work by Ken Jacobs that played at the Museum of the Moving Image in honor of his 80^th birthday. The bill included Jacobs’ recent Cyclopean 3D, which is composed of still stereo images shot from two very slightly different angles, creating an illusion of depth and dimension through jittery, strobing effects. An autobiographical collage and a major work, the film is subtitled “Life with a Beautiful Woman,” a reference to the filmmakers’ wife and muse, Flo, whom he met in 1961. “I make these movies, and I hope they’re alive,” Jacobs told a scantly-populated room after the screening, “And that’s resisting this big, crushing death that’s impressed upon us. And that’s the most I can do.” Cyclpean 3D embodies “the tradition of the avant-garde” as I am familiar with it. And while Jacobs’ endurance and curiosity and life-force and love shines through in his work, what I have seen by Scott—the heroic, ruggedly-individualist artist who left his third wife and twin adolescent sons by bailing off the Vincent Thomas Bridge—seems rather more emblematic of “big, crushing death.”

Perhaps I am being unfashionably Manichean in my polemicizing. “Another point of difference between classical and vulgar auteurism might lie in their oppositional programs,” wrote Girish Shambu in a recent blog post interrogating the VA party line. “The Cahiers critics stood not just for a certain kind of cinema but also against one: that of the Tradition of Quality.” Not so with the Vulgarians: “Vulgar auteurism is about expansion (‘A but also B’), not rejection (‘B instead of A’),” tweeted Vishnevetsky as the online brouhaha about VA reached fever pitch. Per the VMG writer, “Vulgar Auteurism calls for critics to evaluate a film like Fast Five with the same care and attention to style or motifs as one would with a film like Holy Motors.” Such a clarion call would certainly be of great use had Andre Bazin not already provided the elegant and self-evident guideline that “All films are created equal.”

A couple of years ago I interviewed Dave Kehr, a self-professed adherent to Bazin’s pronouncement, and auteurist working very much in Sarris’ classical humanist vein. Kehr had the following to say about the not-yet-proclaimed Vulgar Auteurs:

“The directors who really rub me the wrong way right now are people like Tony Scott and Michael Bay… these kind of macho guys who go out there and do a million shots and beat up the audience with them… I have seen some people defending Tony Scott, like the Cinema Scope guys have kind of adopted him as their favorite Hollywood director, I think just out of sheer perversity, because… I don’t see anything in those. It’s just trash to me, one shot after another, it’s just nonsense. But he does have his little following.”

I try to think the best of my fellow critics’ motives, to believe that their enthusiasms aren’t spurred by sheer contrarian perversity. (Although in the case of the elevation of a piece of shit like Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning, you have to wonder…) When I read the likes of Vishnevetsky’s “Smearing the Senses” and Christoph Huber and Mark Peranson’s “World Out of Order: Tony Scott’s Vertigo,” I must believe that their authors are speaking for the greatness of Scott out of a real sense of conviction, however incapable I am of agreeing with or even comprehending the arguments therein, however much I would have, retrospectively, preferred to have thrown the money I spent seeing Domino and The Taking of Pelham 1, 2, 3 out the window of a moving cab instead.

Writing of Scott for Cinema Scope in ‘06, Huber and Peranson offered that “his themes and structures cry out for old-school auteurist appreciation,” which they proceed to outline, and which is all that is necessary. Useless as tits on a bull, however, is changing out “old-school” for “Vulgar” in that equation. The catchphrase Vulgar Auteurism is the product of a film culture that has, with or without its own knowledge and connivance, been contaminated by PR, which not only dictates what is deemed important in daily and weekly coverage—today the agenda is set by ad revenue, not critics—a transparent attempt to build a brand. Ironically adopted by the champions of commercial directors turned feature filmmakers, Vulgar Auteurism is pure publicity, a “reboot” of auteurism, a revitalization of the franchise. It’s Extreme Auteurism, Auteurism Strikes Back, Auteurism 2.0, Auteurism Uncut (Now with 50% more vulgarity!) It’s a clueless kiddie fad with a mayfly lifespan. It’s Pogs. It’s a “Harlem Shake” video. It’s a Fido Dido t-shirt, and you look stupid wearing it.

Nick Pinkerton is a regular contributor to Sight & Sound magazine and sundry other publications. He lives in Brooklyn, NY. Follow Nick on Twitter @NickPinkerton.

Over the last week I have been planning to write this first blog post on the subject of repertory moviegoing and new/old DVD releases, a weekly missive whose style will, hopefully, fall somewhere between Westbook Pegler, Dave Barry, and Louis Skorecki. I have simultaneously been reading Simon Reynolds’s new book Retromania: Pop Culture’s Addiction to Its Own Past, which has caused me to question the necessity or even the health of such a backward-looking, sepia-toned exercise.

Reynolds is writing about pop music after a decade in which, he argues, the all-access no-admission availability of pop’s accumulated past is threatening to encroach on the vitality of its present—one of many who are presently trying to figure out What The Internet Hath Wrought. Additional required reading along these lines includes comedian Patton Oswalt’s much-forwarded jeremiad on the subject of “Etewaf: Everything That Ever Was—Available Forever,” and rock critic Bill Wyman on “Lester Bangs’ Basement.”

Retromania is invaluable particularly because it encourages the reader to think about his relationship with art in terms of Past and Future. One does not necessarily have to share Reynolds’s views to profit from this exercise—and I do not. He is an avowed Futurist, even quoting from Filippo Tommaso Marinetti. I get a shivery thrill running my fingers along the spine of Wyndham Lewis’s The Demon of Progress in the Arts.

I feel compelled to argue, though, that this column’s title is not so fusty as it seems at first glance. “The Classical” refers to the critical writings of Maurice Scherer a/k/a Eric Rohmer on cinema’s “classical” age (“The classical age of cinema is not behind us, but ahead”), which I have long admired and puzzled over, as well as a title from the songbook of Mark E. Smith’s long-running dance outfit The Fall, of whom the late DJ John Peel famously said: “They are always different. They are always the same.” This gets at the particular conversation that Smith’s group, in its prime, upheld between traditionalism (the rhythmic bedrock of American rockabilly and its physical presence; Mancunian provincialism) and progress (the responsiveness to new, outre currents in music, from Krautrock to rave; the continual skin-shedding reincarnations). That balance remains an inspiration.

In looking over film history, then, it is my sincere hope to not do so at the expense of the present, for the fear of becoming the David Cross character with the mini Victrola in that one Mr. Show skit should ever be with us all.

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In common with most of America, I saw Rise of the Planet of the Apes last week. There is a certain irony intrinsic to the movie. The narrative tells of humankind facing an unexpected challenge for dominance from our ancestors. The film itself, contrasting the expressive performance of leading ape Caesar (a motion-captured Andy Serkis, whose career is apparently attributable to the fact that he is very good at hunkering) with window-dressing work by James Franco and Freida Pinto, evinces the continuing displacement of flesh-and-blood actors by computer-generated counterparts.

I leave the clucking about the implications of “C.G.I.” to the capable tongue of David Denby, who discovered the existence of places called “multiplexes” this summer, and was deeply dismayed by what he discovered going on inside them. What interests me is that the section of Apes most free of human presence, in which Caesar goes into monkey house lockdown, is also the most adroitly constructed. In the clean delineation of personalities, brusque violence, and sensitivity to the “outcast,” these scenes are closer to the cold Roman clarity of Don Seigel’s very great Riot in Cell Block 11 than the cinema of bluster and obfuscation.

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I have mentioned, however, that this is a column about repertory moviegoing, so it would behoove me to mention the best “old” movie I saw over the last month, Richard Fleischer’s 1971 The Last Run, starring Tony Musante, a fresh-off-Patton George C. Scott, and wives #3 (Coleen Dewhurst) and #4 (Trish Van Devere). The move was shot by the legendary Sven Nykvist (Mixed Nuts), with an excellent score by Jerry Goldsmith, and screenplay by Alan Sharp, whose credits in the near future would include Night Moves and Ulzana’s Raid.

Fleischer’s is a case that rewards further research. After getting his bearings in film noir, he graduated to large-scale filmmaking with 1954’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. With its then-astronomical pricetag, Walt Disney certainly must’ve sold Leagues as spectacle—but what impresses today is the patience of the storytelling, the wait through Peter Lorre and Paul Lukas’s expedition planning and Kirk Douglas’s butt-waggling musical number until finally, almost forty-five minutes into the movie, Lorre and Lukas witness Captain Nemo leading a funeral procession across the bottom of the sea. Audience and characters share the same first view of Nemo’s uncanny twilight world together, and thus the same awe. It is hard to imagine the same movie, made today, waiting so long to flex its muscle. That undergirding of character carries the sense of astonishment through the ages, even as the effects in Fleisher’s big-budget bonanzas today look dated (1966’s The Fantastic Voyage feels practically arts-and-crafts.) It is the fate of the awesome to become quaint with time, and so undoubtedly our children’s children will find Apes (pardon) primitive, assuming they’re not too busy being blown by robots slaves to pay attention to filmed drama.

It is often suspected that special-effects and human values are antithetical, but The Last Run is proof that Fleisher’s attention to character never atrophied during his CinemaScope-sized work. Scott plays Harry Garmes, a former getaway driver in late middle-age, retired in obscurity in Portugal, who takes a gig transporting Musante’s sprung con across the Pyrenees into France. Along the way they collect Van Devere; she comes with his cargo, but Scott starts to fall for her, and Musante eggs his girl on, figuring that teasing along the old man’s affection will guarantee his loyalty. Arriving in France, the trio run head-on into a set-up, and retreat into the peninsula with assassins in pursuit. The action that follows, with Scott swinging his supercharged 1956 Cabriolet around serpentine mountain roads, is all whiplash-sharp, but what’s unforgettable is the pained submission that Scott registers, the fatal clench in his final, suicidal smile at the woman he knew never loved him.

The production was publicly troubled, with original director John Huston walking off the set after squabbling with Scott. This alerted the critical community, with its general prejudice for Huston and the headstrong, iconoclast-artist persona he cultivated (see Lillian Ross’s The Picture), which could only make Fleischer look, in contrast, like a mere hireling—an assumption reflected in reviews which were, as ever, completely wrong. At “The Classical,” I will aspire, gazing out from the unassailable bluffs of hindsight, to be less wrong than most.

Next Week: Robert Ryan and Eugene O’Neill? Or: whatever strikes my fancy.

Nick Pinkerton is a regular contributor to The Village Voice film section, Sight & Sound Magazine, and sundry other publictions. He lives in Brooklyn, NY. 

“May I trouble you to Turn Off the Dark, please?”

The conversation between live and filmed theater, which began at least as early as 1896 with May Irwin and John Rice performing their liplock from The Widow Jones for Edison’s cameras, should be a source of continuing fascination for any but the most medium-chauvinistic film lovers. This dailogue is discussed in The Classical’s recent appraisal of Eugene O’Neill/ John Frankenheimer’s The Iceman Cometh, while, upon re-viewing the corpus of Roman Polanski—who once starred in the Paris run of Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus— this critic had to contemplate anew the debt the Polish director’s “Apartment Trilogy” owed to the Theatre of the Absurd generally, and Ionesco’s The New Tenant specifically.

Though a rigorous schedule of covering the ever-evolving Seventh Art keeps me from basking in the footlight glow as much as I might like to, I head theaterwards whenever the opportunity arises—though an ingrained prejudice towards film art tends to influence my ticket purchases. I not-so-long-ago watched Olympia Dukakis’s cleavage wobble its way through The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore, a product of the despised 60s run of that most Hollywood-friendly of playwrights, Tennessee Williams (Milk Train was memorably filmed in 1968 by Joseph Losey as Boom!, with Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, and Noel Coward as the Witch of Capri, making a terrific entrance). Prior to that, my last outing had been to a stage rendition of stage-cinema double-dipper R.W. Fassbinder’s The Marriage of Maria Braun, performed at BAM by Münchner Kammerspiele (This production suffered from much the same slackening of dramatic interest in the second half as the great Fassbinder’s rather overestimated film.)

It was perhaps inevitable, then,  that I would eventually find myself waiting for the curtain to rise on Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark, as I found myself doing on a wet Wednesday afternoon in Row W of the Foxwoods Theatre on the Great White Way. I had a free ticket, thanks to the kindness of Zachariah Durr, a comedian, general-purpose entertainer, and occasional movie blogger whom I have in the past +1’d on Marmaduke press screenings and suchlike, and who therefore obviously owes me big time.

Spider-Man was, of course, a comic book before it became the 2002 film whose tremendous popularity assured that every Marvel property this side of Fin Fang Foom would eventually be brought to life on the silver screen, so to pay off Stan Lee’s bribes to the Grim Reaper. Prior to the 21^st century Spider-Man, there had been attempts to bring Peter Parker over to live-action drama, but the results were ultimately too earthbound, unmistakably some actor hanging around in pajamas. As the conventional wisdom goes, the technology for Spider-Man hadn’t come together until Sam Raimi’s film, with its web-slinger tumbling through an intricately-mapped CGI reproduction of the canyons and peaks of Manhattan, showing all the tangled acrobatics of the Todd McFarlane-illustrated years. The same hurdle has been faced in bringing Spider-Man to Broadway: waiting for stagecraft technology to meet the challenge issued by Raimi’s spectacles, works which, comic book partisans notwithstanding, are the definitive Spider-Man texts in most eyes. That moment of technological parity was a long time coming. In point of fact, it has not come yet—hence the squalid and injury-laden history of Turn Off the Dark. None of which will, of course, turn off the marquee before the investment is recouped.

That said, as a long-standing viewer of both NFL football and boxing, two genuinely evil bloodsports that no-one with a conscience should ever stoop to watching, feigning sham moral disapproval of the recklessness behind Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark is probably the wrong tack. It is a bad show, essentially, because it is a bad show.

It’s easy to see how the messianic subtext of the Spider-Man origin myth (“With great power comes great responsibility”) would appeal to songwriter Bono (seen here performing in The Nutcracker) who responded to the material by issuing a couple dozen uniformly terrible songs. I suppose my favorite was “A Freak Like Me (Needs Company)”, because it effectively marries two gay American traditions, one outgoing and proud (the musical-theater outcast anthem), one mostly furtive and repressed (superhero comics), and also because it sounded a bit like a bowdlerized Helloween song. A fellow behind me, wearing a Spider-Man hoodie, enthused that fill-in leading man Matt Caplan delivered “The best ‘Bouncing Off the Walls’” that he’d ever seen, for whatever that’s worth. The overarching “aesthetic,” supervised at one point by Julie Taymore, was a hotchpotch of Greek myth, German Expressionism, ZooTV Tour, and purposelessly grotesque costumes faintly recalling the baby-masked interrogators in Brazil, with no attempt to integrate the disparate elements towards a single effect. I sunk into a deep depression sometime in the Act II, and mostly fixated on the Piet Mondrain nail polish on the girl two seats over.

The performance perked up, however, in the climactic tussle between Spider-Man and the Green Goblin. The highlight was not the fight itself, which no thinking person could possibly view as anything but a reckless menace to life and limb, but rather when the Goblin’s flyline got snagged on the Chrysler Building. An announcer came over the P.A. to explain the delay. He sounded very rehearsed, almost as though this sort of thing came up several times weekly. Two stagehands with implements that looked like 40-foot long versions of those grabbers they use to get paper towels from off the top the freezer at the bodega came out to wiggle him loose. After about 10 minutes of jimmying, the freed Goblin was cautiously lowered onto the stage, at which point the P.A. piped up again: “Well, as you can imagine, the Goblin keeps chasing Spider-Man around… and then they fall in the orchestra pit… and that’s where we’re going to pick up.”

Had I, like much of the room, paid several hundred dollars for the privilege of watching actors gyroscoped around the theater, I suppose I would’ve been bitterly disappointed. As it is, I got every penny worth.

Nick Pinkerton is a regular contributor to The Village Voice film section, Sight & Sound Magazine, and sundry other publications. He lives in Brooklyn, NY. 

It is a somewhat common tendency of those who’ve grown up gawping at movies to be drawn back, time and again, to their first flush of attraction, as though looking for a clue to the present predicament of their selves.

I think of the telling scenes of children’s moviegoing that appear in the variously-autobiographical films of the French movie brats: Antoine Doinel and Rene playing hooky at the movies in François “I saw my first two hundred films on the sly” Truffaut’s The 400 Blows (1959); Michael Terrazon’s friend propping open the exit door to smuggle him into the theater in Maurice Pialat’s L’enfance nue (1968); Martin Loeb copying the gestures of seduction from the neighborhood drageur and Pandora and the Flying Dutchman in Jean Eustache’s Mes petites amoureuses (1974). It is worth noting that both Truffaut and Eustache were the products of broken homes and little hands-on upbringing, left to grow “like flowers,” per R.W. Fassbinder’s description of his own lackadaisical education. So where could these boys find role models, on the cheap…

The best description that I know of the instructive life-lessons provided a child raised by the movies is provided in a late piece by former Rolling Stone writer Grover Lewis, ‘Old Movies in My Mind,’ in which a perambulation through the precincts of Hollywood is occasion for the author (b. 1934) to reflect on his relationship with the local industry:

I followed the sidewalk tides to the east, remembering the girls I used to squire to the picture show, conjuring up faces without names and fumbling caresses in the brilliantined shadows and romances that sometimes didn’t last two reels. To please the sturdy-calfed maidens I courted as a boy, I aped the winning ways of the stars…

The issue, of course, was how to act, not merely in pursuit of the flesh, but in the conduct of life itself. For my generation, the combined physical and moral and spiritual impact of going to the movies was incalculable. Hollywood’s penny entertainments defined the shapes of reality for the age, and shaped the nation into a community of shared experience. All of us learned the proprieties of love and war at the picture show. The movies were a garden of dazzling light, and the verities were familiar and comforting—basic decency and unsullied justice and the promise of happy ending for all. Wasn’t that the universal goal? A common vision of goodness and virtue? Weren’t those the bonds that held civilization intact and kept the bad spirits at bay?

The movies turned us one and all every which way but loose. Still aping the stars when I reached young manhood, I went out in the world with the fixed idea that I wouldn’t let anybody run over me. I used that, at my worst, to run over others. But ten thousand and one flickering myths later, I rated myself a better character for having been to the picture show.

This last point seems to me essential—as is the University of Texas’s collection of Lewis’s writing, Splendor in the Short Grass, to any fan of American movies in the “New Hollywood” era, or plain old good prose (Lewis, it should be noted, was a close college chum of Larry McMurtry, author of that novelized meditation on movie-reared America, The Last Picture Show.) It is no new observation that Hollywood colonized the inner lives of America, if not the world, in its heyday. I think of the following Gore Vidal routine: “Tell me somebody’s favorite actor when he was ten years old, and I’ll tell you who he is. Could Norman Mailer have existed without John Garfield? He’s been playing Norman Mailer, and I’ve been doing George Arliss. You get hung up with an image.”

What I find rather charming in Lewis’s formulation, however, is the guarded but essentially affirmative tone, the statement: “Yes, I was provided most of my moral bearings, social inculcation, and models of behavior through moviegoing—and no, that wasn’t necessarily a bad thing.” (Lewis was from a broken home of the first order, his parents having shot and killed one another, per the police-report version, in 1943.) Our current Secretary of State popularized the phrase “It takes a village” in the middle ‘90s, but what this failed to take into account is that some villages are composed entirely of creeps, dullards, and worse. This is where what I will blandly call the Arts, a category in which the movies are happily included, come in.

Lewis’s thinking about the movies is in contrast to an entire line of dialogue about the mediated 20^th century, most famously expounded by Guy Debord, who ever looked back to a “directly lived” yesterday, before reality and image were sundered by various forces of mental colonization (The last pocket of directly lived existence identified by Debord came, as I understand it, when he was in his early 20s and partying hard. While I often feel this way myself, it had never occurred to me to expand this personal experience into a universal principal.) Debord’s line of discourse continues in Neal Gabler’s Life: The Movie and God knows how many other books that I haven’t read because how many times do you need to ingest that “We’re-living-in-a-simulacra-blue-pill-or-red-pill?” thing anyways?

Now, Debord is one of my favorite comic writers, but the inherent superiority of “directly lived” life remains a rather difficult thing for me to grasp. This came into focus last fall as I was hillwalking in Scotland in grudgeful weather. The experience was unavoidably visceral, elemental, and, yes, “directly lived,” with slurping murk and stinging rain and clouts of wind which very literally threatened to dash me to oblivion after a good, steep plummet. At the same time this “direct” experience was had, it was being filtered through a whole range of “mediated” associations to wind-dashed hills—Lear’s “Blow winds and crack your cheeks” and Catherine Earnshaw and Hound of the Baskervilles and Jennifer Jones in Gone to Earth. Rather than diminished, the experience seemed to me augmented, multiplied through these associations, without which I would have been, after all, only a solitary man being blown about on a hill.

I haven’t seen Edward Yang’s Yi Yi since its release, but a particular scene has stuck with me and comes to mind now, in which a character enthuses about the ability of moviegoing to double, triple human lifespan through all the additional vistas of experience it opens (The quote is apparently “Two times as much life at the movies!”, which I found through Googling, cited in a book-that-I-will-never-read called Media Unlimited: How the Torrent of Images and Sounds Overwhelms Our Lives).

Well! I sat down to write this week’s column with a good mind to discuss the inevitable disappointments of chronic moviegoing, but have instead penned something like a vindication. I will endeavor to do better next week.

Nick Pinkerton is a regular contributor to The Village Voice film section, Sight & Sound Magazine, and sundry other publications. He lives in Brooklyn, NY. 

People often ask me, “Is the jet-setting life of a third-tier film critic as glamorous as I, a timecard-punching third-shift drone at the tonenail-clipper factory, imagine it to be?” The answer, invariably, is YES!—suffering for other people’s art is even better than you can imagine. In addition to such distinct perks as a) not being able to responsibly sire children because of your almost-guaranteed lifelong dire poverty and b) having hugely dysfunctional relationships anyways because you are preoccupied squinting at review DVDs into the wee morning hours, scratching indecipherable notes on the back of an overdue electricity bill, while your peignoir-clad wife coos in vain from the bedroom… you also get to see the world!

For example, I have had occasion to spend the last weekend in Omaha, Nebraska, a city best known as the setting of Alexander Payne’s first three features and as track 2 on August and Everything After. Despite the fact that most of us not living in Omaha think of it little if at all, those who do happen to call it home take a great deal of pride in the fact that they do and, if my three days and nights were any evidence, they are not without reason. From the Bob Kerrey pedestrian bridge, you can take in views of the silvery Missouri which rival Henley-on-Thames… At the Joslyn Art Museum, an imposing, almost entirely-windowless chunk of pink marble on Dodge St., you may peruse a collection including fine Salvator Rosa etchings and a particularly admirable batch of Academic paintings (the Gérômes were out on loan to the Musée d’Orsay)… At Brothers Lounge, you can play Christian Death endlessly on the jukebox and inflict your presence on a gaggle of Russian students, engaging in barked conversations that you cannot remember a single syllable of the following day. Yes, it’s one toddlin’ town, all right!

The Classical being, as I have to constantly remind myself, a column about the Seventh Art, I should note that you can also visit Film Streams’s Ruth Sokolof Theater, a nonprofit two-screen space housed in the “NoDo” district (that’s “North Downtown,” chump), the branding of which suggests that some insidious New York City realtors have gone Westward, ho. One certifiable NYC refugee who I was privileged to meet was Rachel Jacobson, founder and director of Film Streams, who I learned had lived practically around the block from me in North Brooklyn’s (NoBro’s?) extensive vinyl-siding district. Inexplicably deciding not to spend her best years picking her way around refuse and rats, Jacobson returned to hometown Omaha in 2005 with her accrued nonprofit fundraising experience, which she promptly put towards doing something really fantastic for her community. How cool is that? Good on you, Rachel Jacobson!

The Sokolof is located in the mixed-use Saddle Creek Records complex, built by the Omaha-based record label, much of the funding of which must be attributable to the mid-aughts national break of native son Conor “Bright Eyes” Oberst. This name brings a particular memory rushing back: I was perusing the stacks of a record store called, unfortunately, Dingleberry’s, in Yellow Springs, Ohio c. 2001 when the worst song I had ever heard came over the PA. “What is this?” I asked the clerk. “Bright Eyes,” the clerk responded. (Internet research reveals that the song was “No Lies, Just Love”. One does not soon forget a lyric like “I sat watching a flower as it was withering/ I was embarrassed by its honesty.”) But, whatever, the indie lucre went to good use—so good on you, too, Conor!

*   *   *

The Sokolof’s facilities were extraordinary, as was the very fact that a middle-sized Midwestern city could support such a venture—apparently largely through donations—in an age that increasingly constricts “moviegoing” to the living room.

This iconoclastic, upstream-against-the-flow-of-time accomplishment got me to recollecting another movie house, without the existence of which I almost certainly would not have been in Omaha criticastering. As late as 1997, my hometown of Cincinnati, Ohio—boasting a metropolitan population practically three times the size of Omaha’s—supported an independent, full-time repertory theater. This was in addition to occasional screenings a the Emory, now fallen to rot and ruin, and the meetings of a secretive cabal called the Cincinnati Film Society—to this day I have not to my knowledge met a card-carrying member—who would project 16mm rentals of Bruce Conner and Andy Warhol shorts in the lecture room of the old Natural History Museum on Gilbert Ave., since demolished. Founded in 1981 as The Place, Cincinnati’s abovementioned rep house went through subsequent incarnations as Moviola, The Movies, and, by the time that I knew it, as The Real Movies. (The basement theater at 719 Race St. now houses the wholly worthless Cincinnati Shakespeare Company, one of those institutions that cropped up in the late 90s to siphon off NEA grants previously put towards blasphemous gallery art, so that schoolchildren could be treated to labored Elizabethan ribaldry rather than be educated, through historical example, in deciphering the image-based media culture which makes up the fabric of the world around them.)

If I can point to any single formative aesthetic experience, it was being driven at age 14 to The Real Movies by two Older Girls, Becky and Molly, who I’d somehow become acquainted with in my young-punk perambulations of the University-area’s seedy strip of head shops, acoustic-black-hole rock barns, flyblown record stores, dildo vendors, and horrible restaurants, known then as now as Short Vine. I cannot remember their surnames; I cannot remember the make or model of the car, or even whose car it was. Of the girls, I can only remember that Becky looked like an angular Egon Schiele drawing and Molly had a pink Kool-Aid dye job. What I do vividly recall is that the only music they ever seemed to keep on hand was a cassette dub, one side of which had the debut of West Coast “horrorcore” rapper Brotha Lynch Hung, who dealt extensively in cannibalism and Crip-related issues, and on the other the self-titled 1981 debut LP by Orange County’s The Adolescents (whose guitarist, Rikk Agnew, later played on Christian Death’s ‘Only Theater of Pain’!). And here’s where my personal taste was set in aspic: listening to “I Hate Children” or “Locc 2 Da Brain,” while on my way to see Vertigo.

The end of The Real Movies was the end of rep days in the Queen City. As I recall, co-owner and programmer Larry Thomas—who I have only just now discovered reviews movies for Cincinnati Public Radio WVXU—made a valiant last stand at some obscure far West-side theater that you had to drive like a million miles down River Road to get to, which lasted about two weeks. Otherwise, one had to either trek five hours to the Cleveland Cinematheque—which is celebrating its silver anniversary, Congratulations!—or the Wexner Center in Columbus.

It is a source of profound concern to me that disturbed young men and women coming of age today within the I-275 loop can have no experience equivalent to my own—that wonderful confluence of aesthetic experiences which might keep them from a mortifying life of financial solvency, mature emotional relationships, and comfortable acceptance of the culture/generation that they’ve been born into. The question therefore arises: Where is Cincinnati’s Rachel Jacobson? Where is the person who combines a stubbornly prideful fixation on their hometown, as well as the contacts, practical knowledge and knowhow to do something for the civic good? Cincinnati is lousy with theaters lying fallow: Surely the Imperial on Mohawk Place just needs a coat of paint, and a little elbow grease to tidy up those decades of crackhead shit!

And don’t look at me. I ain’t going back to that dump.

Nick Pinkerton is a regular contributor to The Village Voice film section, Sight & Sound Magazine, and sundry other publications. He lives in Brooklyn, NY. 

I saw every single movie in theatrical wide release between 1996 and 1999. This has not been true of any other period of my life. The factors influencing this remarkable accomplishment are not difficult to figure out: a) I had a driver’s license or knew someone who did, and b) I had nowhere else pressing to be.

This thoroughgoing approach of ordering from the entire multiplex menu occasionally brought great films or enjoyable trash; offhand I think of Breakdown, Con Air, Cruel Intentions, The Devil’s Advocate, Dirty Work, Face/Off, The Game, In Too Deep, Kingpin, Snake Eyes, Starship Troopers, Wild Things… More often the results were not so fortuitous. With the benefit of hindsight, I might’ve done better to read the canonical works of Western literature during the same period (They were too busy gorging us on Toni Morrison and Leslie Marmon Silko at school—take that, Dead White Men!)

The radio was often on when driving to-and-fro from the cinema, and just as I will be haunted to the grave by the Alternative hits of the same period, likewise will fragments of the garbage movies that I saw on school nights continue to litter my mental landscape. This week will be devoted to purging.

B*A*P*S
At some point in this Halle Berry vehicle, an oh-so-proper English butler hollers out “West Side!”, possibly while doing that ‘W’ thing with his fingers, as popularized by the likes of Westside Connection. I got nothing else.

Buddy
Gorilla movie. I got a scored a free poster for it which was inexplicably printed backwards. Even more inexplicably, I gave it to my then-girlfriend who then, most inexplicably of all, hung it over her bed for the better part of a year.

Chairman of the Board
Gained a measure of immortality as a punchline in one of stone-cold legend Norm MacDonald’s Conan appearances. I was hanging out with some buddies outside the Norwood VFW hall, where there was a show going on. Some friend’s band was about to play when we, at the spur of the moment, decided to go see Chairman of the Board at the nearby Central Parke Plaza Cinemas. We drove over, paid—as I recall it was like $5, being the rare occasion when a first-run movie OPENED at a second-run house—and watched about twenty minutes before discovering, to no-one’s shock, that is was an unwatchable piece of shit. We got back to the VFW just in time to completely miss the friend’s band. In retrospect, this all seems rather dickish.

Chill Factor
You wouldn’t believe the premise of this movie if I told you.

Double Team
Had to double check against my porous memory to see if this actually ended with somebody fighting a tiger in a Roman coliseum. It does.

Firestorm
Less successful than the Dennis Rodman action-hero crossover, represented above and in the likes of Simon Sez, this was brush-cut square Howie Long’s attempt to assay his quarterback-sacking into viable stardom. The film, about forest firefighters, is mostly memorable for William Forsyth’s villain, who for reasons I cannot recall poses as a Canadian, and at one point says, “How ‘bout a good Canadian beer, eh?”

The General’s Daughter
Never actually saw this, but when I was ushering at the now-departed Showcase Cinemas Kenwood, it was always a treat to go in and sweep up popcorn while listening to “Sea Lion Woman,” which played over the closing credits. Less enjoyable was tidying up after Notting Hill, which subjected one to Elvis Costello’s “She,” a pretty fair contender for worst song eva.

Good Burger
Another musical note: Ended with a ska song, with guest vox by stars Keenan and Kel. My friend reminded me recently of the fate of Sinbad in the film: “He gets buried under debris, perhaps fatally, at film’s end.” Some years prior, I paid upwards of $2 to see Sinbad in First Kid.

The Island of Dr. Moreau
Nelson de la Rosa killed it in this. Did he wear a tiny tuxedo and pose atop a piano while Marlon Brando tickled the ivories, or am I just dreaming aloud?

Mickey Blue Eyes
Like the girl on the Jersey ferry that Bernstein talks about in Kane, not a month has passed since I first saw the trailer for this film that I haven’t thought about Hugh Grant’s line readings (“Ees me, Miggy”) when doing his Wiseguy voice. As a sidenote, I recall being intensely attracted to Jeanne Tripplehorn in this movie, which today seems just odd.

MouseHunt
Went to a sneak preview of this and they gave us koozies shaped like wedges of cheese.

Out to Sea
Find me another 16-year-old who paid admission, of his own free will, to watch this sad, slack, deeply depressing late-period Lemmon-Matthau film.

Switchback
Danny Glover is a serial killer or something. Upon exiting, my friend and I decided that it was the most boring movie we had ever seen. Nothing has happened since to make me significantly revise this opinion.

Wishmaster
A comedy staple for years. The villain in this movie is a Genie, but since you cannot very well make a horror movie about a “Genie,” they call it/ him a “Djinn” instead. The premise is that he grants people’s wishes in cruelly ironic fashion. However, this is done through either leading them on or, more often, willfully misconstruing or even ignoring what they’re asking for. For example: In either this or the direct-to-video (I think) sequel, someone says “Fuck me” in the presence of the Djinn, at which point they are suddenly bent in two, so as to be able to fuck themselves up the ass. This seems to me an egregious cheat on the part of the Djinn, as “Fuck me” is a far cry from “I wish I could fuck myself up the ass.”

Nick Pinkerton is a regular contributor to The Village Voice film section, Sight & Sound Magazine, and sundry other publications. He lives in Brooklyn, NY. 

It is no secret that everything I do is for the children, and therefore it’s unsurprising that I recently found myself talking to a classroom of MFA students about the sweet science of film criticism. Among the questions fielded: “Is there any critic whose work you can’t stand?”

The short answer is that I too-rarely remember to read film criticism at all, but my go-to bête noire is of course The New Yorker’s Anthony Lane (or, as Kent Jones recently referred to him in his Tree of Life piece for Film Comment, “the Wonderfully Witty Anthony Lane”—my favorite use of Krazy Kapitals in recent memory.) I do not in actual fact mark Lane as a bad writer—he did an introduction to my Back Bay Books copy of The Complete Short Stories of Evelyn Waugh that I quite enjoyed—but rather as one very ill-suited to writing about movies, thanks to his inability or unwillingness to engage with them on level terrain, and his eagerness to sacrifice almost any point to achieve the sort of clever ripostes that have never, I am certain, made anyone laugh out loud. Not long ago I read the following, published in 1947 by Robert Warshow, and almost fell out of my chair:

“The New Yorker has always dealt with experience not by trying to understand it but by prescribing the attitude to be adopted toward it. This makes it possible to feel intelligent without thinking, and it is a way of making everything tolerable, for the assumption of a suitable attitude toward experience can give one the illusion of having dealt with it adequately.”

Whelp.

This got me thinking, naturally: Who is the Worst American Film Critic of All Time?

We cannot hope to be all-inclusive in this survey. This noble profession, which has seen its population dwindle like that of the Sumatran Rhino, once included scores of local critics in papers from sea to shining sea. I should say that when chancing across the work of long-dead, little-remembered critics from Fort Worth or Portland or who knows where—the sort of thing excerpted in filmmaker biographies and the like—more often than not I am surprised by the unusually high quality of the writing, the remnants of a more literate America. But let us limit ourselves to “names.”

Of the big byline critics of the talking picture years, none have been more thoroughly and routinely lambasted than Bosley Crowther, late of the New York Times. Insofar as I can tell, not having gone any deeper into his oeuvre than an occasional chance Googling has taken me, the majority of the objections toward Crowther are based on the fact that he measured movies against the yardstick of his own Adlai Stevenson-vintage liberal-humanist morality, an approach that came to seem fuddy-duddyish with his pan of Bonnie and Clyde, and led to his sacking.

An articulate moral perspective in dealing with aesthetic values may have seemed an impediment in 1967, though it’s a rare enough quality to warrant appreciation today. I would point aspirant film critics—everyone really—towards the words of Klemens Wenzel, Prince von Metternich, Foriegn Minister of the Austrian Empire:

“An idea is like a fixed siege gun; it has the power to strike everything along a single straight line. But a principle is like a gun mounted on a revolving platform: it can turn and strike at error in every direction when it is anchored on a strong and permanent base.”

As counterpoint, I will give the floor to C.S. Lewis, on the critic-as-crusader:

“If we are not careful criticism may become a mere excuse for taking revenge on books whose smell we dislike by erecting our temperamental antipathies into pseudo-moral judgments.”

Finally, there is this nugget, posted over the desk of one of Lewis’s Oxford students, Kenneth Tynan, during his tenure as drama critic at the Evening Standard:

“Rouse tempers, goad and lacerate, raise whirlwinds.”

Somewhere at the intersection of the above perspectives lies the function of criticism. To fail in offering moral insight, aesthetic appreciation, or shit-stirring is, then, to fail as a critic.

This brings us to Crowther’s successor, Vincent Canby, who became the Times’s head critic in 1969, and who was wrong about positively everything, and not even interesting in the process.

I first became enamored of Canby upon reading his dismissive review of The Outfit, which Cannily (sorry) observed that John Flynn’s perfectly modulated crime picture was, “a B movie, made approximately 30 years too late for the market.” As to what that means, or why this invalidates the film as an aesthetic object, Mr. Canby is less than forthcoming. More recently I encountered Canby’s insipid write-up of Michelangelo Antonioni’s Identification of a Woman (1982), in which the American critic punctures the Italian master’s pretense, much in the fashion of an earlier brushoff of Fellini’s Casanova, a review which closed with this entirely unpretentious kicker: “The production is gigantic, but the ideas and feelings are small. One longs to go home and listen to Mozart’s ‘Don Giovanni.’” Yes, doesn’t one just.

Canby’s last NYT byline ran three years after his decease. It was, fittingly, an Obituary for the deeply unfunny but undeniably unpretentious Bob Hope, allowing Canby the rare privilege of continuing to endorse dreck from beyond the grave. For this achievement and so many others, and particularly with consideration of the prominent pulpit from which he broadcasted his purposeless column-space stuffer, I humbly submit Vincent Canby as the Worst American Film Critic of All Time. Rest In Piss, Vincent!

Nick Pinkerton is a regular contributor to The Village Voice film section, Sight & Sound Magazine, and sundry other publications. He lives in Brooklyn, NY. 

From 2003 to 2004, I was an employee of New York’s Kim’s Video franchise at its Ave. A, East Village outpost—the mini-chain’s original non-Laundromat storefront. Upon being shuttered, this is the location that was eulogized in the NY Times for being the “mean” Kim’s, an accomplishment of which I am still prouder than anything else I have achieved in my professional life.

Though I was fired about a month before the store closed—for chronic lateness due to an ongoing battle with the “Irish flu”— for a time I was a fair-haired boy, enjoying a meteoric rise to Assistant Manager and an accompanying $0.50 pay raise, meaning I was pulling down a cool $6.00/ hr.—tax free, chumps!

I have many fond memories of my tenure at Kim’s: Being caught by one of the Mondo’s “corporate” boys while climbing the shelving units on an adrenal high, blasting Joe Esposito’s “You’re the Best” from The Karate Kid; solemnly eating cubed turkey from a foil tray in the back room on Thanksgiving; smoking tea in that same back room and laughing myself halfway into a hernia at the very sight of John Saxon in Enter the Dragon; being jaw-droppingly rude to some customers and nice as pie to others for no discernible reason…

Kim’s was also the finest film school that New York City had to offer. This was in part thanks to the exceptional knowledge of my co-workers—this column certainly could not exist without the influence of one Steven Oddo, most famous for being the ectomorphic young man who carves ‘WAR’ into his chest at the beginning of Nick Zedd’s War is Menstrual Envy, and a possessor of one of the most fascinating individuated aesthetics that I have ever encountered. Also, though by no means the cinematheque that nearby Mondo—Kim’s 3-story flagship—was, Avenue A had a pretty extraordinary archive of oddities to pull off the shelves and enjoy on the 20” TV perched on the far end of the counter. Shift after shift, certain titles could be relied upon to give a mainline-shot of viewing pleasure, of which I hope to give a fair representation below:

Dracula (The Dirty Old Man)

I have always had a soft spot for krazy-dubbing comedy—my high school years were much improved by a well-worn tape of Zombie ’90: Extreme Pestilence—but Dracula (The Dirty Old Man) raised the genre to heretofore unknown heights. I have only just now realized that, despite having viewed this Dracula—a work well beyond Bram Stoker’s wildest imaginings—nearly 500,000 times, I know practically nothing about the circumstances of its production. I can only think this is for the best.  

Jack and the Beanstalk

This was one of two kiddie pictures on a much-played Something Weird disc—the other was The Wonderful Land of Oz—both of which were directed by Barry Mahon, a Florida-based filmmaker who specialized in roughies and other dodgy exploitation. This apparently qualified him in the eyes of Pirates World theme park in Dania, Florida, for churning out a series of inadvertently chilling matinees, of which this cardboard-set fairy tale classic, in which Jack lives in a ranch-style house in Coral Gables or something, is the finest example. We compulsively rewatched the scene in which Honest John, the magic bean salesman, dreams about eating a steak, with actor Christopher Brooks delivering the monologue in a hypnotically halting cadence (“A big… fat……….juicy….charcoal-broiled….”) An offhand statement by Mr. Oddo while watching the film has echoed in my skull ever since: “This is the entertainment America deserves.” 

Bill and Bill on His Own

Mickey Rooney received an Emmy Award for playing retarded Minneapolis man Bill Sackter in this diptych of TV movies. Awful people ever since have been turning purple guffawing at his performance.

Siegfried & Roy: The Magic Box

There is a lot of nightmarish laughter to be heard in this trailer alone, so you can only imagine what goes on at feature length. YouTube Comments are, as ever, a delight: “I would trade my life with Roy anytime, even though I will be bitten by a tiger in the throat, that’s fine as long as I can live in such dream, the palace, the white lion wandering around, the bamboo torch, the green parrot, the pool and the green field. it feels like heaven.”

The Judy Garland Christmas Special—“Steam Heat”

Liza drops by mom’s place to perform “Steam Heat” from The Pajama Game with her *ahem* “fiancée,” one Tracy Everitt… who apparently now teaches dance classes in Hoboken! 

The Lemon Grove Kids Meet the Monsters

Ray Dennis Steckler, auteur of Rat Pfink a Boo Boo and The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies, made a foray into family programming with this trilogy of Bowery Boys-esque larks, with Steckler himself, a/k/a Cash Flagg, starring in the Huntz Hall role. The principle allure of this film was the mysterious effect it had on co-worker Deidra Garcia: after being subjected to even a few frames, she would react in a way that can only be described as complete emotional and physical meltdown verging on out-and-out tantrum, so that one feared for one’s very life if it was not turned off immediately.

The Singing Detective- “Teddy Bears’ Picnic”

A reductive way to approach Dennis Potter’s very great BBC miniseries, but for some long-forgotten reason a mania for this tune (with music by John Walter Bratton and lyrics by Jimmy Kennedy), swept through a certain subsection of the staff, and the only way to get the goods in our pre-wifi wilderness was to fast-forward to the applicable scene.

All Things Paul Lynde

The Paul Lynde Halloween Special had a very special place in the Kim’s canon, but really anything Lynde was Kosher: His nuanced performance as “Bullets” in Beach Blanket Bingo; Bye Bye Birdie, which included the additional pleasure of 33-year old Jesse Pearson simultaneously completely missing the point of and predicting the future of Elvis with his hanging gut in gold lamé; the Lynde “E! True Hollywood Story” which, if memory serves, was full of salacious anecdotes about Mr. Center Square throwing hustlers out of hotel windows… Even today, when I find myself cursing the Almighty for fixing his canon ‘gainst self-slaughter, it only takes a few hours of Lynde on “The Dean Martin Show” to bring me back from the brink. Paul, I love you!

Nick Pinkerton is a regular contributor to The Village Voice film section, Sight & Sound Magazine, and sundry other publications. He lives in Brooklyn, NY. 

As I grow older—and this seems to just keep happening—I find that there’s very little that interests me so much in art and in life as paradox, those quandaries which can never quite be worked through, and can at most be handled by blocking out contradictory information through the willful adoption of blinders.

One of the pleasures of re-reading Pauline Kael’s collected criticism (see last week’s column) was to be recalled of her energetic-if-often-frustrating undertaking—abetted by unheard-of word counts—to describe how films, chaotic combinations of economic pressures, artistic deliberation, on-set happenstance, and audience reception that they are, run off in several different directions at once. Quantifying all of these simultaneous happenings being the analytical equivalent of herding cats.

A personal favorite example of the unpredictable alchemy which occurs in the passage from screenplay to screen comes from a “Making Of” DVD extra to the Criterion release of Maurice Pialat’s A nos amours. In it, Pialat, who acts in the film, describes the process of evaluating his own performance. He remembers re-watching takes, in some of which he can recall having been completely emotionally immersed in the scene, wholly sharing the emotions of his character; others he remembers as having been purely perfunctory. What Pialat notes is that, with full knowledge of which takes were “invested” and which were not, he often cannot tell the qualitative difference (Anyone who writes has probably experienced some variation on this phenomenon: True labor-of-love pieces can go unnoticed, while some dashed-off bit of piffle will be quoted to you for years.)

Here is but one facet of the fascinating phenomena which altogether make up the problem of intention in the arts. (As difficult to comprehend for those who create as those who discuss. There are a few things that no critic should ever write. One is “I think that…” or “I feel that…”; another is “Unintentionally funny”—what are you, clairvoyant?) Another item of recurring interest is what I call “The Lewis Paradox.”

The Lewis Paradox is named for Herschell Gordon Lewis, who went from making “nudie cutie” titillations in the early ‘60s to become the pioneer in “gore” filmmaking, beginning with 1963’s Blood Feast. Lewis’s longtime producer, David F. Friedman—who died in February of this year—was a midway huckster, a Southern carnie barker to the bone. Lewis himself was, as he has quite explicitly said, only out to make a buck—he had a background in marketing, a genius for swinging sponsorships, and when he lost his cornered market to other more stylish sickos, he dropped out of the film business entirely and began making a comfortable living speaking at sales seminars and authoring such horrors as Effective E-Mail Marketing and Open Me Now: Direct Mail Envelopes That Work.

What I think is particularly interesting about Blood Feast is that, however cynical the motives for its creation, it has an austere, hypnotic ceremonial quality and a stark perversity that can’t be so easily laughed away (Per yours truly’s dead earnest roundup of a small 2011 HGL retro at Anthology Film Archives: “The [film’s] Egyptian theme was determined by Friedman and Lewis’s use of Miami Beach’s Suez Motel as their studio, and parallels the raiding of Old Hollywood Biblical epics in ’60s underground films.”)

The general assumption—justified, yes, much of the time—is that money can only have a corrosive effect on the artist. And yet here we have something like an artist, albeit in the art brut category, who almost certainly would not have produced work had it not been for financial incentive. This may seem like a specious claim, granted that it’s based on the assumption that reader, like author, finds something of art in the stilted monologues of Montag the Magnificent in Lewis’s film maudit Wizard of Gore. On a more highbrow plane—or at least in another era—the Lewis Paradox might equally well be applied to Fyodor Dostoevsky, whose mounting gambling debts kept him feverishly dictating his pay-by-the-chapter novels, so that we might not today have the putrefaction of Father Zosima or “The Grand Inquisitor” were it not for an unhappy turn at the Faro table. (Perhaps most pertinently, you certainly would not be reading this supple prose were it not for the bottle of Slivovitz that I am contractually obliged to receive with the delivery of each The Classical column—hey, it beats geeking!)

To the ancients, inspiration was the product of the Muse—for we moderns, a Tenth must be added: Lucre. I have recently been re-reading the final novel by a favorite author, Dawn Powell, The Golden Spur. The title refers to a West Village watering hole, but also doubles as a commentary on the monetary ambition that prods along artistic undertaking, for among Powell’s favorite themes was the eel-slippery nature of popular success, which she herself never enjoyed. (Powell, it should be added, had a mentally impaired son to care for by the time she was 24, and it is difficult to say how much of her bibliography we owe to the additional financial pressure created by “Jojo.”)

So, here’s to that eternal motivator, the Tenth Muse, The Golden Spur. Of course in carrying on like this, I do not mean to discount the other, nobler motivations that one can have for a career in arts and letters. To represent these more lofty and beautiful aims, I turn to a monologue from Nathaniel West’s doggerel novella, The Dream Life of Balso Snell:

“I’m fed up with poetry and art. Yet what can I do. I need women and because I can’t buy or force them, I have to make poems for them: God knows how tired I am of using the insanity of Van Gogh and the adventures of Gauguin as can-openers for the ambitious Count Six-Times. And how sick I am of literary bitches. But they’re the only kind that’ll have me…”

On that note, I’m clocking out. Next week: Maybe something about digital projection?

Nick Pinkerton is a regular contributor to The Village Voice film section, Sight & Sound Magazine, and sundry other publications. He lives in Brooklyn, NY. 

The usually stone-cold hearts of American movie critics have been softened and set all aflutter by Martin Scorsese’s love letter to early cinema disguised as tyke gone wild adventure Hugo. 

We haven’t had a chance to catch up with Hugo just yet, but the film’s nostalgic save-capital-C-cinema bent definitely seems to hit something that’s been in the air of late. (The Classical columnist Nick Pinkerton spent the 17th iteration of his weekly rant on just this topic.) If you care at all about movies, then we’d recommend the stellar new documentary These Amazing Shadows, which offers a behind-the-scenes peek at the folks at the National Film Registry who preserve our cinematic history.

These Amazing Shadows: What do the films Casablanca, Blazing Saddles and West Side Story have in common? Besides being popular, they have also been deemed “culturally, historically or aesthetically significant” by the Library of Congress and listed on The National Film Registry. These Amazing Shadows tells the history and importance of the Registry, a roll call of American cinema treasures that reflects the diversity of film, and indeed the American experience itself. The current list of 550 films includes selections from every genre – documentaries, home movies, Hollywood classics, avant-garde, newsreels and silent films. These Amazing Shadows reveals how American movies tell us so much about ourselves…”not just what we did, but what we thought, what we felt, what we aspired to, and the lies we told ourselves”.

Get These Amazing Shadows Now.

The Classical's Library of Lists, Brooklyn, NY

 Go forth, and have erroneous opinions no more!

Nick Pinkerton is a regular contributor to The Village Voice film section, Sight & Sound Magazine, and sundry other publications. He lives in Brooklyn, NY.

I’ve been meaning to do something with this for a couple of weeks. It’s a video from something called the Knockout Network featuring a young woman named “Vivian Kellie.” She is identified as a “sexy geek,” although she is almost certainly not a geek in any sense of the word that I am familiar with—that is to say, she is not a depraved, D.T.-ridden career alcoholic who gnaws the heads off of animals in a traveling carnival, a la Nightmare Alley, nor is she, at least as she appears today, the sort of person who would attract undue attention in the classroom for her over-studious demeanor.

Vivian, after a short montage which includes a quick peek at her ass, proceeds to read a quote from the Danish-German film director Douglas Sirk—“In movies you must be a gambler. To produce films is to gamble.” This is certainly one of the more banal things that this tremendously cultivated and clever man ever said on record, but it seems to have made its way onto a lot of these quotesyoulike.com sites on the internet, and for all I know, Sirk might have even said something very like it at one point. I am not going to cross-reference with Jon Halliday’s Sirk on Sirk for confirmation—though I will give that book the highest possible recommendation.

There are several things that I find particularly mirth-inducing about this video. Not least is the fact that it has, as of the date of this writing, 6,289,044 views (By contrast, this clip of Douglas Sirk speaking about his art, from A Personal Journey Through American Movies with Martin Scorsese has 1,075.) The first time Mr. Sirk’s name comes up, Vivian seems to call him “Douglish.” After delivering the quote, she inquires of the viewer: “Are you a gambler, or are you more of the safer type of person?”

Like most cognizant people, I am well aware that nothing means anything anymore. I often find myself thinking of scraps of the inner monologue by David Mitchell’s perpetually miserable small-c conservative, Mark, on the superlative BBC show Peep Show, such as this gem which accompanies a shopping trip with his fiancée, where Mark is befuddled by such phenomena as ironic Chairman Mao tees and extraneous zippers: “That’s the way things are these days. Let’s just put a zip here, a Swastika there. Why not? Who knows what these things were once used for? Who the Hell even cares?” But little moments like Vivian and Douglish Sirk still retain the power to astonish and, after a fashion, delight.

Speaking of which, I sure do hate those “Auteur Names Rendered in Heavy Metal Band Logo Fonts” shirts, which apparently originated at CineFile video in Los Angeles, and have long been for sale in the lobby of the IFC Center. Ozu/Ozzy. Herzog/Danzig. Bela Tarr/Black Flag. Scorsese/Scorpions. (The worst of them all.) They’ve been around for a few years now and have consistently upset me every single time I’ve thought about them, as they pair two things that have positively no logical association with one another (The Tarr/Black Flag parallel, I’ll admit, comes the closest to making some kind of sense), save as an attempt to make the “cool” cache of rock culture rub off onto cinephilia. Certainly plenty of bands have drawn subject matter and imagery from the film world, but this is more a matter of enforced commingling by some shadowy third party, selling structuralist cinema to the cool kid crowd. I suppose a cogent argument could be made that the very bold disparity of this juxtaposition of unlike objects creates a kind of bracing surrealist humor, like the celebrated “beautiful as the chance meeting on a dissecting-table of a sewing-machine and an umbrella!” of Comte de Lautréamont’s Maldorer. But quite honestly, I tells ya, sometimes I feel more and more like:

I get a particular thrill when Andy points to Augustus Saint-Gaudens’s Admiral Farragut statue in Madison Square (setting by Stanford White, of McKim, Mead, & White, who was shot in the face while watching chorus girls on the Roof Garden of the nearby second Madison Square Garden, which he also designed!), which also happens to be one of my favorite public sculptures in New York City. (What are the others, you ask? Why, the Dungeons & Dragons masterpiece that is The King Wladyslaw Jagiello Monument in Central Park, of course!)

Yes, this is the tack to take, as so much dyspeptic venting threatens to become tedious. If I’ve learned one thing from St. Armond White—and in fact I’ve learned everything from him—it’s that a critic should never tear something down without offering an alternative in its place (i.e. “the hipster nihilism from Movie A receives a stern rebuke from the pop savvy of Movie B”) So, here are the two things that have given me more pure aesthetic pleasure than anything else in this third week of March, 2012:

Absolutely love the forearm-block “Don’t look at me” post-squirt-shame faces.

Whatever your vocation, this is always how you should be visualizing yourself operating in your given line of work.

Whelp, that about covers it this week for “Zee good sheet,” as Kickboy Face used to say. And remember, if it doesn’t say Bombast, it’s not the real thing.

Criticism of all stripes, the personal essay, the feuilleton, and the knock-knock joke are all dead as Dillinger: this is a given. But for those of us whose sole desire is to be “in the arts” without having to produce art, lecture, or remove our house-slippers, there is still one boom industry: List-making!

Kids these days love their lists, and why shouldn’t they? They’re like expertise in an easy-to-swallow capsule form! In olden times, if you were to going to learn something about anything outside of official school culture, you’d have to hack your way through overgrown, vine-choked pathways into the pop past. You would, perhaps, speak with enthusiasm about “A Warm Place” off The Downward Spiral, and some forbiddingly cool elder within earshot would patiently-if-condescendingly inform you that it was “A total Eno rip-off,” and you would feign knowing what that meant, then go to the public library and then, after a bit of trial-and-error with the spelling, search the CD collection for “Eno,” blindly hoping for the best in what you pick out, possibly consulting the wholly worthless Rolling Stone Album Guide for reference, which would inform you that the very best Black Flag album was by far inferior to the very worst George Harrison solo album.

It was an endless gauntlet of risked rejection which in turn enforced a sort of social natural selection, ensuring that only the dedicated would persevere, and allowing those who had persevered to interact under the assumption of an us vs. them shared set of passions and swimming-upstream hardships.

Well, now you little turds can Google “100 Essential Albums of the ‘70s” or whatever, do an afternoon’s worth of downloading safely hidden away from those once-awe-inducing-but-since-deposed cultural gatekeepers, video and record store clerks, and bluff “hip” well enough to b.s. your way into getting blown by the Art History major of your choice. (One offshoot of this all-access development is that those whose self-identities are wrapped-up in ahead-of-the-curve hip have headed off, loaded for bear, into the hills of crate-digging OOP obscurantism, forming communes where they eke out an existence overpraising justly-neglected garbage.)

Good on you, but I’ll be damned if I’m going to offer you any shortcuts. In this spirit, I offer the Bombast’s List of Worthless Top 10 Lists.

Top 10 Movies I Have, Despite No Particular Fondness for Any of Them, Inexplicably Seen Hundreds if Not Thousands of Times

1. Beastmaster (Don Coscarelli, 1992)
2. Highlander (Russell Mulcahy, 1986)
3. Eating Raoul (Paul Bartel, 1982)
4. Young Guns (Christopher Cain, 1988)
5. Elvira, Mistress of the Dark (James Signorelli, 1988)
6. Drop Dead Fred (Ate de Jong, 1991)
7. Harold and Maude (Hal Ashby, 1971)
8. National Lampoon’s European Vacation (Amy Heckerling, 1985)
9. Stripes (Ivan Reitman, 1981)

Top 10 Things That Shouldn’t Appear in a Film Review, Ever

1. “Like a jazz solo…”
2. “bat-shit crazy”
3. “…avoids the ‘big scenes’…”
4. “patiently-observed”
5. “filmic”
6. “beautifully-lensed”
7. “As the story unfolds at a whirring pace whose tremors flow like the seamless pulses in a sleek, percussive symphony, watching the movie feels like lying back after the meat loaf and mashed potatoes and being spoon-fed gourmet ice cream while the wind whistles in your ears.”
8. TK
9. TK
10. TK

Top 10 Movies That Comedy Central Has Played the Shit Out Of

1. Earth Girls are Easy (Julien Temple, 1988)
2. Glitch! (Nico Mastorakis, 1976)
3. PCU (Hart Bochner, 1994)
4. Soul Man (Steve Miner, 1986)
5. Wasn’t there one with Michael Ontkean in a ski lodge? (Dunno)
6. Real Genius (Martha Coolidge, 1985)
7. Pizza Man (J.F. Lawton, 1991)
8. Cannibal Women in the Avocado Jungle of Death (J.F. Lawton, 1989)
9. Car 54 Where Are You? (1994, Bill Fishman)
10. Somebody told me they play Waiting… (Rob McKittrick, 2003) a lot now. So, I guess that.

Top 10 Filmmakers Overdue For Complete Career Retrospectives With Freshly-Restored 35mm Prints Or 4K Digital Projections

1. Nico Mastorakis
2. Barry Mahon
3. Larry Buchanan
4. S.F. Brownrigg
5. Al Adamson
6. Michael and Roberta Findlay
7. Bertrand Blier
8. Ron Ormond
9. Duke Mitchell

Top 10 Strangest Movies to Engage in Furtive Sexual Activity While Watching

1. Le diable, probablement (Robert Bresson, 1977)
2. The Bohemian Girl (Hal Roach, 1935)
3. Fantastic Planet (Rene Laloux, 1973)
4. Crash (David Cronenberg, 1996)
5. Eastern Promises (David Cronenberg, 2007)
6. Counsellor at Law (William Wyler, 1933)
7. Event Horizon (Paul W.S. Anderson, 1997)
8. The Lion King (Roger Allers and Rob Minkoff, 1994)
9. Badlands (Terence Malick, 1973)
10. TK

Top 10 Proposed Movies That Never Got Made and Don’t Exist So You Can’t Watch ‘Em, Chump

1. Jerry Lewis’s The Catcher in the Rye
2. Robert Bresson’s Book of Genesis/ Leo McCarey’s Adam and Eve
3. Carl Theodor Dreyer’s Jesus
4. Sam Peckinpah’s Castaway
5. Frank Tashlin’s May This House Be Safe From Tigers
6. Roberto Rossellini’s Untitled American Founding Fathers Historical Film
7. Michael Powell’s The Tempest
8. Sam Fuller’s The Lusty Days
9. Jacques Rivette’s Histoire de Marie et Julien (The Leslie Caron/ Maurice Pialat version)
10. Howard Hawks’s When It’s Hot, Play it Cool

Top 10 Film Lines That Should Be Quoted For Humorous Effect More Often

1. “It’s been such a long time since I made love to a woman I didn’t feel
   inferior to.” –Richard Jordan, Interiors

I have, just today, been getting myself up to speed with the last year’s discussion of the state of cinephilia, beginning with Nico Baumbach’s “All That Heaven Allows: What Is, Or Was, Cinephilia?” in Film Comment, and hotlink hopscotching my way backwards through the collected essays of the 2011 Edinburgh Film Festival’s “Project: New Cinephilia.” (“When something is said to be dead or dying, we are bound to hear more about it than ever” asserts Baumbach’s piece, quite correctly.)

I had, in fact, been invited to weigh in on “Project: New Cinephilia,” but demurely declined—this was probably because I was busy dashing off a lucrative review of Marmaduke or something, but also because, as I recall saying to an inquisitive colleague in an e-mail: “I am not exactly certain what cinephilia is, but strongly suspect that it’s for creeps and I hate it.” Let this week’s jeremiad, then, make up for my previous absence.

What most immediately comes to my mind when the subject of cinephilia is brought up is a statement by Eric Rohmer, in a 1983 interview with Jean Narboni, which appears in the collection of Rohmer’s critical writings titled A Taste for Beauty:

“Cinema has more to fear from its own clichés than from those of the other arts. Right now, I despise, I hate, cinephile madness, cinephile culture . . . people whose culture is limited to the world of film, who think only through film, and when they make films, their films contain beings who exist only through film, whether the reminiscence of old films or the people in the profession. I think that there are other things in the world besides film and, conversely, that film feeds on things that exist outside it. I would even say that film is the art that can feed on itself the least.”

Now, of course, there are probably a thousand personal definitions of “cinephilia”—I see Kent Jones on “Project: New Cinephilia” using it as, essentially, a synonym for auteurism—but mine is Rohmer’s: A fashion of thinking about movies that is exclusive rather than inclusive, hermetic rather than open.

Rohmer’s condemnation is all the more resonant because it comes from one of the founding fathers of the very culture that is being decried, co-author (with Claude Chabrol) of one of the first book length studies of Alfred Hitchcock, and part of that 50s wave of French intellectuals who began the polemic dialogue that would, justly, earn the Seventh Art a prestige and stature equal to its predecessors. Pulling off such a putsch demanded of its conspirators a familiarity with the arts beyond cinema, so as to more persuasively argue that cinema belonged among them. Think of Truffaut’s bibliophilia, or the zanily enthusiastic Godard quotes that are dredged up every time the appropriate retrospective rolls around: “Robert Bresson… is the French cinema, as Dostoyevsky is the Russian novel and Mozart is German music.” or “There was theater (Griffith), poetry (Murnau), painting (Rossellini), dance (Eisenstein), music (Renoir). Henceforth there is cinema. And the cinema is Nicholas Ray.”

Even those not, by their own self-definition, participant in the auteurist struggle recognized that knowing movies alone wasn’t sufficient to talk about movies—per Pauline Kael, the motion-picture medium was “a bastard cross-fertilized super-art,” and as such required an acquaintance with the other arts that made up its component parts to discuss it properly. (This is not to bring up role that should be played, in the discussion of movies, of the business side of affairs, the imposition of technical limitations, and the actual experience of life as lived—all of which falls under the rubric of “the real world,” and which appears in movie-chat just about as often as the wider worlds of art do.)

If nothing else, one would think that young critics would be dissuaded from wholeheartedly accepting the tenets of previous generations’ cinephile culture by the very fact of its establishment: The frontier has been fenced! Where’s the opportunity to make your reputation? In turn, the great attraction of writing as a cinephile for fellow cinephiles, is rather easy to comprehend—by playing the connect-the-influences game, you can fill up your word count right quick and be home in time for dinner. (You may notice that I have skirted the issue of academic film writing, to which much of Mr. Baumbach’s piece is addressed. There is a very good reason for this: I can’t read that shit.)

I have a particularly vivid memory, dating to my 18^th year, of being in a thrift store in the basement of the James Dean Museum in the actor’s hometown, Fairmount, Indiana. Among the fol-de-rol for sale—I left with a small cardboard cutout of a geriatric-looking Orson Welles in a movie called The Witching, which I have still never seen, though the cutout currently hangs on my bathroom door—there was a big, dumb green button that said ‘Movie Buff,’ which someone humorously suggested that I should buy. Now, obviously normal 18-year olds don’t pilgrimage to the graves of long-dead Hollywood actors (or commit B & E into the same actor’s shuttered, decaying former high school, so to see the rotting stage whose boards the same actor once strutted, and to find the spot on the wall where Morrissey signed his name in the “Suedehead” video), nor do they look forward to bringing home a copy of Scarlet Street more than they anticipate prom, but something about that ‘Movie Buff’ button filled me with instant recoil. And I suppose it’s the same for “cinephilia”—I’m not sure what it is, but it’s probably for creeps, so keep it way far away from me.

Nick Pinkerton is a regular contributor to The Village Voice film section, Sight & Sound magazine, and sundry other publications. He lives in Brooklyn, NY.

To my great regret, last weekend I missed a showing of Ishirō Honda’s Mothra at the Journal Square Loew’s in Jersey City, New Jersey. In part, my disappointment stems from the fact that the movie is a great personal favorite, containing as it does the first big-screen appearance by charming vocal duo “The Peanuts”, seen above in 1964’s Ghidrah, the Three-Headed Monster, as well as the razing of the bizarro New York, “New Kirk City”. Just as much, though, I regret every missed opportunity to gawp at the Journal Square theater’s impressive Mayan-Mughal mass and extravagantly gilded interior, which, for those not within driving distance of Jersey City, can be viewed in Whit Stillman’s The Last Days of Disco or, more recently, in the video for The Strokes’ “Under Cover of Darkness.”

Instead, I took my first tour of the interior of Olana, the painter Frederic Church’s 1872 Victorian-Moorish folly in Hudson, New York—its imported orientalism perhaps a precursor to the extravagant and exotic movie-palaces of the century to come, a subject of which I never seem to tire. Just last week, through the magic of the Internet, I found myself “paging” through Architectures de Cinemas, a 1981 tome published by Editions du Moniteur, which traces the evolution of cinema structures from the music-hall to the salles Odéon. And as I looked upon the greatest excesses of Gaumont and Pathé, I thought it was perhaps high time to look back upon some of the “palaces” that meant so much to my formative moviegoing years.

I have often thought—and I do not care that this is a hackneyed observation, as it happens to be a true one—that the history of architecture in the 20^th century, if not the history of the 20^th century itself, is a story of steadily diminished expectations: Introduce a cut corner to see if the public will swallow it, standardize these “simplifications,” repeat. Nowhere is this more evident than in cinema architecture. There is not a single really attractive structure in the list to follow, and only one that I would even classify as giddily ugly. But they are nevertheless the personal property of my memory, and I reserve the right to accordingly sepia-tone them.

Super Saver Cinemas 8  Forest Fair Mall, Fairfield, OH

The first thing that anyone born in Greater Cincinnati during the Reagan era will tell you about the Super Saver Cinemas is the story, possibly apocryphal, that it was sued by an apoplectic man for inducing him to seizure. It certainly seems possible, as the madly-strobing façade of this dollar second-run joint opened into a lobby/concession area that was hectic with disco bowl/roller rink neon and doodling lasers, blacklit for optimal display of dandruff. Forest Fair Mall, where the theater was located, was optimistically opened in 1989 with a full complement of upscale retailers that promptly began abandoning their leases like scuttling rats off a sinking ship. By the time I had a license and was routinely driving north for discount movies there, Forest Fair was at probably 25% capacity, with roving youth gangs sullenly stalking past the Rube Goldberg structure next to the Food Court that had long ago fallen still. For some reason my most vivid movie-related memory from Forest Fair, however, is coming across an enormous bin almost completely loaded with VHS copies of the John Cryer film Hiding Out.

Central Parke Plaza Cinemas  Norwood, Ohio

Norwood is a resolutely blue-collar neighborhood which, though surrounded on all sides by Cincinnati, was never incorporated into the metropolis, and thereby retained its particular hardscrabble, pebble-dash, hash-house identity. This makes doubly humorous the attempted elegant, uptown urbanity of the “Central Parke Plaza,” not precisely the sort of place you would go in a tux. This second-run house shuttered sometime around 2000, and was followed into oblivion by “Showcase Cinemas Cincinnati,” which was also, somewhat confusingly, actually located in Norwood (or is it actually nearby Bond Hill?). Regardless, the latter theater remains visible from the Norwood Lateral, a sepulchral cinderblock slab adrift in a sea of cracked parking lot asphalt, now returning to the elements. My friend Dave, a native of Norwood, once told me a rather pitiable and hilarious anecdote about being dropped off by his dad at the then brand-spanking-new Showcase Cincinnati for a 7^th grade date to see Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, which, after being stood up, he watched alone through a blurry veil of tears. Sometimes it seems there’s just too much sadness in the world, I tell ya.

Oakley Drive-In  Oakley, Cincinnati, Ohio

Due East of Norwood lay gentle Oakley, and this handjob hot-spot, where generations of tri-county teenagers were dutifully unburdened of their genetic goo. The last thing I remember seeing here was Deep Impact, for what was inexplicably the second time. The first? “Crocodile” Dundee II.

Tri-County Loew’s, later Showcase Cinemas Tri-County  Tri-County Mall Area, Sharonville, Ohio

It was here that my mother took me to the 1983 theatrical re-release of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, from which I had to be carried out of when my demonstrative shrieks of horror at every appearance of Queen Grimhilde threatened to drown out the movie (“Will someone shut that kid up?”). It was here that I saw 1985’s Baby: Secret of the Lost Legend, and only barely managed to restrain my panic as the principles’ inflatable raft charged towards a perilous waterfall. It was here that I finally demonstrated my mettle, staying glued to 1987’s Jaws: The Revenge past the shocking arm-snatching opening, which sent my panic-befitted friend Ben Ritchey into the lobby, where my mother, by now used to this sort of thing, ministered to the shaken-up boy by feeding him quarters to play Ikari Warriors or Bubble Bobble or something. And it was here that I saw Robert Zemeckis’s Who Framed Roger Rabbit (“Overrated”) and Peter Manoogian’s Eliminators (“Awesome”) and Paul Michael Glaser’s The Running Man (“Almost so awesome as to belie description”).

I cannot find any evidence of this theater’s existence on the internet, much less an entry in Architectures de Cinemas. When I picture a “movie theater” in my mind’s eye, however, I am most probably thinking of the threadbare orange carpet and greasy-fingerprinted concession island of this hideous, long-demolished structure, which stood in the parking lot of Cassinelli Square, across from the Service Merchandise and Toys R Us, and which stands forever in my heart.

Nick Pinkerton is a regular contributor to The Village Voice film section, Sight & Sound magazine, and sundry other publications. He lives in Brooklyn, NY.

Andrew Sarris died this week. My father got the news before I did, which means it was news. When I checked my e-mail upon emerging from a screening of a just-irredeemably-awful movie on Wednesday, questioning my choice of profession, much as I am wont to do from Monday to Friday of every week, dad had forwarded the New York Times obituary by Michael Powell into my inbox.

I never so much as developed a passing acquaintance with Mr. Sarris, author of some of the most indelible epigrams in American film criticism, whose book The American Cinema: Directors and Directions 1929-1968 is one of those references that should be on the shelf of any person who so much as pretends to want to understand what exactly movies are, along with Film as a Subversive Art by the recently-departed Amos Vogel. Will we ever see the likes of such men again? It’s about as likely as anyone currently playing in the MLB hitting .400 for the season (Joey Votto?).

To my knowledge, I was only once even in the same theater with Mr. Sarris. This was at a Film Forum screening of Gone with the Wind which was introduced by his wife, Molly Haskell, whose superlative book on Victor Fleming/ David O. Selznick/ Margaret Mitchell/ Clark Gable/ Vivien Leigh’s film had recently been published (Ms. Haskell’s From Reverence to Rape was, incidentally, one of the first book-length volumes of film criticism that I ever read, along with Joan Mellen’s The Waves at Genji’s Door [!] I can only assume that Wyoming High School must have had a feminist cinephile librarian in the 1970s.)

Ms. Haskell noted that her husband, despite having conflicting feelings about Gone with the Wind, had seen the film twenty-some times, lured back again and again by Leigh’s violet eyes. Mr. Sarris’ presence was noted, and he stood, hesitant but seemingly chipper, to acknowledge his public. This was all there was to it, but I will remember and revisit the memory as it is the only physical linkage that I have to that extraordinary body of work; I will remember it as frequently as I remember seeing an aged and depleted Manny Farber onstage at the Film Society of Lincoln Center after a screening of Maurice Pialat’s Van Gogh, still cantankerous enough to be combative, if only with himself, as he found his own magnificent vocabulary evading him (“That sounded like a bunch of gobbledygook…”).

Reflecting the almost universal esteem in which Mr. Sarris was rightly held, even the Times obituary was rather graceful, ending on a meditative note: “Asked a few years ago if he had soured on any of the directors he once championed, Mr. Sarris smiled and shook his head. ‘I prefer to think of people I missed the boat on,’ he said.”

I interviewed one such figure once—in my opinion, if not Sarris’s—a director whose name I am withholding. In all respects he was a genial and seemingly happy man of sixtysomething, but during the course of our lunch together it came out in no uncertain terms that he harbored the lasting impression that Andrew Sarris had done irreparable damage to his career some forty years prior by giving his brave, painful film a negative write-up in The Village Voice. He went on to point out Sarris’ about-face on Billy Wilder as an example of the mutability of the tastemaker’s taste.

Forty years hence, will someone in a café somewhere be nursing a still-rankling hurt from something that I once wrote in a fit of pique under the influence of low blood-sugar or Irish flu or, rarest of all, actual sound critical judgment? It is not an overestimation of my own influence or cutting wit or, God forbid, an absurd desire to compare myself to Mr. Sarris which causes me to think thusly—although I am confident that most every woman who has ever professed to love me will, with time, forget the color of my eyes; hell hath no fury like an artiste scorned.

Where does this sense of entitlement to good notices come from? In the case of filmmakers, I’d imagine it has something to do with the fact that 95% of them come from the sort of enabling upper-middle class background that allows them to freely pursue their muse despite its possible nonexistence. (Due to the ceaselessly affirmative nature of most higher arts educations, many aspirant artists can make it into their middle-30s without once having to seriously question if they have talent, or even basic fluency, in the medium of choice.)

Whatever the case, critical myopia is real, and rancor is understandable, for even in these allegedly critic-proof times a bad notice, at certain levels, can have career-altering adverse effects. Almost every other day I find myself thinking of Douglas Hickox’s 1973 film Theatre of Blood, starring Vincent Price as a ham Shakespearean actor who, after being apparently hounded to suicide by poor reviews, returns to hunt down the critics who drove him into despair, systematically slaying them in sadistic set-pieces cadged from the inventively-macabre Bard. My favorite involves Robert Morley’s Meredith Merridew being tricked into eating his pampered pet dogs, in homage to Titus Andronicus. The movie, incidentally, must certainly have received mostly awful reviews.

Which brings us back to the subject of Mr. Sarris, and his conscience. Whatever mistakes were made, much more often than not Mr. Sarris was on the side of the angels, arguing against Strained Seriousness while proselyting for the serious consideration of work that was generally regarded as piffle at best. Kent Jones’s old appreciation of Sarris, now reappearing at the Film Comment website, puts the point concisely:

“To embrace American movies and moviemakers in Paris was one thing. To embrace those same movies and moviemakers in the country that had made and marginalized them in the first place was a far riskier proposition.”

To convincingly elevate disdained “product” to the level of art, in the face of ridicule that had the strength of received wisdom behind it, required a degree of rigorous spectatorship to ballast and back up one’s arguments that anyone working in these less-contentious times should still demand of themselves. Pick up your Sarris, and see how it’s done.

Nick Pinkerton is a regular contributor to The Village Voice film section, Sight & Sound magazine, and sundry other publications. He lives in Brooklyn, NY.

I would like to begin this week with a moment of silence for Emi Ito of The Peanuts, whose performances in the Mothra films I spoke of fondly only two columns ago. It was in revisiting Ms. Ito’s legacy, via YouTube, that I struck upon the subject of this week’s Bombast: a few of my favorite musical performances in non-musical films. I sure hope you folks like it; it goes a little something like this:

Bunny Lake is Missing (1965)

The Zombies, “Remember You,” “Just Out of Reach,” “Nothing’s Changed”

During this period, director Otto Preminger was rather preoccupied with the triumphant medium of television. 1968’s Skidoo begins with a channel-surfing gag, and is appropriately peopled with a channel-surfing cast (Frankie Avalon, George Raft, Frank Gorshin, Groucho Marx, Peter Lawford, Burgess Meredith, Cesar Romero, Mickey Rooney). Chris Fujiwara’s 2009 study of Preminger’s films, The World and its Double, posits the movie as a sort of self-destructing satire of televised culture—a reading that I didn’t find altogether convincing, although if true it makes the resulting film even more unlikable, if possible, than it already is.

At any rate, Preminger’s Bunny Lake is Missing of three years earlier included a curious “commentary” on the ubiquitous nature of modern media, a moment in which the narrative proper is temporarily set aside so that we can watch The Zombies “perform” on a pub TV set. In its self-conscious modularity, this scene points to the extreme difficulty of integrating band performances into narrative. I’ve always been fond of the elegantly inelegant solutions reached on The Young Ones…

Out of the Blue (1980)

Pointed Sticks, “Out of Luck” b/w “Somebody’s Mom”

Here’s a quite successful example of the abovementioned integration. Though Pointed Sticks were apparently the first Canadian band signed to London’s legendary Stiff Records, my sole contact with them is through this scene from Dennis Hopper’s Out of the Blue. Linda Manz’s adolescent punkette Cebe, on her own in the big city, wanders into a show—apparently at the Viking Hall on Hastings Street–where she watches the Sticks play “Out of Luck,” and is even slotted in behind the traps on “Somebody’s Mom.” I love Manz in this moment—she’s like Bresson’s Mouchette flirting on the bumper cars, ecstatic at getting a taste of the world outside of her miserable, chartered, provincial upbringing, before the taste is slapped right out of her mouth.

Something Wild (1986)

The Feelies, “Fame” (David Bowie cover)

Oh, cool, The Feelies played Maxwell’s yet again last night, and yet again I failed to attend!

Empire Records (1995)

Coyote Shivers, “Sugar High”

I don’t know if this is the measure of a classic, but no one who has ever heard this song has forgetten it. Here the performance is so integrated as to act as the capstone of the movie; this does not, however, prevent both song and film from being awful.

The Lost Boys (1987)

Tim Cappello, “I Still Believe” (The Call cover)

There is so much gay subtext in The Lost Boys that we are probably better off just calling it gay text. If I ever cease to laugh uproariously at Jason Patric and Corey Haim’s quick exchange of glances and rapt fascination with the undulating, greased, Tom of Finland torso of Tina Turner saxman Cappello, I am most likely no longer among the living. The introduction of Jami Gertz’s Star, immediately afterwards, feels like an afterthought, a hasty cover-up, like Waugh’s “It is time to speak of Julia…” in Brideshead Revisited.

Taking Off (1971)

Ike & Tina Turner, “Goodbye Baby”

Speaking of Tina Turner… More people should see this, Milos Forman’s first American film, not least for a wonderful drunk act by Buck Henry, who’s hysterical when trying to crack an egg on the edge of a bar. It also contains this barn-burner of a performance by Ike & Tina, ripping it up for a crowd of suburban conventioneers.

Better Off Dead (1985)

Elizabeth Daily, “One Way Love”

Stone-cold banger.

Wayne’s World (1992)

Alice Cooper, “Feed My Frankenstein”

Alice Cooper is such a legit dude that he could separately record singles called “Teenage Frankenstein” and “Feed My Frankenstein” within six years of one another and no one would dare to question it. A spry 64, Cooper’s “Ballad of Dwight Fry” was the sole peak of Tim Burton’s recent Addams Family reboot, Dark Shadows, though perhaps Cooper’s finest film role came in John Carpenter’s 1987 Prince of Darkness, in which he uses a bicycle frame device, apparently imported from his stage act, to impale Thom Bray.

The Niklashausen Journey (1970)

Amon Düül II, “Untitled Jam”

R.W. Fassbinder’s “Best Pop Musicians” list: Elvis Presley, Bob Dylan, The Rolling Stones, Leonard Cohen, The Platters, Kraftwerk, Roxy Music, The Beatles, The Velvet Underground, Comedian Harmonists.

Catalina Caper (1967)

Little Richard, “Scuba Party”

When this part comes up on the Mystery Science Theater 3000 episode, Crow cracks: “Little Richard. The only genuine talent in this movie.”

Vampire’s Kiss (1989)

ESG, “Moody”

I moved to New York about ten years ago because I thought that it would be like a combination of this and the Biohazard “Punishment” video. Huge, huge disappointment.

Rio Bravo (1959)

Dean Martin, Rick Nelson, and Walter Brennan, “My Rifle, My Pony, and Me”

Zen, American-style.

For the record, I didn’t “forget” The Mighty, Mighty Bosstones in Clueless. Stay tuned next week for the television edition, in which I will discuss the Dickies episode of “CPO Sharkey” in 17,000 words.

Nick Pinkerton is a regular contributor to The Village Voice film section, Sight & Sound magazine, and sundry other publications. He lives in Brooklyn, NY.