Critical Thinking
Nearly as good as great art, or, at least, great entertainment, is great criticism. For many people, the word conjures to mind stodgy liberal egotists, regularly failing in their attempts to either second-guess or outwit the tastes of the typical moviegoer (which, incidentally, doesn’t exist). For others, it means Consumer Reports-style product reviews. That’s a ridiculous notion in itself, but it’s unfortunately accurate lately. Criticism–REAL criticism–has nothing to do with these things. It is the simple act of experiencing something and attempting to explain, hopefully with some insight and wit, how you feel about it. How your honesty and taste is received by your audience is entirely their fault.
So, who writes real criticism? There is no definitive litmus test, because the vast majority of critics, including the good ones, are hemmed in by the standards and practices demanded by the marketplace in which they appear. Bad critics invest the value of their criticism in their numerical (or alphabetical) ratings. Good critics encourage you, by act of writing, to look past the ratings to the prose. That’s where the real stuff lies.
As far as film critics go, it’s hard to find one who has done so much for film and inspired just as much controversy as Roger Ebert. His show with Gene Siskel was originally thought to be a major setback for serious criticism, reducing the carefully thought-out essays of film’s finest period to brief television segments punctuated with thumbs up or down. It is true that Siskel & Ebert was, at best, a mixed blessing. On one hand, it brought a wider attention to film criticism. On the other hand, the wider the seed is cast, the more thinly it lands. Perhaps Ebert is partially responsible for the majority of critics reviewing films in the same way that Consumer Reports reviews vacuum cleaners.
But never mind that. Being responsible for a trend is not the same thing as being part of it. (Just ask Eddie Van Halen.) As always, look past the stars, numbers, and grade-school ratings. It is Ebert’s prose that distinguishes him as one of the most thoughtful and knowledgable film critics still working today. He has come under fire recently for being curiously lenient towards some films and harsh on others, and it has been speculated that his poor health in recent years has colored his logic.
Were I Ebert, I’d find that a little insulting. Not because of its presumptuousness, but because it assumes that the value of criticism is in second-guessing the eventual opinion of the reader, rather than offering an unvarnished account of the critic’s personal experience. Is it a little mindblowing that Ebert liked Knowing better than Star Trek? Perhaps so, but no more mindblowing than the general notion that different people have different opinions. On one side, you have reviews that attempt to pander to the sensibilities of the audience so that they can leave the theaters satisfied, not because they enjoyed the film, but because they knew what to expect. On the other hand, you have reviews that you vehemently disagree with, but are well-written, and packed with informed opinion and insight. I will ceaselessly opt for the latter.
James Berardinelli is another good critic. He differs from Ebert like night differs from day. He’s a relatively recent arrival in the field, having missed the 70s by a couple of decades. Rather than getting his foot in the door as a newspaperman at an early age, Berardinelli distinguished himself as one of the earliest noteworthy online critics. In daily life, he’s an engineer and a baseball fan, who, believe it or not, reviews movies purely because he enjoys doing it. His circumstances give him an invaluable everyman perspective, perhaps not quite as educated in the history of cinema as Ebert, but just as intelligent and respectful of his readers. And like Ebert, I’ve never known Berardinelli to second-guess the tastes of either the audience or his fellow critics.
All too fleeting in criticism is the journalism of Paul Schrader, who is best known as a screenwriter (with some famous collaborations with Martin Scorcese) and director (his Mishima: A Life In Four Chapters is the best biographical drama you’ll ever see about a figure you’ve never heard of). As a graduate student, Schrader wrote criticism often, and has made a handful of contributions to industry magazines since then. His film canon, or rather, his 15 page essay about the ultimate futility of the canon, stirred up a fair amount of talk when it appeared in Film Comment a few years ago. He was a student of Pauline Kael, and it shows in his prose: clear, on point in its understanding of craft, and uncompromising in its expression of opinion. Schrader has stated that he doesn’t like to apply his critical side to his artistic side, but he does so for a brief moment, introducing a catalog of his writings on his website. “Some are youthful, some are wrongheaded, some are pretty good.”
One more choice, somewhat out of left field, is Robert Christgau. He is the only music critic on this list, mainly because I can’t think of any other music critic who writes with the same qualities as the film critics I’ve mentioned. His reviews are uncompromising and careful, but they’re also written in a very unique way. Each is only a few sentences (or even a few words), highly dense, demanding to be analyzed for allusions and multiple meanings. Something has to be said for critics who don’t care who they piss off, because any critic who does isn’t a critic at all.