Word: criticism
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...Vladimir Nabokov wrote that reality is "one of the few words which mean nothing without quotes." The same with calling live-action films real movies. I watch these things for a living, and it's a great job, but any critic knows that the average film is basically photographs of people talking, walking or hitting something. The process is pretty simple: actors pretend to be real people; they get their pictures taken while they say their lines a few times; and later, watching the assembly of these scenes in a theater or at home, you laugh, cry or shrug...
...great acting: attend to the gestural brilliance in Ratatouille: Remy the rat's slight hunch of the shoulders and secret smile as he acknowledges that, yes, he has the makings of a great chef; or the face of the severe food critic Anton Ego as he takes a forkful of Remy's signature dish, and his sourness disappears, a beatific smile replaces the sneer, and Ego is transported back 40 years to the sublime memory of his mother's kitchen. "Yes, it's a super-cartoony design on his face," Director Brad Bird told TIME's Rebecca Winters Keegan...
...recognize the Reiss touch from both The Simpsons and The Critic: constant sidesteps into movie and TV burlesques, and a very high ratio of good humor to bad. But if Queer Duck has a godfather or bachelor uncle, it would have to be the classic old Rocky and Bullwinkle show (or, as it's called in a gay TV-porn collection Queer Duck owns, Rockhard & Bullsprinkle). And since that was the smartest pre-Simpsons cartoon series, I mean this as high praise indeed. For all its bitchiness, the movie manages to be frisky and genial. One last odd fact: Reiss...
...Movie reviewing is the solitary evaluation of a communal medium. Critics watch films in small screening rooms, or alone on DVD players, then retire in solitude to write up their opinions and insights, to recollect passion in tranquility. Roger does all that; but more than any critic I know, he brings the informed discussion of film out from under the lamp, into daylight. He has used his fame to elevate the conversation, challenging audiences to attend not just to the dramatic and ethical aspects of films but to their visual strategies. (Roger is one of the few film critics...
...Roger knows that, whatever else they may be, movies are stories people tell us; and a review is a conversation the critic has with both the filmmaker and the audience about the power and plausibility of the tale. No one has done as much as Roger to connect the creators of movies with their consumers. He has immense power, and he's used it for good, as an apostle of cinema. Reading his work, or listening to him parse the shots of some notable film, the movie lover is also engaged with an alert mind constantly discovering things - discovering them...