Word: critics
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Pauline Kael, at one time arguably the best film critic in operation, has turned into the Hubert Humphrey of film criticism. She comes on chatty and playful when talking about film techniques, valuing good stars above acting and sensual excess over rigor, all the time letting us know that under that tigress bite of hers beats a heart which overflows with sympathy. She makes sufficient noises in the vague directions of liberalism to insure our recognition that she cares in the correct way about moral and political issues which the films she sees might raise. She is overwhelmingly ebullient...
...CHUNG: There are few topics that film critics enjoy discussing more than the Role of the Film Critic. The argument is typically framed as a battle between the audience and the critic, as if their interests somehow diverge as they enter the movie theatre. The debate often starts over a single movie; a filmgoer will watch a movie that they loathe, notice a critical consensus surrounding it and redirect their animosity towards the “out-of-touch” critics. The critics will respond in kind with an admonition of the masses’ susceptibility to Big Hollywood...
Watching this schoolyard scuffle with a smirk plastered across his goateed face, taking a perpetually unsatisfying drag from his hand-rolled cigarette, is the intellectual film critic. To those removed from the academic world, this person doesn’t exist, but any student at all familiar with the inside of a university film studies department knows his kind very well. Subsisting on a rigid diet of Fassbinder and Brakhage, the only filmic pleasure he knows is found deep within his Criterion collection...
Pauline Kael, at one time arguably the best film critic in operation, has turned into the Hubert Humphrey of film criticism. She comes on chatty and playful when talking about film techniques, valuing good stars above acting and sensual excess over rigor, all the time letting us know that under that tigress bite of hers beats a heart which overflows with sympathy. She makes sufficient noises in the vague directions of liberalism to insure our recognition that she cares in the correct way about moral and political issues which the films she sees might raise. She is overwhelmingly ebullient...
Being engaged with form, then, is probably the most important thing one can strive for, as a critic and as a listener. If I want to concern myself with depths of literal meaning, I’ll sooner read a novel than search for the same kind of voice in music, which hits ears first and mind second. Case in point: I bought a hardcore hip-hop record in Paris after listening to it for five minutes. I can’t understand a word of what Fratrie is saying, but his flow tells me all I need to know...