Quick, someone -- fetch my whip!

Tue Jan 14 2003

Via Gleaner: Salon's Charles Taylor takes Daily Variety editor-in-chief Peter Bart to task for printing a lengthy, "remarkably misinformed" screed attacking movie critics for having their own opinions, rather than simply reinforcing the often questionable taste of consum-- uh, moviegoers:

"Bart suggests that critics prove their unreliability by offering different opinions on which movie is the best of the year. It doesn't occur to him that a moviegoer might see that diversity of opinion as offering an array of movies to check out."

Among the tidbits Taylor points out: Bart thinks the Madonna vehicle Swept Away was one of the best films of the year; that he considers both Morvern Callar (a worldwide festival hit that is only just opening in some cities) and its star Samantha Morton (you may remember her from Minority Report) to be "obscure", and the critics who include the film on their top ten lists are simply elitist dogs; that in discussing the role of critics in American moviegoing, he considers the opinions of studio ad executives to be more expert than the critics themselves.

There's lots more; I haven't nearly given away the whole article. Click here to read it if you haven't already.

It does seem that movie critics' tastes are sometimes divorced from the mainstream, and when you consider that the best mainstream critic -- Chicago's own Roger Ebert -- usually can't even get simple facts straight in his head, reading movie criticism can sometimes seem pointless.

And if you live in Dismal Seepage, MS, reading a list that includes City of God (which won't be released in the US until much later this year), Spirited Away or Morvern Callar can make you feel like "the cinema" (as embodied by The Pianist) and "the movies" (as embodied by Chicago) are two very different things.

I would offer this theory: critics (even Bart's "elitists" at the New York Times) see, and often have to write about, every single film that is released. That means that for every The Hours there are ten Just Marrieds and twenty Spider-Mans. And rather than simply pick the highest-grossing films or the ones that readers would choose in a poll, these critics gravitate towards films which still believe in movies as an art form, rather than a business.

For my own part, I could care so much less that they've made Terminator 3, and I find the concept of a Pirates of the Carribbean movie to be wrong on so many levels. And yet I'm dying to see the Matrix sequels and The Return of the King, because there is something else working there. However, my interest in studio movies ends there: the movies I'm most interested in seeing right now, this minute, are of the "elitist" sort. Specifically, "25th Hour", "Adaptation" and "Morvern Callar".