ON FILM

Critic or reviewer: They're not equal

Reviewing movies is like coaching basketball or practicing law: Almost everyone secretly believes that, given the chance, he or she could do a creditable job. (Hardly a week goes by when I don't receive a letter from some proud parent nominating a son or daughter as a potential reviewer of children's movies.) The job of the American film critic has always been complicated by the fact that virtually all Americans regard themselves as astute judges of movies.

There's no mystery why this is so. Most of us have probably seen thousands of movies, and a lot of us can be said to have constructed a style of living based largely on the films we've seen. The movies inform our self-perception. We measure ourselves against the screen's two-dimensional characters. We talk like them, we borrow bits of business and fillips of transitory grace. Movies teach us how to talk to girls, which sunglasses are cool and how to smoke a cigarette.

Soaked in the movies and wise in their conventions, it is only natural that we consider ourselves their master. The documentarian D.A. Pennebaker has discovered that, with today's lightweight video equipment, just about anyone can be trusted to shoot usable footage. We all know how to frame a shot, as we've developed an almost instinctual sense of what movies look like.

But just as sunbathing imparts no particular insight into nuclear fusion, basking in the movies is not the same thing as knowing them. Art works because it affects and engages us in mysterious ways and on several levels. A child can tell you what he likes, but can he tell you why? And is it even useful to think about the why of a movie or a book or a painting?

I think it is, because understanding the art people produce is essential to understanding people. American movies say things about America -- buried beneath the dunes of sugar and schmaltz is a secret history of yearning and aspiration. As in dreams, these meanings might be obscured and entangled with emotions so profound as to be nameless. (And sometimes a cigar is just that.)

Movies are like our collective dreams -- it is the critic's job to interpret them.

I don't want to suggest it is especially hard work. You're inside most of the time, and even the least promising movies often yield moments of delight, sometimes accidentally. Is it hard to synopsize a plot and turn a thumb up or down?

No, that's not hard. And that's what a lot of "critics " -- though not Roger Ebert, he of the famous thumb -- do. Most of the people who write about movies for a living are reviewers rather than critics, a distinction John Simon made in his 1963 essay "A Critical Credo."

"What constitutes good criticism?" Simon asks. "Perhaps it is easier to begin by defining the commonest kind of bad criticism, which is not criticism at all but reviewing. Reviewing is something newspaper editors have invented; it stems from the notion that the critic is someone who sees with the eyes of the Average Man or Typical Reader (whoever that is) and predicts for his fellows what their reaction will be. To this end, the newspapers carefully screen their reviewers to be representative common men, say, former obituary writers or mailroom clerks, anything but trained specialists."

A reviewer reports on a film -- he gets the names of the actors and their characters spelled correctly, he identifies the genre and sketches out the story (while scrupulously avoiding plot spoilers) and finally, and most importantly, distributes consumer advice. Is the movie worth the ticket price? Or should you wait for the DVD?

A critic, on the other hand, is something else. But what?

I believe film criticism is a kind of literary performance in which one creative mind operates on the collaborative work of literally hundreds of others. A critic wrestles with the infinite complexity of filmic sensory assault and emerges, with luck, with something interesting to say.

"If you think it is so easy to be a critic, so difficult to be a poet or painter, may I suggest you try both?" Pauline Kael, 16 years dead but probably still the most influential American critic, once said. "You may discover why there are so few critics, and so many poets."

But Kael's obliterating observation goes only so far. Poetry is easy only in that the form is simple to ape. One might argue that, proportionally, there are as few good poets as there are film critics. But writing criticism is closer to writing poetry than it is to straight journalism. It relies on evocation and rhythm, on creating sympathetic vibrations in the ear and mind of the receptive reader.

Reviewing is relatively easy, criticism ought to be hard. If it's not, you're probably not doing it right.

...

Last week I listed my favorite -- not the best, not the most important -- film for every year of my life in the 20th century. Here's the 21st-century of the list. I am thinking about turning it into a book.

2001: Waking Life

2002: Spirited Away

2003: Lost in Translation, over Mystic River and 21 Grams

2004: The Sea Inside

2005: Brokeback Mountain

2006: The Departed

2007: Shotgun Stories ekes it out over I'm Not There in a miraculous year for movies.

2008: The Visitor; next in line is 4 Months 3 Weeks 2 Days

2009: That Evening Sun over Up

2010: Winter's Bone

2011: Take Shelter barely over Certified Copy

2012: Michael Haneke's Amour

2013: Inside Llewyn Davis

2014: Kumiko, The Treasure Hunter

2015: Carol

2016: Still too close, but these films are a cut above the others: Loving, Moonlight, Manchester By the Sea, Hell or High Water.

Email:

pmartin@arkansasonline.com

blooddirtangels.com

MovieStyle on 04/07/2017

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