Which film critics do you trust (if any?)

x-post re: "DVD values"

this literaly landed in my inbox from another list:

"April 13, 2006
Re: Scatology
From: David Sterritt

Has anyone mentioned "La Grande bouffe," the 1973 Marco Ferreri film? Higher up the artistic scale is Godard's intricate "Numero Deux," which uses conspitation as a central metaphor and signals its multivalent concerns with same right from the title.

David Sterritt, Ph.D.
Adjunct Professor of Language, Literature and Culture
Maryland Institute College of Art
Chairman, National Society of Film Critics
Programming Associate, Makor/Steinhardt Center of the 92nd Street Y
Special Correspondent, The Christian Science Monitor
Professor Emeritus of Theater and Film, Long Island University"

And yeah, the proles are dumber than they've ever been.

k. does that mean you'll cite actual examples?

The Sopranos, Sex in the City, Six Feet Under, Queer as Folk...

"every theme and plot point being presented explicitly (thru dialogue or action)"

cos without dialogue or action, you have something like an empty screen.

Poor, rural, uneducated Depression-era audiences to thread.

I work at a video store, and believe me they do. A LOT more than shows that are off the air.

xpost Wow!!

cos without dialogue or action, you have something like an empty screen.

this sounds like the best movie ever!

cos without dialogue or action, you have something like an empty screen.

...

I can't imagine just renting the show for the show itself. Weird.

Now plz to continue blatantly ignoring everything I say and making snarky comments elsewhere, it silently entertains several people and quite frakly me at this point.

-- Dr Morbius (wjwe...), April 13th, 2006.

oh! the pwnage!

how to come back, i just don't know...

Is it really that weird? The only TV I watch is music videos (or stations I wish were playing music videos), so if I do bother to watch a show, it's through DVD. Admittedly I get to see them for free, but it's a lot more enjoyable than waiting once a week to catch a show with ads. People also get to see another episode immediately on the same disc. I assume it's more popular to watch shows on DVD than on TiVo.

x-post Family Guy is kind of the classic example (Though adult swim helped too)

and while we are at it, go read Ebert on BI:2

Nicole Kidman is great in The Portrait of a Lady.

See the Seitz blog link comments for multiple angles on TV, film, distribution.

http://mattzollerseitz.blogspot.com/2006/04/cinema-dead-and-alive-interview-with_15.html

"...The rise of documentaries is related to the decline of European auteurs, and the failure of significant American auteurs to arise from and remain in the independent world in very significant numbers. If you look at the whole Sundance phenomenon, there was such promise there, but while you’ve got a few interesting directors coming up, most of them just go on to the majors or whatever. In the past, people would go to the independent theaters and art theaters for foreign films, and specifically the great tradition of European films. That has dried up."

Also, Seitz quotes Dave Kehr in the Comments: "In other words, ‘straight-to-video’ once meant ‘not good enough to be shown in theaters.’ Now it means ‘too good to be shown in theaters.’ That’s the reality.”

this is only wrong insofar as the studio/star system that made grahame/lombard possible died 45 years ago; but kidman is certainly 'as good'.

the studios were quite happy to let them make lots of basically quite similar films though, cos that's how genres work. there's something to be said for it, i guess, but not that much.

Ignoring for a moment that 'straight-to-video' still pretty much means the former -- it's still largely a ghetto for no- to mid-budget genre stuff by nobodies and for stuff that didn't get picked up by distributors -- what he's leaving out is the potential it has to increase the audience for this stuff. Twenty five years ago, people who didn't have access to indie/arthouse/repertory/etc. theaters would never, ever, ever get to see these movies. Now they might be able to get it off of Netflix or at Hollywood Video or what have you, if the movies are properly advertised, marketed, reviewed, etc. (The potential for reviews by key critics increases, too, if they don't have to wait for a screening that might never happen but can review from wherever they happen to be via DVD.)

All that, too, is eliding the fact that a lot of these movies are far, far, far from "too good" for theaters or anyplace else. Sturgeon's Law, etc.

that's interesting. in the uk lots of films get a nominal theatre release just so the film will get reviewed: my hunch is no-one bothers to review dtv stuff unless the marketing dept gets their act together.

The studio system would definitely have made a film in which AIDS is barely mentioned and the lesbianism is "tasteful" (see The Children's Hour)

This looks like a terrific fite, I wish I had got in earlier. On the TV / Cinema ?Mobile Phone debate, I think that certain media tend towards certain shot choices (TV is almost by nature more close up friendly) but this does not apropos lead to firm TV / Cinema / Mobile Phone / Play aesthetic choices when it comes to storytelling. Nevertheless, the play - cinema/TV dynamic does lead to certain ways of telling a story which cannot be done easily on stage (time lapse, multiple viewpoints, close-up) which can influence the semantic language of the presentation.

xpost

But those aren't the ones he's talking about. That Assayas' Clean -- an English language film, with 2 different types of 'names' in Maggie Cheung and Nick Nolte -- took THREE YEARS to get distributed here is a scandal.

what the fuck?