Which film critics do you trust (if any?)

bummerz. i like nathan lee if only for making southland tales his no. 1 movie of '07. (which even i agree is sort of an insane thing to say, but i respect the impulse.)

I had no idea who this LYT clown is, but then I skip a lot of bylines these days.

http://www.lytrules.com/images/heads/LYT_Head_Goof.jpg

yes, Rip Taylor has somehow reproduced!

I had no idea who this LYT clown is, but then I skip a lot of bylines these days.

I'd learned to skip his byline a while ago, but I didn't realize was basically a monster fashioned by New Times Media.

so this is what the conglomerate-approved "pros" in the crix biz are like now! Let's hire some guys from Newark to "talk" to Mr Thompson.

(Col, it sounds like you read his byline and skip the pieces)

Yes, that's what I meant. Although I don't usually even get that far because I don't go out of my to read blurbs about The Bank Job or whatever.

http://img137.imageshack.us/img137/7644/hupoyb2.png

be disabused of your romantic notions of war... all over again

every 30 years!

jeez, there's a stomping-car-thieves scene in Stop-Loss that made think it was made for drive-ins.

I saw David Edelstein post somewhere that the VV could give Nathan Lee a lot of freelance stuff, so if you think emails to the editor will help...

do they even have a film editor now? i thought it was dennis lim but then he got the old heave-ho...

is Hoberman still there?

Yes. I think Joshua Land replaced Lim, but I'm not sure if he's still the editor.

do they even have a film editor now? i thought it was dennis lim but then he got the old heave-ho...

-- banriquit, Friday, March 28, 2008 10:39 AM (2 days ago) Bookmark Link

a lot of pictures of him got posted on HTML playground?

ok lol at this:

http://uk.rottentomatoes.com/news/1723638/3.php

http://glennkenny.premiere.com/blog/2008/02/heh-heh-he-said.html

though he obviously hasn't been reading the primaries thread.

I think to be a really good writer and film critic you need a range. You need to know what's going on in painting, you need to know what's going on in music, you need to read books, and get laid, and go to restaurants, you know what I mean?

Hmmmm, I'm batting about .225 there.

That photo of Nathan is hot in a Wally Cleaver kinda way.

don't think many filmmakers know 'what's going on in painting' -- i know what he means, but film writing has a long history of 1) colonisation by literary types 2) needing to 'measure up' to more socially respectable media...

(also, impudent harlot sez NL is sexy in the flesh)

btw, Godfrey Cheshire, sorely missed in NY, reps for Flawless.

http://www.indyweek.com/gyrobase/Content?oid=oid%3A256779

don't think many filmmakers know 'what's going on in painting' -- i know what he means, but film writing has a long history of 1) colonisation by literary types 2) needing to 'measure up' to more socially respectable media...

So? All these tensions are good!

sometimes

has anyone seen Profit motive and the whispering wind? I will tonight, and just found out it's by maker of The Mad Songs of Fernanda Hussein which I truly truly loathed.

Did you catch H1dden In Plain S1ght too?

I like everything Lee says but this: "No one who takes movies seriously takes [Anthony Lane] remotely seriously." I don't take stridency seriously.

i know what he means, but film writing has a long history of 1) colonisation by literary types 2) needing to 'measure up' to more socially respectable media...

yeah but i think he just means being able to connect it to the culture. which i mostly agree with. although it's also a trap like anything, it can provide boxes or frames that things get crammed into whether they belong there or not.

i don't think taking anthony lane seriously is really an option anthony lane intends to provide. but when he really loves something, i like his enthusiasm.

wow ed gonzalez really does kinda hate everything haha

lololol

frequently disagree with anthony lane, but there are far worse serious-critics-who-one-should-take-seriously around. there is probably a touch of jealous haterade, what with him 1) being generally feted as a dece writer, style-wise 2) getting real paid.

I'm told Anthony Lane gets miffed if you used "dece" in his presence.

Did you catch H1dden In Plain S1ght too?

went with the territory. zzzzzzzzzzzz

Ed G hates mostly what's worth hating.

holy cow this armond white thing sets some kind of new standard for incoherence, even by his standards. (and i sort of like his incoherence, it's his defining quality, but still.) by the end i have no idea at all what he's talking about, except that he doesn't like roger ebert and mumblecore and thinks "movies must affirm our humanity." he doesn't like populists, doesn't like elitists, doesn't like bloggers, thinks pop is either underrated or overrated depending on some opaque critieria, doesn't like "art for art's sake" but wants more david gordon green and julian hernandez ...

really, can anyone find a throughline in that? it has some good lines, but if there's a thesis there beyond I AM RIGHT AND THE WORLD IS WRONG i can't find it.

(bumping this becz i'd like to hear anyone else's take on armond's rant. i need to learn not to revive threads at 3 in the morning.)

there's lots of stuff on the Armond thread revived last week. Here.

ah thankx.

...and ok, so, everybody else says it's incoherent too. good to know. now i can go back to not thinking about armond white.

does anyone have links to his eighties rockcrit?

now:

http://www.jonathanrosenbaum.com/

Also, Nathan Lee back to NY Times (Wong's As Tears Go By today).

http://projectionbooth.blogspot.com/2008/05/bad-journalism-pet-peeves-of-film.html

yeesh.

i mean, calling an article "bad journalism" and leading with a sentence as unreadable as "The results of it can be seen in the recent slaughtering of Speed Racer by the likes of a majority vote at Rotten Tomatoes (and many others aside), while the start of it, I think, can be seen in the kind of slandering going on right now at The House Next Door as regards the recently announced remake of Abel Ferrara's Bad Lieutenant, directed by Werner Herzog (!) and starring Nicholas Cage (!$%@)"...

Maybe, but sentences like that are my downfall as a writer. My editors are constantly telling me they get a headache whenever my sentences get to their fourth or fifth clause.

But I use long sentences to give the short ones that extra element of surprise.

I use dull, medium-length sentences to a similar purpose.

sentences like "This is a simple pitfall but its devastation is one muted in its effects, as we tend to mistake it for legitimate thought, uncritical of our own mental processes" and "And so we continue leaning on our crutches as we sit down in the middle of the auditorium about twice as far back from the screen as the screen is tall (that's how I do it, anyway)" and "The Star Wars prequels and Matrix sequels saw mostly venom, the unforgiving kind like in the Alien films (speaking of bad sequels...), eating away at the ship, damaging the infrastructure" totally give me a headache.

The biggest problem with that blog entry is that Rob simply drops the names of films as though mere mention of his allegiance toward this movie or against that movie (i.e. Hulk and Iron Man, respectively) stands in as an example of independent thought.

But the intent is sort of OTM, about the gangpiling aspect of Internet discourse..

Not that this hasn't been noted and unpacked many a time before, on basically every ILX film thread from 2004 thru 2006.

i guess. i think bad writing is a worse problem than gangbanging opinions to be honest.

It's a blog.

ok...

i guess i just dont think it's a problem full stop. who cares if 80% of newspaper critics dont like speed racer

I mean, not to be completely defeatist about it, but yes, the writing aspect would raise my ire a lot more if it appeared in Film Comment or something. But in blog form, I'm almost always paying more attention to whatever it is the writer's trying to convey.

I'm not arguing that stripping the entry of all reference to specific films would've done a lot more to bolster his argument.