Film Critics Are Huggable Too!

Ae Fond Hiss.
Why your cinematic fish and chips could do with a little literary chili sauce.

By a film critic.

A British Prime Minister who was given to the odd creative fluctuation once said critics were no more than failures at those very arts they felt themselves to be custodians of. An essayist, that there are two sorts of critics: those who relieve themselves against “the flower of beauty” (the art in question), and those who afterwards “scratch it up” (like an untrained mongrel, one presumes). I threatened my own safety once in college, when in between the daily football discourse, someone mentioned that they’d gone to the cinema to see 300. Convinced I was among allies, I launched into a colourful tirade against the film, reducing it to the status of ‘a bunch of grown men in their underwear screaming an awful lot about nothing’. In retrospect I should have looked up first, before saying I was sure it had sucked as much as a certain other over-budgeted big-screen dumb-fest.
How dare I, they all said. No sense whatsoever, they confirmed. Always knew he was a bit queer, one sentenced. What was worst for some was the fact that I hadn’t even seen it yet. Gentlemen I had long ago categorized as relatively sane and calm suddenly seemed five minutes away from re-arranging my digestive system.
I have a very public man-crush on every single employee of Disney’s Pixar studio (that’s the team of visual sorcerers behind Toy Story, The Incredibles, Ratatouille, etc), and I ran this by a friend who claims to look forward to my supposedly outlandish opinions, just after seeing something Dreamworks had made. He suggested that I learn to watch movies as if I were blindfolded, without the slightest bias towards or knowledge of who a project’s cast, directors or producers were – in other words, that I should get abducted by a terrorist cell, and therein learn to appreciate the movies as if it were 1935 again. Unusually sharp for a Sunday, I back-handed like Federer, and told him to suppose that there were essentially two groups of people who could tell a guy everything there was to know about movies: people who make them, and people who criticize them. I then asked him to consider who might be more honest if the ordinary movie-goer needed a five-minute diagnosis – the people who need you to see a movie so they can make their money back, or the people, just like you, who’ve seen the movie and are prepared to tell you what’s missing?
A new-ish book by legendary film-critic Jonathan Rosenbaum, Essential Cinema: On the Necessity of Film Canons, does nothing to help the perennial party-pooper stereotype of the species. But Rosenbaum does reinforce the need for us to be finicky about the footprint left behind of the films we’ve watched, so that generations of movie-goers are linked together by cinema that genuinely chronicles our times, be it comedy or drama – cinema that not only speaks to our desire to dream, but also to realize. We are all film critics, writes Rosenbaum, or at least ought to be, in the face of an endless deluge of commercial brain-wash. After he’s damned the American Film Institute’s choices for the 100 Greatest Films Ever Made (nope – no screaming men in underwear here), he nominates a few of his own, and then makes a rousing defense of criticism – or, as another essayist once said, ‘the art of praise’; why on earth shouldn’t it be someone’s job to tell you that a movie you’ve probably never heard of is so much more scintillating than Hollywood’s hormonal summer line-up? Fine, you say – but why are these blowhards all so darn negative? Because - and this is my final quote, I swear - good critics, like screen-writers, have villains in their stories.
The film critic is at war whilst you digest the abysmal end of the popcorn box, and Rosenbaum is proud to declare himself a cultural warrior, daring big studios and Hollywood execs to come and take a bite of him. But the fact that he’s in a battlefield, or visualizes himself to be, doesn’t mean he’s not head over heels in love with movies anymore – because that’s precisely what critics are.
The job entails watching a Biblical amount of film, even when the reel in question hardly measures up to your average cute cat on YouTube video. That’s the sort of sacrifice only lovers make when a speeding bullet threatens their companion’s life, or when they’re getting married. The popular perception is that critics are a stubborn rap-crew of I-Told-You-So’s, waiting throughout the usual two hours or so for low-points to make intellectual toilets of; when in fact, we’re giving our days the brain off, just like you are. Who doesn’t love the occasional Matthew McCounnaghy/Actress I’d Like To Snuggle With rom-com, complete with paper-thin plot, and a nauseatingly cliché ending that says little besides Hollywood’s given you a giant wedgie again? I, for one, have seen Failure To Launch a number of times, and plan on doing so next time I feel dead inside.
Not that I’m dead inside. I’m not sitting in front of the latest box-office list checking off a list of requirements that aren’t being met - though I am squealing like a piglet, when the feeling germinates and grows that a particular effort is etching its place in history. You just know when you’ve seen a bad movie, like when you’ve had a bad night out – and when you’ve been a witness to brilliance, the ground just shakes beneath you. The assertions the critic eventually types up are not entirely made of conscious thought – we just have a feeling, and reckon we should let you in on it. The critic is the astronaut landing on the moon, relaying whether or not he’s found hospitable land, checking if it’s okay for the wife and the kids.
Critics lie too. A good 40, maybe even 50- percent of the time we haven’t seen most of the classics we reference modern movies to – but we do so in good faith that someone just like us has tested the water and is confident you can make a cup of tea with it. I’m the ultimate Bill Murray fan, but I really only have tangible memory of having seen five or six of his movies, max. On top of that I tell people I’ve seen Caddyshack, a golf flick with Murray in it, a zillion times, including golfer chicks I’d like to get with.
For you, or sort of, I’ll stay up late and wake up early, vampire-style, to actually see the movies I plan on referencing. The Darjeeling Limited, about three brothers who go on a sabbatical on a train across India, goes down a treat at 4 AM in the morning – this is the sort of lackadaisical thing I might say to you if you were a friend of mine. As your critic, I must point out the wonderfulness of the way Owen Wilson and co have to rush back onto the locomotive at every stop or get left behind, and liken that to how we all jerk along on the journey of life; but then I must raise eyebrows at something, the geographically incorrect music, the abruptness of three Americans on a train journey to see their monk-mom in India, anything, because in art there’s no such thing as perfect. There are no wrong answers either – just things we should confess to distrust.
Recently I saw Wall-E, which I’ll summarise as being about a waste-cleaning robot who finds himself hopelessly infatuated with a laser-wielding iPod from Mars. I cried the entire time; so if I can’t get a hug, could somebody at least pass me some Kleenex?