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Ali: 12/30/01 Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon: 01/05/01 Fellowship of the Ring: 12/24/01 Memento: upd. 07/02/01 O Brother, Where Art Thou?: 06/20/01 Orange County: 01/13/02 Saving Silverman: 02/11/01 Snatch: 01/21/01 Spiderman: 05/04/02 Tomb Raider: 06/17/01 Traffic: 01/09/01 Why Meta-review? I'm not a movie critic. If I presented myself as a movie critic or were paid to review movies, then I might reasonably expect people judge my work. I think it would be hard to review movies for a living and I respect the people who manage to make a living doing it. Still, those people often botch the job and even though I'm not a professional reviewer, sometimes I think it's pretty obvious how and why they botched it and I don't feel bad pointing it out and maybe poking some fun at 'em for being lazy or dim-witted. Of course, sometimes they get it right and I'll acknowlege that too, when it happens. So, what you've got here are a collection of what I call meta-reviews that I've pulled from my personal web page where virtually nobody outside of my immediate family would ever read 'em. Now virtually nobody plus a dozen or so friends and web acquaintances have easier access to them without filtering through (adorable) pictures of my niece and nephew.
A word about methodology: I've found Rotten Tomatoes to be the most useful collector of critical opinion and would definitely recommend them as a handy bookmark.
Instead of calling these things metareviews, I should just call them what they are: C-Dog vs. Eberts. I'm not going to go 'round reading a bunch of reviews of the Spidey movie because, though I enjoyed it, I probably wouldn't have enjoyed it as much if I'd had to pay for it. Ach, maybe that's a bit harsh. It's a fine movie with some good acting out of the leads, some nice touches, only a few wrong notes, and I wouldn't mind seeing it again. ("Fine ... good ... nice," as you can see, it doesn't exactly inspire a desperate search for exactly the right adjective to capture its essence.) Anyways, I did read one review. I figured there was no way our man in Chicago could punt this one, or make himself look any stupider than he has in the past. Goes to show you should never underestimate the thickness of Ebert's skull. Again I'm flabbergasted that the man is paid to be a movie critic yet is incapable of figuring out the meaning of blatantly frigging obvious scenes.
Witness: I have one question about the Peter Parker character: Does the movie go too far with his extreme social paralysis? Peter tells Mary Jane he just wants to be friends. "Only a friend?" she repeats. "That's all I have to give," he says. How so? Impotent? Spidey-sense has skewed his sexual instincts? Afraid his hands will get stuck?And so Ebert closes his review, flummoxed by the a scene so uncomplicated, so explicitly set-up, so bloody simply to understand giant monkey-controlled robots bent on destruction couldn't miss the reasoning if they crashed through the wall of the cinema only in time for the last minute of the film, catching the scene out of the corner of their cylon-like front-mounted infra-red scanner/laser targeting devices. Ebert, here's the dealy-o, not 10 seconds before telling MJ he could only offer her friendship, Peter Parker tells us in voiceover that the people he loves have to pay the price for his powers. The people he loves pay the price. Even without the voiceover you should have picked up on that. The Green Goblin spelled the strategy out earlier. There was no mystery there. A somewhat touching dilemma for the hero, yes. A mystery, no. Now that the comic book hero adaption genre has a new entry, how does the list of the best shakedown? I'm not qualified to answer, I'm afraid, but I'll tell you where it slots into my small list. I'm the kid who had nightmares and was afraid to sleep in the same room as his Vic-20 after seeing Superman III though, so take what I say cum grano salis.
C-Dog's Top Five Fave Comic Book Superhero Adaptations (With One Cheat)
Metareviewing Orange County... I'm not going to spend much time thinking about this one. I'm sorry I wasted $5.75 of my hard-earned money and 83 minutes of my life on this piece of crap. I sit to write this hoping only to do my small part in saving as many as possible from doing the same. I like Jack Black. He was great in High Fidelity. I defended him for making Saving Silverman on the basis the movie wasn't actually that bad. That said, I have this to say to him: "Screw you, Jack Black. I hope you were well paid for your dignity and credibility." Ditto Chevy Chase (yeah, like he had any left), Lily Tomlin, Kevin Kline (who, like Robin Williams, does nothing but piss me off as he continues to allow his smug sense of self-righteousness to define the characters he portrays), John Lithgow, and Ben Stiller. Only the lowest of hacks, the most shameless and easily bribed or cowed by their corporate masters would dare call themselves a 'movie critic' and write a favorable review of this movie. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the discerning eye and sharp writing of Peter Travers, Rolling Stone. I checked, by the way, to make sure this review wasn't a letter from a precocious 12 yr. old Rolling Stone reader and sure enough Peter Travers is actually a writer for Rolling Stone who is (I'm assuming) paid for his work. I can only laugh. "Deft script," he calls it?! "Full tilt fun," he maintains? There is more deft writing and full tilt fun in the weakest of 30 second SportsCenter promos than in the whole of Orange County and I would've felt less cheated after plunking down my cash if the theater had actually screened the former instead of the latter. After exposing myself to Travers's unconscionable pimping, I needed to feel clean again, so I looked for a review that showed the promise of objectivity and stumbled for the first time across the work of Donald Munro of the Fresno Bee. I could tell by the name alone that I would be reading the work of an ethical and principled genius. He did not disappoint. Well, he seems to think Tom Hanks possesses some degree of talent, something I've yet to see the puffy-faced father of Orange County's ostensible star, Colin, display. In any event, Munro points out that this film is little more than a nepotic wank job and he grades it out at a D. Way to call it, brother! Okay, okay, I'm going easy on account of this guy is probably a distant cousin of mine. I should be pointing out the critic's obligation to warn working class people that they would be shocked and disgusted that anyone would think this story of a spoiled little sham artist rich kid and his 'problems' related to being so goddamned wealthy he drives a SUV to high school had any sort of value except as an unintentional look into how alienated Hollywood types are, and want us to be, from real problems like paying the electric bill. How is anyone supposed to sympahthize with the story of a kid who can get all his alleged problems solved by having his father throw money at them? Oh, but wait (spoiler alert) the real problem is the kid needs to realize he doesn't need to go to Stanford to be a writer, he can stay home and sponge off his parents and continue to goof around with is useless friends and still be a great artist. My ass. What a steaming pile. I feel sick just thinking about it. Jake Kasdan, the director of OC, has taken perhaps the single largest step backward I've ever seen a director take ... and I know what Tony Scott has been up to since True Romance. Kasdan's last effort was Zero Effect, which I felt was brilliant re-imagining of the Sherlock Holmes mythology and even included on my 90 Great Films list. He's clearly used up his talent (washed up at 26, he must have a serious drug problem) and should consider carpentry or perhaps accounting as a fall back.
Metareviewing O Brother, Where Art Thou?... Ebert's take is half-witted as ever. Here's the quick summary of his review: "There were a bunch of scenes I really liked, but I didn't get it." He's the literal equivalent of that Chris Farley sketch where Farley interviews celebrities by asking if they remember specific scenes from their movies then, after describing the scene, says, "that was cool." To be fair, I actually wrote a not-so-clever review myself after seeing it for the first time, excerpted below: ... caught O Brother, Where Art Thou?, whose crappy title has no doubt cost it thousands of viewers -- which is a shame. It immediately became my favorite Coen Bros. movie and may even wind up being my favorite George Clooney movie, and that's saying alot because I really dug Out of Sight and Three Kings. O Brother is sort of like Huck Finn Meets Homer's Odyssey, The Musical. That not making you want to jump out of your seat and run to the local theater to see it? It really ought to. A film like Pearl Harbor will probably draw big crowds because Bruckheimer and Bay have this Neo-Rockwellian melodramatic fascist power fantasy version of Americana on celluoid honed to Himmleresque perfection, but it's a film like O Brother that actually says something about what it means to be American. Set in Mississippi during the Depression using the framework of the Odyssey to present characters that allude to Steinbeck, Huey Long, Babe Ruth, John Dillinger, and Robert Johnson, to name a few, the Coens have put together a film that sits well beside W.J. Cash 's The Mind of the South, something they failed to do for the midwest with Fargo -- perhaps because, to my knowledge, nobody's ever tried to write The Mind of the Midwest.Dimly, perhaps, I mistook the Babyface Nelson character for Babe Ruth and John Dillinger rolled into one. Hey, nobody's perfect. Still, I think overall I was right. The movie is out what it means to be American. What it means isn't something you can just present as a simple statement ... Chris - so when you sang "in the end the love you take is equal to the love you make," is that true? Paul - Yes ... there's our attitudes towards those things that have the greatest impact on our lives, yet we don't spend nearly enough time and energy trying to get right: our government and race relations. There's also the role of religion, family, women, music, and on and on. No one explains everything, just as no statement of who we are and where we came from is complete without any of them, and more still. O Brother doesn't define us, but it provides broad scope. Ebert I'm sure would've got it if the Coens had dumbed it down to the Armageddon imagery of Americana, but that imagery says nothing about who we are and only speaks to how Republicans tell us we should be because they imagine it's how we were. I can hardly be accused of being timely in getting this written, though I think it must be about time for this to be released on DVD. (Note to self: make sure the DVD ends up here, ASAP.) If you're not crazy about Coen Bros. movies, if you don't like what Eggbert and I have written, you still ought to at least rent the flick, if only to hear the song.
Metareviewing Tomb Raider… For my other meta-reviews, I've selected a few representative reviews and attempted to critique them point by point. In this case, the reviews, positive and negative, all say pretty much the same thing. This movie isn't exactly inspiring a complex tapestry of nuanced criticism. Go figure. So, let's just deal with the consensus opinion as a whole. The critical consensus on Tomb Raider can be summed up "Angelina Jolie good, rest of movie bad". I have to say that on this film, the critics are generally correct. As is usually the case, it's not entirely accurate to paint in such broad, black and white strokes because Jolie isn't that good and the movie isn't that bad, but for so generic and underwhelming a film it's hardly worth the effort to make the distinction. Girls who want to see a competent female action hero will get what they're looking for and boys who want to see Jolie's hammers in tight shirts will also get what they're looking for. There's no reason to discourage those groups from going and no reason to encourage anyone else to see it, so the critics are doing their job by panning the movie in such a way that the people who will enjoy it won't be put off.
Metareviewing Memento… Charles Taylor, Salon.com & Geoff Pevere, TheStar.com (Toronto) Update: An excellent dissection of the movie from Salon.com. I've seen the movie a second time and several of the observations I was going to make are covered in this article. One of the film critic’s most important jobs is to encourage people to see good movies and stay away from bad ones. Therefore, a review of Christopher Nolan’s Memento is obliged, even when pointing out flaws, to come back to the key consideration that it is a well-crafted, finely acted, visually interesting, conceptually intriguing film, a film it is far more important you make an effort to see than a House of Mirth, for instance – which by the way was a piece of crap, literally a buzz-kill. (I was going to hammer Taylor for recommending it, but in going back I see that it was actually Salon’s Stepanie Zacharek who wrote a unforgivably apologetic review of it.) Taylor’s review, while written to his usual high standard, fails the litmus test. Taylor implies that viewers won’t make an emotional connection to the movie, except in the tale of Sammy Rankin, which is related by Guy Pearce’s Leonard over the course of the movie. Taylor suggest more of that story should have been told or focused on, completely missing the point of it’s meaning to the movie and perhaps also not recognizing that it may or may not have actually happened and that while it is crucial to understanding Leonard, it is by it’s nature only a small part of the movie and couldn’t have expanded. Taylor also never mentions the film’s sense of humor, a glaring omission. While hardly an Airplane!, Memento has far more laugh out loud moments than virtually any movie marketed as a comedy because the humor comes naturally from the characters and situations and not from wacky, sit-com type set-ups for anemic punchline/payoffs. (The same reason Buffy is funnier than Friends.) Pevere’s review, while slight, at least acknowledges the humor in this otherwise “cold exercise,” to quote Taylor: "Memento" might have postponed being revealed as a cold exercise if the filmmakers had cast someone other than Guy Pearce in the lead. All I could get from Pearce in L.A. Confidential was a stiff actor playing a dullard straight-arrow whose conflicts didn't go deep enough to seem interesting. Here, done up in a shock of spiky, dyed-blond hair and various creepy tattoos (designed, it would appear, after Robert De Niro in "Cape Fear"), he's a blank, not even a man tormentedly trying to recover his past. He's so affectless that being a blank seems what he aspires to. The loss of short-term memory is his fulfillment.Taylor’s (and Pevere’s) point about Pearce is well-taken. I’m not sold on Pearce’s talent either, in fact, throughout the movie I found myself wondering if his L.A. Confidential co-star, Russell Crowe, might not have been a better fit in the role. Taylor is careful not to give away too much of the film, but I found myself forgiving Pearce later in the film when we had a better understanding of his character’s nature. The tempation as an actor to overdo the torment of his memories must have been strong, but fits the story. Both reviews allude to the film’s format and its relation to the thematic matters: Taylor’s dismissively and unfairly, Pevere’s superficially but with more accuracy. Taylor speculates that if told in sequential order the story would fall apart, Pevere notes that the backwards unfolding is not a gimmick, but a device that gives the audience an understanding of Leonard’s condition that simple descriptive repetition (which the film also supplies) would not have afforded. When the DVD is released, I’ll test my theory, but in thinking it through I do believe that story would have held up if told sequentially and might have given us a better understanding of Moss’s character, which was the major gripe I had about the movie after – yet another detective movie where the female character is constricted by the story and alienated from the audience. Seeing the movie a second time has changed my perspective slightly. Where I originally felt the Natalie character was short-shrifted, I feel less so now, though I still wish we could have gotten to know her better. I have to admit I simply got a little confused about what order things were happening in the narrative and it made her make less sense to me. One of the joys of this movie is how it's largely about memory and in writing about it I am relying on that notoriously faulty device. The updated link I added above is by a reviewer who did what initial reviewers of the movie either didn't have time, or were just to lazy, to do: he watched multiple times and took detailed notes. If more critcs followed the example, reviews in general would be far more helpful. It was nice to see Taylor's assertion (which I doubted, but couldn't disprove from memory) that the film wouldn't make sense if told in forward order refuted.
Meta-reviewing Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon ... Roger Ebert: Broad, inaccurate generalizations (an Ebert hallmark) do a disservice to the message. His message is "see the movie," and the message is good, only one wishes Ebert would write with credibility so the message would be not be tarnished by commingling with dumbass blathering. Well, maybe it's not that bad a review, but in writing about the martial arts genre he says, "To be sure, people get killed, but they are either characters who have misused their powers or anonymous lackeys of the villain."which makes me wonder if he's paid attention to any of the other genre films he's watched because in nearly all of them (CT,HD included) somebody's wise old sifu is or has been murdered by the baddies. Wise old sifus and the wisecracking, hot-headed younger brothers of the good guys are to Hong Kong action movies what the old cop who's due for his pension in a month and the wisecracking, hot-headed younger brothers of the good guys are to American action movies. Ebert also writes, " In 'Legend of Drunken Master,' the recently re-released Jackie Chan movie, a bed of glowing coals is suspended in the air next to an elevated factory railway. Why? So Chan can fall into them."His point is partly valid, in martial arts movies fights tend to break out in unlikely places. In order to make his point though, Ebert forces himself to forget that the bed of coals was not actually "suspended in ... air", but was plausibly shown to be the uncovered top of a brick oven used to heat up iron rods. Ebert's summary also leaves out or misrepresents key plot points. For one, the obstacle that prevents the hero and heroine from acting on their feelings for one another is neither of the things Ebert claims, as anyone who didn't have their face buried in tub of buttery popcorn for long stretches of time would surely know. Occasionally, Ebert stands up for an overlooked, under-rated movie, but more often than not his reviews are like this one: they make you wonder how he got, and retains, his job when he's clearly so bad at it. Mike Clark, USA Today: Slightly better than Ebert's review, if equally inaccurate. Would it kill these guys to take notes? Or do they just ignore the subtitles? It is not "family considerations" that have prevented Li Mu Bai and Yu Shu Lien from acknowledging their love, nor is it Mu Bai's thirst for vengeance, nor is it the theft of the Green Destiny sword (the latter two being Ebert's incorrect guesses). Shu Lien makes it clear it was out of respect for her dead fiancee, who had fought alongside Mu Bai when they were younger and was killed in battle before they could wed. Clark and Ebert both, perhaps with the intent of not over-disclosing plot details, do not discuss at all the end of the movie. That neither mentions the legend of the boy who jumped from the mountain makes me think though that they don't discuss the ending because they didn't get it. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon is a fairy-tale that on one level seeks to show role of legends and larger than life heroes in our understanding of ourselves and relationships with others. Ebert was on to something in the beginning of his review when he talked about how the fighting in martial arts movies sometimes has greater meaning. Martial arts are about training the mind and the body; Ang Lee argues, by way of telling a story (this is what Clark and Ebert did not pick up on) that telling, and reflecting upon, certain legends can also help train the mind to develop the spirtual discipline needed to live a harmonious life. The characters who are unable to strike a balance between their desires and duties, between idealism and pragmatism -- suffer for it in the end. For the Jen character, the conflict within herself is between her love of freedom (the outlaw life as personified in her mind by Shu Lien and Jade Fox) and her love for the bandit Dark Storm, which she identifies with a loss of her freedom. This conflict eventually rains death and anguish upon those around her as she lashes out in frustration. Her downfall is a lack of mental or spiritual discipline -- an understanding that with rights come responsibilities. I'm probably making the movie sound didactic; it really isn't. Though I believe Lee's intent was to present a meta-legend with a moral, I don't think he sacrificed a sense of fun and wonder in doing so. The fight scenes are amazing, the scenery gorgeous, the characters complex and engaging -- it's a flat-out well crafted film.
Meta-reviewing Saving Silverman ... Jay Carr, Boston Globe: Jay’s not alone. From what I can tell there’s near unanimity in critical derision of Saving Silverman. I saw the movie today and I can see where that’s coming from. It’s really not as bad as all that though. For one thing, it is funny. You can tell in what way from the previews: funny “ha-ha, that guy just got kicked in the nuts and now he’s getting his head shoved in the toilet,” funny, not “this brilliant piece of satire challenges our perception of male and female roles in post-post-modern society,” funny. In setting out to review a movie made to get laughs out of Jack Black spinning around with panty hose on his head (not Jack Black playing the same character he played in High Fidelity -- a point that Mr. Carr holds against Black which, as long as I’m commenting parenthetically, I don’t believe Black, for good or ill, is contractually, morally, or in any other way obliged to play in every single movie he makes) one should consider whether the movie is actually funny (a subjective thing, I know, but reviewers might listen to see if the people around them are laughing before they stick their nose in the air and start moaning for Woody Allen to come save them – but that’s a subject for another rant) and whether it gets it’s laughs honestly, for example, through the clever arrangement of words and images, or dishonestly, by making fun of the disenfranchised and using cliches to create the illusion of cleverness. There’s surprisingly more of the former in Silverman than I had reason to expect going in, although there is enough of the latter to justify a negative review on the whole. What Carr and many critics are missing, I think, is the fact that Silverman doesn’t fall prey to a number of comedic movie conventions for buddy/relationship comedies. Bonedaddy, TC: I cut and paste Mark’s Boneyard pieces into our site, so there’s no real way for me to post them without reading them at least superficially. I also put in the paragraph tags, so even if I tried to hold off reading, I can’t help but see at least the last couple words of each paragraph. That’s the scenario under which I’m writing this. I did see something about “The He-Man Woman Haters Club” in his review. I also remember the last sentence, which says something along the lines of “yeah, like that’s not sexist.” Based on these fragments, I hereby set out to meta-review … Scanning Rotten Tomatoes, linked somewhere above, I noticed female reviewers were among the most virulent in their contempt for this movie, a fact I’ll try not to forget as I start to wax apologetic for its flaws. SS isn’t about a bunch of guys trying to protect their guydom from the encroachment of Woman – who represents commitment and the end of good, clean, straight guy fun. I realize the previews make it look this way, but really it’s about two guys (one, atypically, is actually not straight – Jack Black shares an on-screen kiss with the guy who played the drill sergeant in Full Metal Jacket in the finale – a little wink to those who like to point out the undercurrent of homoeroticism in pop culture movies about “guydom”) trying to save their friend from making a really, really bad relationship decision. Bonedaddy I think might’ve been pleasantly surprised in seeing the movie to find it doesn’t promote the idea of a bunch of guys banding together to keep one of their friends from entering into a relationship simply on the grounds that it would mess up their plans to gave guy fun. I didn’t like the way the movie backhandedly, after pointing out the idea’s stupidity, endorsed the idea of there being one perfect match for each person. This was the thing about the movie that left me feeling betrayed. It also would have been nice if the girl the guy being saved ended up with didn’t also happen to look like a supermodel. Is the movie sexist, as Mark has deduced from the previews? Well, I bet The Wedding Planner and What Women Want are more so, though I doubt the female reviewers will lambaste them as they did SS because it’ll be the kind of sexist claptrap that’s targeted to adults, not to adolescents. Still, the female characters are unlikable and the movie is told from a guy’s point-of-view, so even though I don’t think the movie is malevolent in a way some others, like American Pie, American Psycho & American Beauty (kidding about the last, just going for the American triple play, though the more I think about it…) are, I’m mindful of the fact female reviewers seem to be distraught and will defer to their judgement. The thing is though, it's not like the guys have a problem with all women or with their buddy having a relationship. In fact, they try to set him up with a girl that he actually likes to replace the girl that's clearly wrong for him. (That she's some kind of other bizarre stereotype doesn't help the movie though.) Guys, jerky women shouldn’t be kidnapped and chained to an engine in your garage until their boyfriends move on to a more healthy relationship as this movie irresponsibly depicts. Let's make sure we've got that down for the record. Reviewers, there's *slightly* more to cheer for in this movie than you expect. What you don't get the previews or from the title is that what the guys are trying to save their friend from isn't Woman, the commitment-mongering bitch, it's himself for settling for a bad relationship.
Meta-reviewing Guy Ritchie's Snatch ... First off, I re-watched Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels to refresh my memory for comparison to Snatch and it turns out the Special Features on that DVD finally helped me make sense of that commercial Jerry Seinfeld did for AMEX -- the one where he does stand-up in England with that bit about "taking a butcher's up the apples and pears." I never clocked what he was on about (something about a bad experience in a British prison?), but thanks to the Cockney Rhyming Slang overview on the DVD, I now know that "butcher's" is short for "butcher's hook" which is a rhymed subsitute for the word "look." I don't know for sure what the "apples and pears" bit is, but I'd guess "stairs" as it's the first rhyme for "pears" that comes to mind and makes sense as stairs are something you'd plausibly look up. It's a good feeling to get something that was nagging at me finally cleared up. I still have no idea what that sick bastard in the McDonald's commercial is up to (the fella that's wrapping stuff in his soiled food papers) and can only conclude the commercial is actually McDonald's way of avoiding liability for a Mad Cow disease outbreak ... "look, we showed you in the ad how you'd go mental if you ate one of our damned burgers; it's your own damned fault you've got spongiform encephalitis now, ennit?" But enough about commercials I don't understand and on with reviewing the reviews: Ben Falk, BBC Online: I wasn't aware there was any hype, as Falk claims, to the effect of Snatch being a radical departure from LS&2SB. If there was, it's rubbish because the movies are very similar. Lots of the same faces, a similarly contrived plot, the same type of banter, and the same visual style, only this time it was obvious Ritchie had a fatter bankroll to play with. (Before I forget, I'm going to thank God he exercised restraint and kept his movie-killing wife out of the film. Madonna is a fine little singer, for sure, but Dick Tracy fer chrissakes; we don't any of us need to flashback to that horrorshow.) Falk says this film is "crippled by a lack of laughs." I don't know what he's using for a sense of humor these days, but I suspect it's been a while since he took some toilet paper to it and wiped because it's not serving him. (That's a roundabout way of saying, "he's using his ass, poorly" in case that didn't come across ... I'm a bit tired after a late night at the bar last night and no chance to nap today.) Everyone in the theater I saw the film in was laughing out loud quite a bit of the time in the spots they were meant to -- the comedy worked. Snatch is by no means perfect, but it's not anywhere near as bad as Falk's review makes it sound. While it's true there are scads of characters to keep track of, they're all quite good and it's no trouble keeping track of 'em. I think what we have here is another case of a reviewer (Ebert serving as the model here) too thick in the skull to make sense of a movie any more complex than Home Alone where all you need to do is hear the name of it, see any given five seconds, and you know exactly what is going to happen the other hour and twenty- nine minutes. Harvey O'Briend, Phd. of Harvey's Movie Reviews: Our man Harvey is a Phd. Based on his review of Snatch I'm forced to conclude his doctoral thesis was entitled "My Ass and a Whole (sic) in the Ground Full of Rocks: A Comparative Study" and that he was surprised to discover, while researching, that his ass was not, in fact, also full of rocks. He compares Snatch to Natural Born Killers of all things. NBK was an unmitigated pile of steaming feces that only someone with Mad Cow disease would have leap to mind for any reason at all, nevermind to imply it's similar to a movie that's actually any good at all. Rodney "If You're Watching a Movie I'm In, You Must Be Ready to Shoot Yourself" Dangerfield was the best part of NBK, 'nuff said. Dr. O'Brien also writes, "Ritchie's treatment of black characters is no different here than it was last time out"as he whines about the portrayal of Travellers and Jews in the movie. For starters, the black characters in Snatch are nothing like the menacing gang from LS&2SB. If anything, they just take the place of the Northern white English bunglers from the first movie this time around. At the risk of coming across as insensitive to stereotyping in films, which obviously happens and is a problem, it's not the problem in Snatch and trying to make it so just makes you look like a poncey gobshite. (I'm all full of mumbly cusswords after having watched two Ritchie movies in a 24hr period.) Snatch is brutally violent and irresponsible about it, but it's not a message movie. It's got a fighting Brad Pitt in it, but it is *not* Fight Club. In fact, now that I think some more about it, I think the good Doctor has missed the point of our seeing that the film's main baddie runs dogfights: it's really the only thing that's makes him any worse of a person than anyone of the other characters in the movie. They're all murderers and thieves and the violence they wreak on each other is treated so lightly and comically because it's a result of the choices they've made about their lives. If you're a promoter of unlicensed boxing matches who fixes fights for mobsters, as the most morally upright character in the film is, then, in the world of movies, you can pretty much expect nasty things are bound to happen to you and the people with whom you associate. Take a step back and put yourself in the audience, if you go to see a comedy about these characters, are you expecting a sermon about how violence is bad? Of course not, you could've stayed home and rented Cry Freedom if that's what you were after. "Violence is bad" movies are out there and not every movie needs to be one. I don't even have to read Ebert's review to know it's crap. I notice though he gave higher ranking to The Gift which, despite it's being a Raimi film, is obviously a piece of crap. I'll refer Raimi apologists to For Love of the Game. Some movies you just don't need to see to know they're going to be a waste of your valuable time. Now that Crouching Tiger,Hidden Dragon, Traffic, and Snatch have opened, I'm a little worried about the foreseeable future at the cineplex. There isn't anything coming out that I'm looking forward to seeing. It was a good run while it lasted though, I can't remember the last time I went to three movies in a row that were as good, or better, than I'd dared to hope.
Metareviewing Soderbergh's Traffic ... Ebert: Ebert foolishly chooses to review Traffic in the context of the real-life "war on drugs" despite his own admission that pretty much all he knows about the war is what he saw in the movie and the British miniseries that inspired it; it's like deciding to review Anti-Trust in the context of real-life anti-trust suit against Microsoft knowing no more about it than Tim Robbins can bear a slight resemblance to Bill Gates if given a bad haircut and dorky glasses. Thankfully, Soderbergh's made a thoughtful movie about what it means to say that we are engaged in a war on drugs, so Ebert's susceptibility may have resulted in his accidentally happening upon the truth. Ebert lightly touches upon the movie's narrative structure, but doesn't discuss Soderbergh's visual style or how Traffic fits into what I guess you'd have to call Soderbergh's canon by now. (Incidentally, it's less commercial than Out of Sight; less arthouse, therefore less pretentious, than The Limey; and light years better than the godawful Sex, Lies, and Videotape thanks to the employment of competent actors and a far superior script -- placing it squarely in the realm of quality next to Erin Brokovich.) For me, a big part of the pleasure in watching Traffic came from admiring the way Soderbergh balances a flair for the highly stylized presentation of his story with a kind of naturalism without the result being a messy hodge-podge of styles. I have to remind myself that Ebert writes for a rag of a newspaper so it may not be that he doesn't notice the most interesting things about movies, only chooses to dumb his reviews down a shade so he can trick his readers into going to see them based on the impression his reviews give that the movies are shallow bits of fluff they won't get headaches thinking about. Is Ebert actually a cynical genius who is attempting to herd crowds towards movies he thinks deserving by carefully crafting his reviews to take advantage of his readerships gullibility? Hmmmm. On a side note, I've been watching the Ken Burns documentary on baseball over the last week or so and it was a nice synchronicity to have Traffic end on a scene of the Benicio Del Toro character watching kids play baseball (something pure) on a field his tainted work helped to build. Charles Taylor, Salon: This is much more like it. Taylor demonstrates a knowledge of current events relating to our anti-drug policy as he discusses the movie's relevance. He also feels, as I do, that Traffic is a bit of a disappointment. That disappointment though is based on the high expections I had a result of the Out of Sight / The Limey / Erin Brokovich trifecta. Traffic is in some ways superior to each of those three, but ultimately the viewer's emotional connection to the characters is undermined by melodrama too heavy to be borne by the film's documentarian style and the lack of focus on any one character. Taylor wishes in his review that there was a little more of the muckraker in Soderbergh's approach, he writes: But reason isn't a substitute for drama or passion. "Traffic" should be scalding; instead it merely makes a solid argument.He finds the film lacking in intensity. I don't agree, as I've already mentioned, I felt there was an emotional distance, but I don't think amping the film up would have solved the problem and probably would've just excacerbated the melodrama problem. Reason and drama can march arm in arm, but reason and melodrama keep wrangling and elbowing each other like two unwilling fat guys forced to share a twin bed -- nobody wants to see that. If anything, I think the film should've taken more pleasure in showing up Orrin Hatch and the other politicos who took self-aggrandizing turns in the film. I loved the movie when I was chuckling at the blatant hypocrisy of some of the characters ... I think what was missing was more humor. Not slapstick, but the desperate kind of humor that gives you just enough of an "in" so you can laugh at the insanity. One final nitpick of the review: I'd say Taylor ascribes a little too much moral authority to Del Toro's Mexican cop, who practices his own duplicity in his own quest to get that ballpark lit.
Metareviewing Fellowship of the Ring…
Reviews cited: Most film critics can't be bothered to put one informed opinion in a review, nevermind string a few together for their non-vegetative readership, which leaves a metareviewer precious little to do but point at their work and mutter something to the effect of, "Well, look at the thing, it's just a piece of shit as anyone can plainly see. Why bother with it at all?" There are however a few out there, a very few, who are entertaining to read and actually do their readers the service of pointing out which movies are worth the effort and considerable expense of going to see in the theater. Filthy is one such. His review of FOTR is generally right on but seems to be willing to accept the out of hand dismissal of the film on a moral level as having anything worth saying: The story takes place in a world where some characters have no reason to exist other than to be evil. In fact, Sauron is hardly even a character, just an unstoppable foe with unlimited resources and no redeeming features. Not even a mother that loves him. The good guys face pure, black evil; no moral complexities, no doubts about who is right. In the real world, evil that black would be a laughably lame plot device, and the story would be trashed for its moralistic simplicity. So would a single ring that, when destroyed, destroys all badness. If that happened in the real world, what the fuck would Miss America do?Filthy's right, Sauron is a convenient baddie. Evil for its own sake with no redeeming qualities. Neither Jackson nor Tolkien, I would argue, are making the case for good and evil being that simple -- let's leave that to real-life world leaders. You'll notice that even while saying they do, Filthy doesn't flesh out the "white" side of the argument for the "black and white" criticism. I think the reason is he'd find it hard to do so. Perhaps making Sauron so purely malevolent invites the perception and does disservice to the story -- that's a criticism I would accept as fair, but to say that it's all black and white and no grey is inaccurate. It's a mistake most critics seem to make. If you want to know where the grey is, look to Boromir. Look to Galadriel. Look to Gollum. Even the heroes have weaknesses: Frodo, like Bilbo, is basically a decent guy, but also like Bilbo is susceptible to the ring -- not to the extent of the more powerful characters, but nothing about doing good in the context of the struggle to destroy the ring comes easy to him. You have to look to find the complexities but they are there. There's one scene in particular that I felt effectively showed that even on the side of the good, there is room for disagreement as to how to wage the struggle: it occurs in the Mines of Moria when Frodo tells Gandalf (I'm paraphrasing) it's a pity Bilbo didn't just kill Gollum when he had the chance. This angers Gandalf and he sternly puts it to Frodo that (again paraphrasing because I haven't got the book at hand) there are some living who perhaps deserve death and others dead who deserved life, but not being able to grant life to the dead one should not be quick to deal death to those who seem undeserving of life. It's a powerful case for mercy and forgiveness and will temper Frodo's treatment of Gollum as the story unfolds. Personally, I wish too that the film and books had more scenes of this sort, but they are there and it's not fair to ignore them. Filthy also makes some spot-on commentary that in my fanboy appreciation I glossed over. Witness: With nine characters, plus elves, wizards and others, people are sure to get lost keeping track. The other three Hobbits in the Fellowship all act like they're about to steal my Lucky Charms. They're just stupid, condescending sidekicks meant for comic relief, because everyone loves to laugh at filthy little people.Samwise, Meriadoc, and Peregrin have to little to do, and if I'd been in charge of things, I might've looked for a way to have Merry and Pippin in tandem take on the Sam functions and excised his character. I know, I know, it would've been a more drastic change than playing to Arwen's character as Jackson did and the whole story would have to be restructured, but it was just a thought and perhaps we'll all not feel so ambivalent about the number of hobbits mucking about as things progress. Frickin' Ebert, the temptation here is to throw up my hands because the fat gobshite just writes nonsense, but I'll do my best to control my distaste and discuss just a bit of his review. So, let's hold our noses and poke the pile of feces he's left us with a stick a bit ... That "Fellowship of the Ring" doesn't match my imaginary vision of Middle-earth is my problem, not yours. Perhaps it will look exactly as you think it should. But some may regret that the Hobbits have been pushed out of the foreground and reduced to supporting characters. And the movie depends on action scenes much more than Tolkien did. In a statement last week, Tolkien's son Christopher, who is the "literary protector" of his father's works, said, "My own position is that 'The Lord of the Rings' is peculiarly unsuitable to transformation into visual dramatic form." That is probably true, and Jackson, instead of transforming it, has transmuted it, into a sword-and-sorcery epic in the modern style, containing many of the same characters and incidents.Ebert, what movie did you see? Are you retarded? First of all, Chris Tolkien's opinion means about as much to me as Chris Tucker's. Why playa hate Tucker? Check out his interview with Charlie Rose some day when your local PBS station replays it. That kid is so full of himself and full of shit it's almost unbelievable. But I digress, Chris Tolkien makes his living reassembling pieces of his dad's corpse. He's Natalie Cole with a more snobbish attitude. Screw him. As to Ebert's implication that Jackson's FOTR is just a modern day fantasy movie with coincident relation to the source material, it's ridiculous on it's face. If anything, the film is a too literal adaption of the material with no significant deviation from the meaning or message of Tolkien. And the hobbits being pushed to the background, again I wonder how much of the movie he missed arguing with the kid at the concession stand about how to skillfully load a bucket of popcorn with yellow grease. "Look you worthless monkey, I'm Roger Ebert and I'm telling you a bucket of this size needs 4 distinct layers of popcorn separated by a layer of butter in order to ensure each piece is properly coated. I want you to mix a box of Sno-Caps in with my popcorn or I'm going to have speaks with your manager!" I having a harder time pinning down exactly what it is Skerritt didn't like about Jackson's version. He seems to have approached the review with the idea of making it negative but without real will to do so. He calls the film unimaginative, points to the Shire as being an exercise in cliche, and faults the pacing of the story. These latter two points are equally true of the books he professes to admire, and the first seems specious on the grounds that the approach of the film seems to have been as much as possible to transcribe the experience of reading the book to the screen and as far as how that was done, Jackson and his team, I felt, did as fine as one could hope for and I don't see why my opinion on that matter should count for any less than Skerrit's. I've read many more reviews and found none that mention the scene in Moria where Gandalf and Frodo discuss Bilbo's taking pity on Gollum, which to me is central to the story and theme. It'd be like reviewing The Third Man without mentioning the scene on the ferris wheel.
Metareviewing Ali…
Reviews cited: Here's my mindset going into Mann's Ali: it's called Ali, not Ali: A Biography, or Ali: The Documentary, so I went to it not expecting to see When We Were Kings Redux or a remake of The Greatest (shudder); instead, I wanted to be entertained by a movie that could present to Ali's two greatest skills -- fighting and talking. I also hoped that in the process of doing those two things, there'd be insight into how one man became, arguably, the last century's most exciting practioner of those rather disparate arts. If that seems a bit much, I think most people would probably agree he's the only boxer we have any real, enduring interest in outside of the ring, other than for prurient reasons. *cough* Mike Tyson *cough* Because I wasn't looking for complete historical accuracy and was looking for entertainment before education, I wanted reviewers of the film to identify if Ali delivered the goods: effective recreations of the fights and Ali's verbal prowess in the context of a narrative that would hold a reasonable person's interest. On the whole, reviewers of the film who aren't pure shills seem to be getting it right. The consensus is Will Smith was up to the task, if more to the verbal apect of the role than the physical; as Ebert put it, "the right actor ... in the wrong movie." The reviewers also tend to agree that the fight recreations are near perfect and eclipse previous attempts to film actors boxing. Almost all seem to have left disappointed by the structure of the film and Mann's style, but no so diappointed that they can't recommend it overall. After seeing the film, I think they got it right on all counts. Will Smith: yes. Michael Mann: no. Since the reviewers are for the most part doing their job on this one, I want to address some of the more interesting observations in the three reviews I felt were representative of the critical whole and the things I was surprised to see paid professionals get wrong. Ebert thinks the movie has the feel of a rough cut rushed to release before editing was done. The reasons he cites for feeling this way indicate that he's been mentally traumatized by watching too much schlock and no longer has the attention span or cognitive abilities to focus on anything more complex than a network tv promo for next week's "Fear Factor". One example of his failure to pay attention: he points to a scene of Ali training in Zaire by running the streets and back alleys of Kinasha and writes, "... [Ali runs] past a panorama of daily life ... he runs and runs and runs, long after any possible point has been made -- and runs some more." No, Ebert, no. This is one of the central passages of the movie and does as well as could be expected in showing, without words, Ali's complex relationship with his handlers (trainers, advisors, etc...) and with his "third-world" fans. He runs away from his handlers (though he eventually returns to them) and runs with the people of Kinasha past several murals that have been painted on the sides of buildings, all showing him with gloves raised in triumph or punching tanks and knocking airplanes out of the sky. This is how Ali sees what the people of Africa see in him. This is how Ali understands his importance to their dreams of peace and prosperity. It sets up the final shot of the movie: Ali, arms raised in triumph, leaning over the ropes towards the people. Ebert apparently saw the "panorama of daily life" and missed the dozen or so murals Ali passed by because Mann didn't have the action stop at each one for Ali to ponder aloud, "Hhmmmm, this mural gives me insight into reason for my popularity here." You'd think the one he did stop and stare at would've been enough for Ebert to pick up on. Later in his review, Ebert complains that there's no dialogue while Ali watches from a rooftop as fires burn across the city after news of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s (LeVar Burton) assasination breaks. Spell it out for me, Ebert cries, I don't understand!!! Wiley's review was interesting to me because his thesis is that Mann made the moview with the same approach he postulates Mark Twain took to Tom Sawyer Abroad. Wiley didn't go so far as to draw any type of comparison between Twain and Ali, but I think you couldn't do much better if asked to pick two Americans whose experiences and legacies say the most about what, if anything, is unique to something as hard to define as the American character. In any event, Twain and Ali would be a great answer to the old "who would you invite to dinner for conversation?" question. But back to Wiley's point about Twain and Tom Sawyer Abroad... He wrote this entire piece just to get one image down on the page for posterity. He had a herky-jerky setup of Tom Sawyer, Huck Finn and the slave Jim in a hot-air balloon. Balloon goes abroad. To Africa! The balloon crosses the Sahara, and finally, Tom and Huck let Jim off on the head of the Sphinx. While they float off to watch Jim on the head of the Sphinx from a distance in order to get "perspective," Jim waves both arms across each other, then stands on his head and kicks his legs like a frog, all to gain their attention. Mark Twain's point was obvious, to me. Hey, this is the guy who made this. We'd better think about this the next time we feel like abusing him. Mark Twain constructed that entire piece just for that one image.Wiley felt that the whole of Ali was constructed for the purpose of recreating "The Rumble in the Jungle". I don't agree with him, but I like the fact that he had an original idea and ran with it. Ebert, take note. Caro's review is interesting for questioning the scope of movie and the time of Ali's life that Mann chose to focus on. Caro argues that Mann's focus is too narrow and too much of Ali's childhood is missing, too much of his post-Rumble career. The movie was quite long enough, thanks, and I don't think we need more, in fact I felt rather to the contrary that Mann tried to cram too much into the movie and left out some of the most interesting parts of the story. In his defense, Caro does recognize that one of the mysteriously left out bits is the "more compelling, unflattering dynamics [of the Ali-Frazier relationship]". Still, it's hard to comprehend how he expected Mann to include the Atlanta Olympics and more of Ali's childhood and development as a fighter. He too though totally misses the point of the murals ... Mann has a tendency to let the camera linger on Smith’s face as events swirl around him — one Zaire scene has Ali looking at a mural for what seems like five minutes — and I guess we’re just supposed to read his soulful reaction.Didn't these guys notice what the murals were depictions of? Didn't it occur to them there might be a reason they are there? Caro makes one useful observation: "... Mann has restaged Ali’s fights and public appearances in obsessive detail, and although the screenplay is credited to two writing duos (Stephen J. Rivele & Christopher Wilkinson and Eric Roth & Mann), the wittiest lines come from Ali." It points to the problem with fictionalizing Ali versus documentarializing (how's that for a mouthful of made-up word, eh?) him, you're not going to put words in an actor's mouth more interesting than the ones Ali himself came up with. So, no matter how good the impersonation, you're better off watching tape of the original. Ali is a fascinating, complex, and relevant figure. You'd hardly know it the way he's wrapped in the flag today, but there's a reason Frazier quipped back in 1996 that he would've like to have seen Ali, after lighting the enormous Olympic cauldron, fall in. Mann reduces the flawed side of Ali's character to his infidelities. There was so much more than that though. He could be brutal in the beatings he administered to lesser fighters. His arrogant riffing could be charming and it could also be cruel. It's a shame this movie couldn't have done more to explore his life because Will Smith did a great job getting into character and it's hard to imagine anyone else getting it so right for another try.
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TC: fouling the web since March, 2000.