Think Ken Loach and Mike Leigh have similar styles
Call any instance of realism in film, tv or photography "gritty"
Describe a slightly unconventional film as "cutting edge"
Call Penelope Cruz Almodovar's "muse"
Greet every minor quirkfest by the Coen brothers as a timeless masterpiece of comic genius . Even O Brother, Where Art Thou?, A Serious Man and The Hudsucker Proxy.
More suggestions welcome.
(Image: Daily Mail UK)
10 comments:
I'd say you were a pretty mediocre film critic if you dismiss films you don't understand as minor quirkfests.
Also use of phrases like "This truly is.." or variations on "Morgan Freeman IS Nelson Mandela/Sean Penn IS Harvey Milk etc." are a bad sign.
What's not to udnerstand? Theyre perfectly easy to understand. Nothing deep there at all.
Describe all CG effects as "stunning".
See 3D movies as not just a gimmick, but a new language of cinema.
Work out an interpretation of a David Lynch film, and feel satisfied with the knowledge that you've won the movie.
Think that the "digital revolution" will lead to millions of backyard Spielbergs, any day now...
Know that if a film has a single black, female or gay character, the film is really about nothing but race, gender or queerness.
Can see the deep morals of Inglourious Basterds. (srsly: http://www.sensesofcinema.com/the-deep-morals-of-inglourious-basterds/)
Oh, and if you're able to use words like "Derridean", "Lacanian", "the condition of interiority" and "intramundane", you can be a Real Film Professor!
But Fraser, you've forgotten to mention "Oedipal issues"! Very important for academic and critical cred to reference psychoanalytical concepts discredited by most practising psychiatrists many years ago
The first two thirds of Hudsucker Proxy are a note-perfect homage to the great screwball comeduies of the 30s and 40s and in the final third the characterisations deepen, darken, become more grounded and touching. To dismiss this as minor or a quirkfest is to dismiss Bringing Up Baby or Palm Beach Story in the same way.
O Brother is not only hilarious, witty, inventive and atmospheric, but as warm, textured and evocative of the Depression Era as any movie made in the past 30 years. Also it becomes oddly touching around the time Holly Hunter pops up and more and more transporting as it goes on. And I think this might be the first time the Coens' humanist streak is brought to the forefront.
As for Serious Man... Oh boy. That is the bravest, deepest, most hypnotic movie I've seen all year. Yes, it's quirky and hilarious, but it's also intimate and literate and painful, and a profound statement on faith and people's compulsion towards faith and searching for answers in a world that is dumb and cruel and provides no easy answers. It's an oddly but deeply moving film.
The Coens' best movies are so quirky and entertaining and essentially satisfying on the surface that a lot of people don't bother to dig beyond it. Ladykillers is a hollow best-forgotten quirkfest. Intolerable Cruelty is minor and pretty hollow but still enjoyable and elegant enough. But in each of the above three films there is great depth and complexity - plenty that you can miss out on and not understand (Upon first viewing I also mistook O Brother for something minor.) In fact I have a feeling, that's exactly what happened in your case.
if you describe boring, lefty, PC films as "confronting."
Ie Joe Blogs' film about Muslim Militants is at once thought provoking and sympathetic to a cause which we in the West are all too quick to judge..." etc etc
Goran: You Know You're a Real Film Critic When... you answer a waspish, mildly iconclastic one-liner with a lengthy screed from Yours Outraged. (I know you can answer in pithy one-liners because I read your blog reviews - they're pithy and bloody well-written.)
Like it isnt already obvious that Hudsucker's an attempted tribute to 30s screwball. We know that already.
You havent addressed the dramatic structural weakness that hobbles A Serious Man's very conception (Man Who Does Nothing Suffers - particularly in the drmaa/comedy form).
And you've ignored O Brother's spitting in the face of the Buster Keaton comedy principle - he who mugs largest flops hardest (and vice versa). Great soundtrack though.
But oops, I've gotten carried away and turned into Yours Outraged.
What I'm more interested in than any of the above is the conservatism of film critics - they tend to move in herds. A topic for another occasion, I think.
Anonymous: I can't think of a single film that's been sympathetic to Muslim Militants. Name one.
Anon: Ah yes, don't you like it when people describe Islamic terrorists as freedom fighters or better yet, one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter. Yeah, like blowing up 127 people to smithereens is about freedom!
Re: A Serious Man, best film of the year for me so far. Seen it three times. It surpasses Coens' recent efforts of No Country For Old Men and the abysmal Burn aAFter Reading, imho.
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