Issue 04: Survey time! Everyone's a critic—including you; who will be the next Miyazaki?
I spent this weekend reading A.O. Scott's Better Living Through Criticism, the thinkpiece-generating book of the moment. Scott is one of the chief critics for the New York Times and in this new book he tries to make the case for criticism—as necessary endeavor, as work of art in and of itself, as pathway to a better life.
I'm inclined to agree with Leon Wieseltier's takedown of the book in The Atlantic, though I also sympathize with Alissa Wilkinson's praise on the grounds that Christian culture needs to do a better job of fostering and encouraging good criticism. Scott's book strikes me as the kind of pop-intellectualism that Brooklynites love to discuss over brunch and booze on lazy Saturdays, seldom to be thought critically about again. At the very least Scott is passionate about his profession, and I think that's why I bothered to plow through it with such haste. His words and thought experiments go down easy; on the flip side, his arguments amount to nothing that I hadn't already pondered myself.
For all his exhortations to dig deeper into the meaning of things and to examine life until every surface has been overturned, Scott fails to make a convincing argument that the critical life is the better life promised in the book's title. In a particularly jarring passage, he describes an encounter with a young skeptic who at the wizened age of thirteen asks of Scott's role as film critic, “How exactly is that a job?” Scott explains how his challenger's parents are a professor of engineering, “who not only knows how to solve difficult equations and make complicated machines, but also teaches other people how to do those things,” and a therapist, “trained to translate her insights into the human condition into workable solutions to individual problems.”
In that kind of company, Scott's profession comes across as petty and unnecessary—and to my mind, a touch egocentric—but to make matters worse he doesn't even try to justify himself. He goes on to admit that watching a lot of movies for a living and writing about them is cool, yet bizarre, and likely to lead to various frustrations and descents into slovenliness and cynicism. He concludes this chapter conceding that we shouldn't, “ideally, have any use for critics at all, except insofar as we should all aspire to become critics.” Yet earlier in the book he posits that everyone already is a critic: we all arbitrate our taste on the regular, whether we're choosing between flavors of tea at Starbucks (and speaking of which the tea that's been sitting beside me as I write this STILL isn't cool enough to drink yet; if you're reading this, Starbucks WiFi overlords, tell the powers that be to crank down the temp on the hot water, thanks) or between highbrow films at a film festival.
I wish Scott would spend more time trying to identify what constitutes good or bad criticism—there's a touch of this in his chapter on Being Wrong, and I wish he had elaborated—rather than just spew off tautologies and cite poetry and critical essays as the spirit moves him. Ultimately Scott arrives at a sort of non-verdict about criticism: that to be a critic is to think, thus to live better through criticism is to live better by doing what every functioning human being does instinctively anyway. The book is full of such truisms and paradoxes-passing-as-breakthroughs, while it's lacking in very many firm or otherwise exciting pronouncements. I side with Wieseltier on his conclusion about Scott's infuriating own: “The impossibility of perfect certainty does not condemn us to a vapidly uncertain life.”
Survey Time!
Since we're on the topic of criticism this week, I want to do a little experiment. I want to see how you approach movies with a critical eye, and I want to compare our respective critical processes and prejudices in search of some vague definition of what makes a movie good…or bad.
Your mission, should you choose to accept it (and the more of you that do, the more fun this will be): Pick as many or as few of the movies listed below and, in 2 or 3 sentences per movie, explain why you think this a good movie or a bad movie; if you can't pin it down as one or the other, feel free to say so! You can reply directly to this email (only I will receive the replies). In the next issue of the newsletter, I'll share our collective thoughts (anonymously) and try to fashion some meaning out of our insights. Here we go:
Brooklyn
Hail, Caesar!
The Revenant
Star Wars: The Force Awakens
Articles, News, and Interviews
Who will fill the enormous shoes left by Hayao Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli? http://bit.ly/1mo18wg
R.I.P. “happily ever after.” http://bit.ly/1KcjNqp
A Portuguese director brings the Arabian Nights to the big screen…with a twist. http://bit.ly/1mgaLNq
The Revenant was almost shot on film, and other anecdotes from cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki. http://bit.ly/1KPNM7z
Richard Wright starred in an Argentinian adaptation of his very own Native Son, to intriguing results. http://nyti.ms/1KckRdX
Today in collaborations this curator can't believe are actually happening, White Teeth author Zadie Smith teams with French réalisatrice terrible Claire Denis for a sci-fi thriller with Robert Pattinson and Patricia Arquette. Globalization, ladies and gentlemen! http://bit.ly/1nYAeNk
And in other collaborations I can't believe are actually happening, Ava DuVernay and Lupita Nyong'o are teaming up for their own sci-fi film. 2017 is gonna be great. http://bit.ly/1V4A1Cy
Poster of the Day
As they do every year, the British Film Academy shows everyone else up with a classy suite of posters for their Best Picture nominees. http://bit.ly/1XnvtIY