Well, I’m very busy and will have trouble producing original work for the next five or so days. But today is Wednesday, and the New York Observer is out, so I thought I’d share a few examples of how the real pro’s handle a movie review. Note that I’ve found little, if any, consistent connection between what my favorite critics think about a film and whether I like it or not, but the good ones are always a fun read.
Andrew Sarris on Prairie Home Companion:
You can either love it or dismiss it. I happened to love it for making me forget I was looking at a movie for 105 minutes. The rest is rationalization.
Rex Reed on Land of the Blind:
Among the multitude of lessons he must learn if his career moves forward are the following: how to frame a shot, how to control actors from eating the sets, and where to place the camera in order to get more than two people in the same set-up. Everything else about Land of the Blind is as big a mystery to me as crib death.
Ron Rosenbaum on Domino:
The colors themselves are a violation, almost an emotion. The motion itself is an act of violence 24 frames a second. All the images are as if from an illuminated manuscript of Satanic verses.
What you notice is the greenness of the green, the poison green making a mockery of the secular worship of Greenness. Then there’s what he does with movement. Nothing moves at the right speed. Images are violently sped up, violently slowed down and chopped up. Motion is violently violated, almost a metaphor for emotion violently violated. Early on in the film, Keira Knightley’s Domino says that she loves bounty hunting because “I can live the nasty and not do time for it.” Domino the film does the nasty to the time in it. Nothing proceeds at the same pace, everything is out of synch, everyone is out of their minds, and it seems to have something to do with life as we live it now—with, as Hamlet put it, the time being “out of joint.” Disjointed, disorienting.
Then if you’re mean and like to make fun of your host, compare those critics to Chuckling’s review of Deserted Station:
All that and much of the rest of the movie (lots of children, etc.) did make it appear that these people were human like the rest of us. But on the other hand, they were unquestionably two-dimensional. It is, however, possible they were two-dimensional due to the nature of the medium (flat screen)...
Yea, yea, I know, but is it really so wrong to have a little fun at the shallow end of the pool?
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