Okay, these things are supposed to be once a week, not once a month or whatever it keeps being lately. Still getting into the groove. Working it out. In the meantime, this will be a supersized edition – most links are within the last couple of weeks or so, but there are some exceptions where I felt the post warranted it. :)

Featured Links

MM: More Than the Silver Witch of Us All by Kim Morgan at Sunset Gun

Several posts popped up celebrating Marilyn Monroe’s birthday on June 1st, and I think this one my Kim Morgan is my wistful favorite – it’s wide-ranging and really gets at the person beneath the myth, something a lot of commentaries on Marilyn Monroe fail to do. See also The Lady Eve of The Lady Eve’s Reel Life discussing Marilyn’s final film The Misfits, a post that fits both Marilyn’s birthday and the Horseathon that was currently underway, sponsored by My Love of Old Hollywood. Also, Bobby Rivers at The Cinementals has a great post about Marilyn’s ability to make dorks and nerds feel loved.

Mary Pickford: The Girl Who Invented Celebrity by Carley Johnson at The Cinementals

The recent Mary Pickford blogathon generated a number of good posts, and I really enjoyed this one from The Cinementals. Yeah, I’m going to be linking The Cinementals a lot from now on, so just get used to it. They generate an awfully lot of high-quality content, and it’s getting to be one of the premier sites for classic movie fans. Anyway. Here Carley talks about Pickford as really the first big Hollywood celebrity – and how that differs from our current definition of the term. Also check out Page‘s picturiffic post about Pickfair at My Love of Old Hollywood, and Brandie‘s exploration of the working relationship between Pickford and writer Frances Marion at True Classics.

The Legendary Wit of Judy Garland by Lara at Backlots

Also celebrating a birthday this month was the wonderful Judy Garland (see my tribute), and Lara goes into Judy’s legendary wit, while also pointing out that it was something of a public front for her. Fascinating commentary, and the section about the candid interviews revealed a side of Judy that I didn’t really know about. See also Aurora‘s tribute to Judy at The Cinementals, and Ryan McNeil‘s perhaps fortuitously-timed Blind Spot review of A Star is Born.

The Latest Whither Criticism Kerfluffle

Seems like there’s a big debate over the “value of criticism” or “what is criticism” or approaches to criticism or what have you that takes over a bunch of the big dog film critic blogs for a while every six months or so, and even as they get repetitive, I always enjoy reading them. The current topic is the common one of film critics vs. mainstream opinions, kicked off immediately by a video podcast from the New York Times featuring film critic A.O. Scott and media commenter David Carr. Appalled by Carr’s lack of logical rigor, Jim Emerson analyzed the crap out of the video, while Glenn Kenny offered his thoughts on criticism itself. Meanwhile, others looking in, like the excellent amateur blogger Velvet Cafe (whose blog is a must for extremely well-written personal experiences with movies) wondered why all the fuss over such a trifling video. I left my own long comment on Velvet Cafe’s blog, but the gist of it is that I agree with Emerson, though I’m not as angered as he was. The video mostly just made me frustrated that the level of discussion it displays is considered adequate in any way. It’s a ridiculous video, and while it might not be worth getting up in arms over, Emerson’s breakdown of it is exactly right. If this is what passes for critical discourse at the New York Times (about criticism or anything else), then we’re in a bad way.

“Indie Blockbuster Franchise” is Not an Oxymoron by Kristin Thompson at Observations on Film Art

The Lord of the Rings trilogy are independent films. Does that statement make you go “whaaaa?” the way it did me? Check out Kristin Thompson’s extremely interesting article about big-budget independent films, which are financed not by a big studio bankrolling things from the start, but from international distributors putting up a portion of the cost up front for a share of the profits. That system is extremely risky when it comes to something the size of LOTR, but it paid off extremely well in that case, giving smaller distributors around the world a lot more cash for a few years to invest in other properties. With New Line Cinema, at the time functioning as a wholly independent producer, now subsumed into Warner Bros, who will take their place, and what blockbuster franchises can hope to be the next indie cash cow? Thompson looks to Lion’s Gate, with its recent take-over of the Twilight and Hunger Games franchise. In any case, Thompson’s look into this specific type of distribution is very interesting and enlightening.

Silent Talk: The Silent-Classic Divide by Chris Edwards at The Cinementals

Chris Edwards already runs one of the best silent film-related blogs out there at Silent Volume, and now he’s contributing at The Cinementals, as well, with a series on getting into silent films. He’s already into the series for real with a post on starting with silent shorts, but I’d like to highlight his introduction post as well, which wonders why there’s an apparent divide between classic film fans and silent films – in other words, why do so many people who love classic films draw a line at silents in a way that they don’t do for black and white, older acting styles, etc. There are a number of suggestions proffered in the comments, including lack of availability, even more different style, and lack of continuity between the silent and sound eras. It’s an interesting question, for sure. Definitely stay tuned for the rest of Chris’s posts, especially if you’re interested in getting into silent film. Also on topic and at The Cinementals, Trevor Jost runs down his favorite silent films.

Old Wives for New: Sex, Sin, and Cecil B. DeMille by the Mythical Monkey

The other “best silent film-related blog other there” (in addition to the previously-mentioned Silent Volume) is easily the Mythical Monkey Writes About the Movies, where the Mythical Monkey ostensibly writes about his choices for the Silent Oscars (if there were such a thing), but actually writes excellent long-form essays about all manner of silent films. This entry is about the career and influence of Cecil B. DeMille, who is often derided today for his love of populist spectacle, but was, in the 1920s, one of the most highly respected and influential directors in Hollywood. There are good reasons for this, and I’ve got to say, I’ve heartily enjoyed all of the silent DeMille films I’ve seen, which isn’t something I can say for all silent filmmakers.

Demented Podcast: Battle Royale #4 by Nick, Steve, Rachel, Kai, Stevee, me, and Jason

A bit of a self-plug here. I was on the Demented Podcast a few months ago, and my score on their ridiculously hard trivia game was good enough to get me a spot in the Battle Royale, where the top five scorers of the podcasting season play off against each other for the championship title. Lots of great trivia, lots of fun, and lots of laughs are traded here. What’s that? Oh, how did I do? You’ll have to listen to find out!

Click here to read on!

I‘m going to make a vow right now to never again say in print or in conversation the words: “The book is better.”

Not because the book isn’t better, not because I don’t think the book is better in many cases, and not because I don’t think it’s ever valuable to compare a film adaptation with its literary original. But because the statement “The book is better” is too easy a gut reaction, too simplistic a critical statement, and too cliched a response. It doubles as an elitist phrase, both revealing that you’ve read the book in question and that you, being literary, prefer it to its pop-art cousin the cinema. Now, of course not everyone who uses the phrase intends those elitist connotations and I don’t mean to suggest that they do.

Instead, when dealing with a film adaptation of a book, I will seek to compare how they differ, what specific things the book did better, and what specific things the film did better. Sometimes I can’t be that specific, because the difference is more ephemeral than that, but I will be specific about that, too, as specific as I can.

I already try to do this, recognizing that the film, though based on an existing work, is also its own work of art and ought to be treated as such rather than merely a copy/shadow of the original. But I will make it explicit. Hold me to this. If any time after today, you hear me say the words “The book is better” or see me write them, call me on it. Remind me to think more carefully about the relationship between the two works, and tell me to rewrite or expand what I wrote.

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Jim Emerson has an intriguing post up on his scaners::blog about whether film criticism can be or even should be objective. I’m somewhere in the middle on the issue; like many of the commenters (read the comments, too; a lot of the good discussions is down there), I usually find Roger Ebert’s reviews too high on emotional response, and I have the same problem with Pauline Kael. (The analytical side is apparently covered by J. Hoberman, who I haven’t read enough to comment on myself; and to be fair to Ebert, his essays on criticism itself and on older films are quite good–it’s only the reviews of new films that tend to bother me.) On the other hand, the more I write about film the more I realize that what’s really important to me is the experience of watching the film, often even more than what the film made me think about. The experiential nature of film is largely what Emerson points out in his original post.

I’ve had a couple of people in the last few months mention that they watched a film because I praised it and they didn’t care for it the way I did. I’m sorry about that, but I think it comes down again to the experience. Quoting one of Emerson’s footnotes: “The best reviewers (who may or may not also be critics) share their insights and perspectives on a film so that the reader gets an idea of what they experienced — which is not the same as saying the reader should expect to have an identical one.” I would hardly put myself into the category of “best reviewers,” and I know that those particular reviews were written hurriedly, but this strikes me as exactly right. The best that I can do as a reviewer/critic is tell the experience I had watching the film, acknowledge that it was my experience (colored by my background and personality, as well as perhaps the conditions surrounding my watching of the film)–I can’t guarantee that anyone else would have the same experience, and wouldn’t necessarily want them to. Though I don’t think criticism should be reduced to “this is how the film made me feel,” because some standards of quality DO exist and some analysis of how the film achieves its experiential power is helpful, you can never take the personal out of it. That’s why I dislike critics who try to pretend they aren’t personally involved and thus biased to some degree.

I don’t have much more to say, other than it’s a good post and discussion and you should read it, and then you should add Emerson’s blog to your feedreader, because his blog is uniformly excellent.

The major film critic awards have been trickling out over the past few weeks, most of them honoring the Coen brothers’ No Country for Old Men and other semi-indie, art-house end of the year releases, prompting Time’s Richard Corliss to wonder “Do Film Critics Know Anything?”. Basically, he likes all the films that won, but thinks perhaps the film critics awards are an exercise in mutual affirmation of the type of films that film critics like, but that average moviegoers haven’t seen and don’t care about. And he’s afraid that the Golden Globes and Oscars are going to follow the film critics’ lead and nominate a bunch of stuff most people haven’t seen. (The Globe nominations came out last week, and he’s mostly right.)

But the Golden Globes and the Oscars, if they follow the critics’ lead, will have V.D.D. — viewer deficit disorder. Large numbers of people won’t watch shows paying tribute to movies they haven’t seen. In the old Golden Age days, most contenders for the top Oscars were popular movies that had a little art. Now they’re art films that have a little, very little, popularity. The serious movies Hollywood gives awards to in January and February are precisely the kind it avoids making for most of the year. The Oscars are largely an affirmative action program, where the industry scratches its niche. The show is a conscience soother, but not a crowd pleaser.

I guess my question is, first, so what? And second, um, so what? The Oscars have been accurate tests of cinematic quality since never; they used to be more populist, as he says, perhaps, but they’re always political. They’re always calculated. He does allow that the film critic groups should pick whatever they want to pick, but then bemoans the fact that *shocker* the rest of the awards might actually listen to critics? We might have fewer craptastic movies coming out of Hollywood if *shocker* the average moviegoer listened to critics. And if we had fewer craptastic movies coming out of Hollywood, maybe then they’d get more awards come award season. Just a thought. (He does mention critically-acclaimed popular films like Knocked Up and how they’ve gotten passed by so far this year…personally I disliked Knocked Up, so…)

Plus, I figure the more small, indie, artsy films that get honored at awards time, the more visibility they have, the more people will go see them, and then more people will learn what sort of cinematic treasures lurk outside the multiplex. (I’m being elitist. I’m sorry, I have to to counter Corliss’s rather odd populism…I like blockbusters too, but they don’t need awards–they get plenty of viewership without them.) It’s the small films that NEED critics to promote them, to bring them to a public consciousness that they won’t get from television and radio ads. And October-January (aka awards-preparation season) is the only time they get highlighted.

I don’t really understand why the Oscar show needs to be a crowd-pleaser. Is Corliss working for the network that’s airing them, trying to figure out how to get them more viewers? If people are only interested in watching the summer blockbusters they loved get awards, there are the People’s Choice Awards, the Blockbuster Awards, the Kid’s Choice Awards, and probably others. Let them watch those telecasts, and leave the Globes and the Oscars for those of us who WANT Julie Christie to win an award for so brilliantly portraying an Alzheimer’s patient (Away from Her), and who WANT the Coen brothers to finally win an Oscar for one of the most cinematically perfect films of the year (No Country for Old Men), and who WANT the innovative French animators who worked on Persepolis to win an Oscar over Pixar (who are awesome, don’t get me wrong, but they already have a bunch of little naked gold men), and who WANT festival fare to do well enough in awards season to get screentime in the areas where we live, since going to festivals isn’t what you might call feasible for a lot of us.

If you ask me, the problem isn’t that art-house films get too much attention at the end of the year awards, but that they don’t get enough attention during the rest of the year. It’s not that the awards aren’t populist enough, but that there’s such an unfortunate audience split between popular and art-house.