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A Matter of Opinion
Three renowned critics talk about the business of film criticism and the state of moviemaking in America
"Everybody’s a critic," or so the old saying goes. Everybody except David Manning, the non-existent critic who supposedly showered superlatives upon several pallid Columbia Pictures releases last year before the charitable Mr. Manning was revealed as fictitious. Even when critics prove authentic, respect for their analytical abilities remains elusive. In a 1968 anthology of movie criticism, Richard Schickel jokingly noted that “being a critic of films ranked somewhere below playing the piano in a bordello.” More than 30 years later, their ranking may be somewhat improved but even the finest film critics are facing daunting adversaries. The erosion of print in the sound bite era, the glut of uninformed reviews populating the Internet and the uninspired quality of major studio releases have all taken their toll. Kenneth Turan, David Sterritt and Roger Ebert form an illustrious trio of critics who are all realistic about the state of contemporary cinema while their reviews consistently reflect a hopeful optimism that another great movie may be just around the corner.
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Kenneth Turan
The red carpet may be rolled up and every starlet in town may be wearily kicking off her Manolos, but the premiere isn’t really over until Los Angeles Times film critic Kenneth Turan serves judgment with breakfast. Even the most mindless summer blockbuster is treated to an inspired, intellectually discerning review by Turan, also a regular commentator for NPR’s “Morning Edition.” It’s the rare journalist who can boast of co-authoring actress Patty Duke’s memoirs, as well as exploring aesthetic agendas in his latest work, Sundance to Sarajevo: Film Festivals and the World They Made (University of California Press).
Mark Griffin (MM): When you sit down to write a review, do you have an ideal reader in mind?
Kenneth Turan (KT): I don’t think that it’s possible to do this without writing for a reader who will share your sensibility.
MM: Are today’s movies, particularly the mainstream studio features, too preoccupied with technology?
KT: Well, I think it’s a danger because if you throw enough money at most problems, you can solve them. The danger is that if they concentrate on that and get that right, they think they don’t have to worry about whether the script is good or whether the story is good. Atom Egoyan used a digitally enhanced shot in The Sweet Hereafter. He was unsatisfied with the rate at which the bus was sinking and he re-did it digitally. So technology doesn’t have to be the enemy, or only for stupid films.
MM: Thanks to the video revolution, do you think the general populace is more film literate now or just having fun with all of the gadgetry?
KT: I think they’re having fun with all this gadgetry. On the part of the younger moviegoers that I talk to, there doesn’t seem to be a real passion to use all of this accessibility to investigate older films. This is a group that thinks older films are films from the ’70s and ’80s. Going back to really look at the ’20s and silent films, or even the ’30s and ’40s, there’s not a lot of interest in doing that. And I think it’s a waste of a great opportunity. I mean, you can see these films in your home now.
MM: In the undiscovered gems department, who are some moviemakers deserving of more attention?
KT: There’s a Scottish film I really loved that came out a few years ago called Ratcatcher (1999) [by] Lynne Ramsay. I thought Ratcatcher was in some ways the best film of the year. It was really thoughtful and intriguing. Hardly anybody saw Ratcatcher, but I think we’ll definitely be seeing more from her.
MM: Emerging performers?
KT: There are so many. The publicity machinery is so enormous that even if someone just pops up all of a sudden, they’re ‘discovered.’ There’s a young actor named Ryan Gosling who was in the film at Sundance that won the Grand Jury Prize, The Believer. It had a Showtime run and it’s about to be released theatrically. I’ve seen him in a couple of other films since and he’s very talented.
MM: In the last few years we’ve witnessed an epidemic of rampage killings in our nation’s schools. After each tragedy, we hear rumblings about the detrimental impact that Hollywood issues/47/images can have on impressionable young minds. Should moviemakers be assuming some of the blame?
KT: Is it only Hollywood’s fault? Of course not. I don’t have any empirical data, but I tend to feel that Hollywood is contributing, or certainly not helping. We run in a society that believes that seeing things on film can help sell things—the entire commercial world, the advertising world. We feel on the one hand that the moving image can influence what people buy and how they act. But then people want to say, “No, in this case it’s nothing. Yes, we can get people to buy soap and cars but influencing them to become violent, we can’t do that.” It’s not very convincing to me.
Hollywood is fearful of getting stuck with the whole blame and the whole blame is definitely not theirs. So Hollywood ends up going into complete denial and saying, “We have absolutely nothing to do with this.” It’s easier to blame Hollywood than to blame divorce or latchkey kids or uninvolved parents or gun control laws. So I think Hollywood does become a scapegoat, but that doesn’t mean they don’t have some responsibility.
MM: The greatest director of all time according to Kenneth Turan is...
KT: Can’t do it. There are just too many. Maybe my mind just doesn’t turn that way. I can pick favorites. I think in many ways my favorite director is Orson Welles. I mean, I think “greatest” is a tricky question and I don’t even know if it’s possible to answer, but “favorite” is more manageable and Orson Welles is my favorite director.
MM: What made him so good?
KT: He had such a grasp of the moviemaking process. There’s so much brio and enthusiasm. Not only filmmaking skill but delight in filmmaking skill. He just takes your breath away. I share your enthusiasm for the Golden Age of Hollywood. That was a great moviemaking period. We’re not in it now. The economics have changed and the audience has changed. We’re paying the price for that change.
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David Sterritt
He may be smart cinema’s most enthusiastic champion. The inexhaustibly animated David Sterritt has been reviewing films for The Christian Science Monitor for over 30 years and still hasn’t lost an ounce of obsessive interest in the well-made movie. Sterritt’s criticism has appeared in an impressive array of publications including The New York Times, The Washington Post and Film Comment. A professor of theater and film at Long Island University, Sterritt has published several books honoring such cinematic masters as Jean-Luc Godard, Robert Altman and Alfred Hitchcock.
MM: After the events of September 11th, do you think the new political climate will force movies to grow up?
David Sterritt (DS): In a word, no. I have yet to be convinced of any lasting, substantial changes in the wake of 9/11. Immediately there was talk of how this was going to make us all more serious; it was going to make us grow up and our media were going to reflect this. From the [beginning], I was kind of skeptical of that view. I think that our media could stand to do a lot of growing up but that doesn’t mean that it’s going to happen any time soon.
MM: Everyone is talking about how “daring” cable television has become. The Sopranos, Sex in the City and Queer as Folk are supposed to be smashing taboos and pushing the envelope. Do you think that might encourage feature moviemakers to start taking more risks?
DS: One of my crusades throughout my career is I just wish the movies would be more adventurous—would take more risks. The kind of inertia that is bred by the huge financial stakes of Hollywood type filmmaking is to not take chances and to see what sells and then build on that. So there is this tension between people like me who want more risk-taking and more adventurousness and the studio attitude.
The studio attitude is, in fact, supported every step of the way by most popular tastes. Most people usually go to the movies just for an evening’s entertainment. They’re not looking for more than that and Hollywood has relied on generic formulas throughout its history. The dynamic of generic studio filmmaking is to provide the right combination of sameness and difference.
When real changes come along, it’s very often through some film that the studios made sort of reluctantly. Star Wars was a movie like that. In the middle ’70s science fiction was considered box office poison. Lucas was able to make that movie because of two reasons: one, he had made American Graffiti, which had been a smash hit and everybody thought, “Well, maybe he’ll do it again.” And two, he kept the budget low. Only with that combination was Lucas able to make his movie, which then became the most profitable, biggest grossing movie of all time at that moment. So often these movies that change everything are made by people who are semi-mavericks with a vision.
MM: Name one film critic that you are always compelled to read.
DS: If I’m going to choose one, it’s going to be a close friend of mine. I respect him to the skies and that is Stuart Klawans in The Nation. Stuart is just an extraordinarily thoughtful critic. He’s a superb writer: He thinks deeply about things and yet does not burden us with that but rather lets us have the benefit of that through eminently readable prose. If I had to choose one film critic right now to take with me to a desert island—well, it would be a female critic—but leaving aside extracurricular considerations, it would be Stuart.
MM: According to David Sterritt, the greatest director of all time is...
DS: There are so many possibilities. I’ll tell you who my personal favorite is and that’s because I think he’s the most important: Alfred Hitchcock.
MM: More important than Welles?
DS: I would choose Hitchcock for three reasons: One, his influence has just been vast... filmmakers all over the place continue to borrow from him so much. Hitchcock is an astonishingly entertaining filmmaker. Even his deepest, most profound works tend to be a lot of fun to watch and audiences love them. Also, the third and most important thing is that he truly is a kind of philosopher-poet who happens to be working in the medium of motion pictures.
A movie like Psycho—a smash hit when it came out—remains unbelievably popular today. I show it to students all the time and it always makes a big hit. So, here it is now 42 years after it was made and it still absolutely takes them in and gives them a sensationally entertaining ride. I can think of few works of the past half century that have the profundity that that movie has. It’s just astonishing on every level—from the verbal to the cinematic to the photographic to the narrative. All of those levels are superbly integrated. It’s a profound work about the human condition. Psycho required many viewings before I started to notice things like the fact that the first thing you see when the camera comes into the hotel room in the beginning is the bathroom of the hotel room. Later on, when Marion is driving to the Bates Motel and it starts to rain and she puts the wipers on and they’re slashing back and forth across the windshield, you have water and blades! Scholars and obsessives notice these things and write them down, but things like that probably have at least a subliminal impact on the casual Saturday night moviegoers seeing the movie for the first time.
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Roger Ebert
Never underestimate the power of the thumb. Particularly
when that digit belongs to Roger Ebert, the most recognizable
film critic on the planet. Moviegoers ordinarily indifferent to
auteur theories will peruse Ebert’s reviews in the Chicago
Sun-Times or tune in to his syndicated series Ebert &
Roeper & the Movies, which features
some engaging “thumbs up, thumbs down” banter
between Ebert and fellow Sun-Times reviewer Richard Roeper.
Never one to rest on his Pulitzer Prize-winning
laurels, Ebert recently began writing essays extolling
the virtues of a select group of vintage and
contemporary films, entitled The Great Movies (Broadway
Books).
MM: The Great Movies includes four titles directed by cinematic maverick Billy Wilder. Do you think the reason Wilder’s films have endured is because they’re flavored with what you’ve described as a “dubiousness about too much sincerity”?
Roger Ebert (RE): That’s part of it. They’re ironic, and irony is in. Sincerity is out right now, which is why at the moment Capra is not too fashionable. Although everything comes around again, you know. I think there’s another element, though. If you look at these great movies and see which ones seem fresh today, they’re the smart ones that do not seem to take the audience for granted or condescend to the audience.
Movies that are really smart and assume that the audience is intelligent are more timeless and I’ll give you some examples: Citizen Kane, Trouble In Paradise by Lubitsch, just about anything in the great period of Preston Sturges or Luis Buñuel. Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove has not dated, nor has Some Like It Hot. Those two comedies—you could open them in any theater in the country and people would have more or less the same reaction that people had when they were new.
MM: It’s been said that highly literate, cynical screenplays like All About Eve and Sweet Smell of Success probably wouldn’t be bankrolled today.
RE: You know, I might have agreed with you if I’d spoken to you this morning, but I just saw Changing Lanes, the new film by Roger Michell, which is co-written by Michael Tolkin. It’s about two people who are having a bad day. Their paths cross with a fender bender and they are are both people with problems with anger. A dumb movie would have one angry person pursuing an innocent person and making life a nightmare. This is more of the case of two angry people who are engaged in what becomes an escalating personal struggle during the course of the day. There is a speech in it by Amanda Peet, who plays Ben Affleck’s wife, that is a speech that Wilder could have written.
MM: That’s high praise.
RE: [Peet] says, “Did you know that
my father had a mistress for the last 20 years? My mother knew
and she never said anything about it because she thought it would
be kind of hypocritical to accuse a man of cheating when the comfortable
lifestyle that she enjoyed was based upon the fact that he made
all of his money by cheating and she knew that when she married
him.” The way that speech is written, you know Tolkin wrote
it. It’s kind of like In The Company of Men.
Neil LaBute is also kind of in the Wilder tradition, not that
he makes comedies, but he really does have that almost shocking
adult honesty about the world.
MM: So, after seeing something like Changing Lanes, you’re not concerned about the dumbing down of studio product?
RE: Oh, studio product is dumbed down, but it’s not made by dumb people. And every once in a while they just have to make a smart movie in order to maintain their sanity.
MM: Star Wars is also included in The Great Movies and although you refer to it as “a masterpiece,” you allude to the fact that it’s been singled out as the picture that warped the industry by creating a blockbuster, mega-merchandising mentality. Is it fair that one movie should take the blame?
RE: Well, blame or credit. A lot of people would think it’s credit and other people would say that it was Jaws, really... The studios didn’t pay much attention to summer. Now, of course, it’s the prime box office season.
MM: So it would be terribly unfair to frame Star Wars as the culprit that changed everything?
RE: Things were going to change. You know,
there were certain marketing patterns that are probably more responsible
than any given movie. Films would open in a couple of major markets
and would gradually percolate across the country in the months
to come. Bonnie and Clyde was on the cover of Newsweek
at least three different times over a period of nine months as
it got to be a bigger and bigger and bigger hit. At one point,
Faye Dunaway was on the cover and there was a cover story—I
think in Newsweek—about Theadora Van Runkle’s
costumes. There’s a story about how Jack Warner didn’t
even hardly want to release it and that was a movie where word-of-mouth
built and built and it just hung on and opened in more and more
theaters. Today a movie does not get a second chance like that.
It either performs in the opening weekend or it doesn’t.
The problem is now that the overhead for the marketing campaign
is so high that they have to reach a broad audience very quickly
and that militates against quirky movies or difficult or original
movies. MM
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This story was published in the Summer 2002 MovieMaker Magazine. The headline was:
Their Opinions Count / Three renowned critics talk about the business of film criticism and the state of moviemaking in America
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