Reel Pleasures

...In the mid-1970s, Cavell showed remarkable sensitivity to gender issues and cinematic representations of sex and power...

...You feel the temperature rising unendurably at the back of your brain and you are parched down to the pit of your stomach...

...From the editor, I received an education in the differences between academic andjournalistic styles, the precision and delicacy of individual words, and the boons and sacrifices that come with writing for deadline...

...I enjoyed the prerogative of writing about whatever films I found interesting and was free to experiment within the boundaries of the column, devoting its 2,500 words to atheme, a genre, or, if I believed it necessary, a single film...

...Hostility remained the rule with Allen until 1987, when James Gardner, writing in the year of Full Metal Jacket, The Last Emperor, The Untouchables, The Dead, and Empire of the Sun, devoted an entire column to Radio Days, a film most viewers then and now have rated a minor comedy...

...The breathless expectation of pornography is not the best attitude to encourage, either for entertainment or for serious engrossment, if we wish to assist in creating that climate of maturity that is ultimately and vitally prerequisite to the promotion of truly mature cinema...

...the desert has been inculcated in you...

...To the viewing public, most movies seem so transparent that anyone with half a brain could evaluate them...

...All The New Leader's film reviewers have been adept at fashioning barbs...

...But for now, I must simply doff my quill and leave these, and the rest, to you...

...All along I have felt a special communion with my readers...

...John Simon, the "On Screen" columnist from 1962 to 1973, offered a famous drubbing of 81/2 (1963): "Fellini's intellectualizing is not even like dogs dancing: It is not done well, nor does it amaze us that it is done at all...

...He recalled our conversations about movies over meals as well as my mad habit of chasing down two, even three movies a night at student film societies and the local revival house...

...They noted important works not as pinnacles, but steps toward the refinement of a form...

...New Leader critics admired the early efforts of Federico Fellini, but beginning in the early 1960s, he fell under their lash...

...In 1993 David Bromwich, looking back at Martin Scorsese's career, called The Last Temptation of Christ (1988) "a tour de force of indigestible piety...

...Among the reasons I am proud to have written about film for The New Leader over the past eight and half years is its rejecting the simplicities of both types of criticism...

...Latching on to the burgeoning Internet industry, as did many in my generation during the silicon boom, I found freelance work as the film books reviewer for Amazon.com and as a features writer for MSNBC.com...

...For a struggling scholar in a "publish or perish" world, it has been gratifying to see my work appear in print on an ongoing basis...

...But few of his 38 other films are worthy of serious attention___No self-respecting literary critic would praise a novel that was as silly in its symbolism as The Seventh Seal, as muddled in its metaphysics as Wild Strawberries, as absurd in its allegory as The Virgin Spring . . as sappy in its sentimentality as Fanny and A lexander...

...The days are long gone when audiences would flock to art houses for European films not subject to the Hollywood production code, but Martin Dworkin in the mid-'50s decried the tendency of American distributors to market them as voyeuristic entertainment...

...And I feel privileged to have had a platform to discuss a handful of masterpieces when they first hit the screens: Terrence Malick's The Thin Red Line, Roberto Benigni's Life is Beautiful, Almodóvar's Talk to Her...

...You have not merely been transported to the desert...

...Simon vividly conveyed the sensation of watching Lawrence of Arabia (1962): "When a distant rider approaches through the heat waves, your eyes ache as they try to keep his figure from deliquescing, as they try to distinguish between mirage and reality...

...Franco Zeffirelli's adaptation of Shakespeare's best-known love story, with its famous adolescent nude scene, was "a Romeo and Juliet [1968] for teenyboppers and pederasts...

...His sapphire eyes light up once, when something large and furry comes into view...

...Obviously a film that elicits such lyric ejaculations from the reviewers cannot be all good...

...Reviewers and filmmakers, when they tell the truth, admit that current innovations are largely technological rather than aesthetic...

...Astonishingly, Farber also damned Ingmar Bergman's Wild Strawberries (1957) with faint praise...

...For Färber, Howard Hawks had such a poor notion of color in 1959 that "Rio Bravo is photographed through a piece of seaweed...

...By the same token, when Manny Färber reviewed Some Like It Hot (1959), widely considered Billy Wilder's funniest comedy, he found it had "no laughs at all...

...Indeed, though I studied the NL's archive of film reviews before I took the position, I was newly delighted, reading again through more than 50 years of commentary to prepare for this essay, to find that its reviewers have always maintained a strong sense of the cinema's cultural importance while consistently expressing passion for the art...

...as Illicit Interlude (1954), Dworkin argued that the film was "horrendously mistitled...

...the small and smooth-skinned Meryl Streep moves him not at all...

...Naked feet of men and camels struggle and fray themselves across those sands and rocks...

...Broadly speaking, movie reviewers cast themselves in one of two roles...

...Robert Asahina, who wrote here from 1976 to 1983, dismissed the much lauded Blade Runner (1982), declaring "the screenplay fails to develop [the film's] interesting idea, and Ridley Scott's direction is uninspired...

...Simon, however, is the NL's undisputed master of the zinger: "Michael Cacoyannis' Electro [1962] is not a tragedy, merely a disaster...

...During my tenure at The New Leader, beginning in 1997,1 found myself energized by some remarkable films: Night Falls on Manhattan, The Dreamlife of Angels, You Can Count on Me, In America, Million Dollar Baby...

...Forbidden Games seems positively lyrical today, but Wallace Markfield, writing in 1953, found it brutally realistic for a French film: It "offers none of the standard pieties that go with ponderous breads, sunlit fields, glistening earthenware, and manure piles...

...uproarious and glorious' (Justin Gilbert...

...Such observations can stir viewers to re-evaluate films they know well...

...When I came to The New Leader, I was a year out of graduate school, moldering in Charlottesville, Virginia, unable to find anything other than adjunct work in my field...

...Katharine Hepburn, in The Lion in Winter (1968), "sheds enough tears to erode the gold plating from a dozen Oscars...

...Woody Allen," said Gardner, "has realized his first and most fervid ambition—he has become an artist...

...The whole film appears to be shot from inside out...

...My post at The New Leader came unexpectedly...

...Yehudah Mirsky, a friend from my college days at Yale and, at the time, a frequent NL contributor, recommended me...

...The point is that Redford's regal jawline and careless approximation of a performance style looks right...

...Barbarella (1968) Simon called a "science fiction grotesque, a kind of Candy in the sky with zircons...

...When Bergman's Summer Interlude (1951) was released in the U.S...

...NL critics were divided about the merits of Bergman and Fellini, but Woody Allen came under consistent attack...

...John Morrone, holding forth here in 1989, was fascinated by Terry Gilliam's ignored The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (1988): "atonic—wildly fantastic yet spirit-affirming—the work of a storyteller who prefers not fact but phosphorescence...

...Murray, considering a failed adaptation of a Hemingway novel, observed: "It is typical of Hollywood that, after having ignored The Sun Also Rises for the past 30 years because the raw reality of [Jake] Barnes' emasculating war wound made the subject matter too controversial, it should then plunge boldly in to castrate the entire book.' And here is Daphne Merkin, the NL's film reviewer in the mid-'80s, considering Isak Dinesen's tendency to turn autobiography into personal fantasy alongside Robert Redford's performance in Out of Africa (1985): "Never mind that he plays the Oxford-educated [Denys Finch] Hatten without the faintest trace of an English accent, or that he acts as if he were in a docudrama about animal conservation instead of a love story...

...Although digital film and computer generated imagery elicit raptures, these alone do little to improve the quality of motion pictures...

...In the '50s Elia Kazan, Oscar-winning director of A Streetcar Named Desire (1951) and On the Waterfront (1954), was considered one of Hollywood's most original and independent-minded directors, despite his testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee...

...Unmoved by Jessica Lange's Cora in the 1981 remake of The Postman Always Rings Twice, Asahina asserted that "despite a voluptuous figure, she is about as erotic as the ironing board at which Cora seems to spend an inordinate amount of time...

...There the moral was explicit and facile: that the brutality of institutional power is not different from the brutality of thugs who rape and kill for pleasure...

...hindsight creates impressions often undermined by more immediate contemporary judgments...

...Simon was especially funny on the doggerel critics dumped upon Tony Richardson's Tom Jones (1963): "Once in a while a movie comes along that makes poets of our reviewers, and their ballpoints in a fine frenzy rolling sprout pure rhymes like 'brawling, sprawling' (Judith Crist), slant rhymes like "rowdy, bawdy' (Jesse Zunser) and even rhyming pairs like 'roisterous, boisterous...

...If they cannot sustain a delight in movies as entertainment and art, they abandon a perspective essential to good film writing...

...But The New Leader's critics did not merely pan films others took to be masterpieces...

...When is the last time you heard a critic call for that...

...Though these ranks are fun to read and quote, critics show their true mettle when they love a movie and their expressiveness makes the reader experience their impressions...

...In Barry Lyndon, the point is expanded beyond the hypocrisy of social convention to the ambiguity of human nature...

...Moreover, it appears, having a regular forum to tout our opinions as if they were facts tends to turn us into impossible snobs...

...YET while A pall may have been hanging over international cinema since the Reagan era, reinvention is still possible, even in today's unimaginative marketplace...

...He too registered contempt for Bergman: "No one can deny that parts of The Naked Night, Smiles of a Summer Night, Winter Light, and Persona are extraordinary...

...Asahina offered an extreme example, deeming Annie Hall (1977) an "egregious mess...

...Many readers are probably convinced they could do finer, more tolerant appraisals if they took our places, just as the typical film critic believes his being hired as the chief reviewer at, say, the New York Times would be a distinct improvement...

...Director René Clément has sidestepped all that is pseudo-quaint and patronizing to fix on the screen as grubby a set of rustics as ever graced the pages of the Domesday Book, types that seem ready at any moment to break machines or toss faggots on a heretic's pyre...

...Sometimes the desert yields to rock formations which look like prehistoric temples of savage magenta or sacerdotal mauve...

...Years later his writings about Vietnam, gathered in Dispatches, would bring him to work on screenplays for Kubrick (Full Metal Jacket) and Francis Ford Coppola (Apocalypse Now...

...They speak to an audience with a shared knowledge of cinema history, but they risk becoming as falsehearted as the first bunch...

...Michael Herr praised Stanley Kubrick's 1962 adaptation of Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita over recent films by the more established masters John Ford and Otto Preminger...

...A truly mature cinema...

...Marcia Cavell in 1974 found Amarcord, another cornerstone of Fellini's career, "often ravishing, though not resonant...

...I would love to tell you about the fiasco of Munich, the plotless and somnambulant King Kong, the dreary Chronicles of Narnia, and the quiet pleasures of The Squid and the Whale...

...If there is truth to this statement, perhaps it is because our jobs appear cushy...

...When you catch them citing the wisdom of Shakespeare without regard to whether the line was spoken by Lear, Iago or Polonius, it is time to run for the hills...

...twisters blow columns of sand over the landscape, pillars of fire that lead nowhere...

...the tormented and tormenting soul is not so much viewed as allowed to express its own views, to impress us with its awesomely human inhumanity...

...She judged Kubrick's tale of 18thcentury social mobility, Barry Lyndon (1975), superior to the director's more popular and acclaimed ? Clockwork Orange (1971): "The nobility, with their enormous false beauty spots, their rouged and powdered faces, look like the painteddevilsof [A Clockwork Orange...

...I also began talking about movies biweekly on a local radio program...

...The second breed, the alleged aristocrats of the profession, see themselves as astute observers, attuned to subtlety and nuance...

...Despite the stream of complaint running through the NL's pages, its critics from the 1950s through the late '70s held that film was a maturing art...

...I have also had opportunities to participate in longstanding debates among the magazine's critics by reviewing late masterpieces by major filmmakers from the last century: Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut, Airman's GosfordPark, Bergman's Saraband...

...Simon proved similarly revelatory on Bergman's Persona (1966): "Never before on film has the derailed psyche been examined more penetratingly, never before has the drama been played so consistently beneath the surface, yet without the slightest sacrifice in palpable excitement...

...Their "thumbs up, thumbs down" method gained popularity in the 1980s, when ticket prices began their steep rise and a family night at the local multiplex turned into a significant financial outlay...

...Relentlessly middlebrow, these critics consider their work a public service: a scouting report forthe consensus opinion of whether a given feature is worth your cash...

...But William Murray, writing abouti Face in the Crowd (1957), pointed to the director's canny commercialism: "In every Kazan movie you can clearly hear the soft sweet tinkle of the cash register...

...This deliberately naïve approach leads them to conclude that accessible but derivative filmmakers like Peter Jackson and Quentin Tarantino are genuine auteurs, while they remain cold to the likes of Robert Altman and Pedro Almodovar...

...Many implicitly despise a form that is lowbrow enough to be labeled "popular culture...

...Calling it "one of the most natural car films on record," he reduced what was hailed upon its release as a masterpiece of cinema art to the status of a road picture...

...As soon as critics begin to feel superior, not just to a given work but to the medium as a whole, their critiques become celebrations of their own witticisms rather than films...

...Film criticism would be no fun if it lacked the zinger—a well executed joke, usually an insult, that also advances a point...

...Not a shy group, NL film critics often took idiosyncratic stances that bucked the prevailing opinions of the times...

...Members of the first breed consider themselves representatives of the public, as if someone who sees hundreds of pictures a year can claim to be anything like the average Joe...

...It merely palls on us, and finally, appalls us...

...Dinesen, I think, wouldhave approved...

...they also found gold in what the critical consensus trod upon as dust...

...I campaigned for these jobs, which eventually evaporated as formats changed in the frenzied worlds of broadcasting and the Internet, but I did at last secure a position teaching literature and film...

...One would be hard pressed to find such optimism now...

...I had begun exploring other career options...

...and having seen this film, we can say of the hero of A Clockwork Orange that he loved Beethoven not out of the goodness of his heart, but because, for Kubrick, evil and art spring from the same demonic impulse...