Ray Pride

A Boston Globe underling got frisky in 1980 with a temporary headline about a presidential speech by Jimmy Carter that somehow made it to press with 161,000 iterations: "Mush From The Wimp."

While not as memorable as the immortal New York Post front-page "Headless Body Found In Topless Bar" (written by headline ace and Post movie reviewer Vinnie Musetto), it still rings in my head once in a while among the great lore of journalism of the past century, and of late, every time I take more than a minute to wind through aggregated links or RSS feeds of people writing about movies, it's right there on the tip of my tongue. The crush of opinions in idle bloggotry is a powerful and potentially valuable force, I'd like to think, but it makes me woozy. Too many in-jokes, too many points being made that I've seen made again and again over the course of a career. Not enough people are getting paid to write arts criticism in this early part of the new century, but those who are eagerly counter Dr. Johnson's advice that "No one but a fool ever wrote, except for money."

The Toronto Film Festival came and went, and I couldn't go. I read first dispatches from Canada way, where more than 300 programs would allow any attendee to find a ready twenty or so movies that make any filmgoer's year. From the flood of studio prestige releases to potentially fine new work from Europe and Asia, 2007 will have as many sources of lasting joy as any cinematic annum. Yet a lot of recent writing and posting shows a strange resentment in the air which writers are constantly, compulsively confessing and describing and concerning themselves with their process rather than that of filmmaking, and it's a strange breed of writing, too meta to ever become meaty. That's not to say that people blogging are idiots and bores and pedants and scolds and suck-ophants and reactionary dolts, which I'm not saying, and I don't subscribe to that reactionary view at all.

It's the death wish of established print outlets that scares me, defining "reactionary" in the most classical sense. Even the most cursory day-to-day surf shows a lemming-like brand of self-destruction on the part of newspapers and magazines. In its own without-a-net way, the transformation of contemporary media is a thrilling thing to be in the midst of, with no one really knowing even the immediate future, and all these words eddying outward like melted polar ice warming in the Arctic Sea. "Old media," shrinking their page sizes, firing their most experienced cultural writers, is wasting their goodwill and structures in myriad ill-conceived moves wrought by pencil-pushers, usually white corporados, white-haired, many in their 60s, chasing after "youth" like a long-fallow horndog freshly divorced, newly in thrall to the small blue diamond-shaped pill.

Cynical? Here's a published passage that came not from a blogger or your everyday uncredentialed curmudgeon, but from the established, esteemed lead critic of Daily Variety, Todd McCarthy: "Based on what I've seen so far, particularly at the Toronto Film Festival, I'm in no rush to see the rest of the Iraq-centered fiction films (as opposed to documentaries) Hollywood will be serving up in the coming months, simply because I think I know exactly where they're coming from and that I'm not going to learn anything new from them…. I'd rather spend my time learning and experiencing something new and forward-looking, as well as analyzing the ever-changing political map of the Middle East, not stewing in the juices of stale vitriol." Candor of such bravura ought to be something worth applauding, and yet many examples, such as this, bask in self-regard and concerted contention rather than, well, teach me anything new. McCarthy's late-career ennui also demonstrates the "seen-it-all" syndrome endemic to critics, as well as the reduction of movies to sociology and plot rather than the seductive, hypnotic matters of form.

While McCarthy resented the fictional treatments of atrocities from the Iraq occupation—including Brian DePalma's $5 million multimedia mash-up, "Redacted," documentarian-turned narrative filmmaker Nick Broomfield's "Battle for Haditha" and Gavin Hood's follow-up to "Tsotsi," the Reese Witherspoon-starring melodrama "Rendition"—I'll be curious to read his reaction to "The Kingdom" (pictured), which opens next week. Peter Berg may be the canniest of the filmmakers adding the potentially toxic element of politics to the narrative stew. It's about the subtext, stupid. His straight-ahead thriller is political in the margins, by implication and in the context of our own relative awareness of the theater in which his story unfolds. (I'm reminded of another journalistic epigram, from the German newspaperman of the earlier part of the last century, Karl Kraus: "Satires which can be understood by the censor are justly forbidden.")

And anyone who says they know what newspapers will be like in a year, or two, unless they own one, like Rupert Murdoch does the Wall Street Journal, is lying, or a fool. And the movie crickets? They'll be there after the electrical grid fails once and for all, kibitzing at the man holding the shadow puppets, complaining about the sentimental mush he's put out into the world.

(2007-09-18)

Also by Ray Pride

Long Live the New Flesh
David Cronenberg's latest movie is about many things. Superficially, "Eastern Promises" is his second gangster thriller, after "A History of Violence," and it provides the most succinct definition yet of "balls-out action"
(2007-09-11)

Tip of the Week
In the first half hour or so of Jennifer Fox's epic navel-gaze, "Flying: Confessions of a Free Woman," you will think either of suicide or murder, depending on your disposition
(2007-09-11)

Tip of the Week
With the richly burnished look of the sun-drenched desert in his beautifully shot new film, Mangold's stylishness suits the subject, amply capturing the lean and rugged reality of the great out-of-doors
(2007-09-04)

Pulp Infraction
"Shoot 'Em Up" is an overheated funhouse of an action movie, with fifteen or so action set pieces and a dozen involving absurd amounts of gunplay, mostly of dazzling design
(2007-09-04)

Bitter Biter Bit
(2007-08-28)

Tip of the Week
(2007-08-28)

Under My Umbrella
(2007-08-21)

Needing the Eggs
(2007-08-21)

Tip of the Week
(2007-08-21)

Mclovin It
(2007-08-14)

Tip of the Week
(2007-08-14)

Engineering This Fiasco
(2007-08-10)

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