An argument against weekly film criticism.

Yes, of course, where would we be without our weekly review fixes? Whether we show vague interest (Hoberman, Atkinson), morbid fascination (Dargis, A.O.), disgust (Lane, Denby), or trainwreck-watching giddiness (Armond, Seitz), we must realize that the only reason for film reviews to be released upon the day or week of their films’ releases is for people to know whether or not to plunk down their cash for tickets, unless you’re in cinephilic circles and mindlessly taking constant surveys of film criticism, looking for consensus or great divides. At Reverse Shot, of course, we’re guilty of the same thing, since we run weekly reviews at indieWIRE. However, hopefully our approach can preclude the kind of knee-jerk idiocy often run rampant and which often makes one feel the fool some years later. Sure, it’s just the not-as-rarefied-as you’d-think opinion of myself and some of my fellow RS-ers that a film such as A.I., if not reviled upon its release then unimaginatively dismissed as an "odd" or "imperfect" or—that fucking empty word—"flawed" "synthesis" of Kubrick and Spielberg. Sure, the movie is a daunting tangle of profound emotional insight and philosophical weightiness that one probably shouldn’t even begin to purport to have moral or intellectual superiority over until perhaps their seventh viewing, but does that mean that critics had to chalk it up to the clash of auteurist sensibilities and nothing more?

Is it true of all weekly writing? Is it true of my own writing, and that of my highly capable fellow writers? Should we take all weekly writing with a grain of salt? Who am I to judge what is high and what is low art and which demands more time? It was upon reading these insanely short-sighted, deluded, nonsensical reviews of Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut, which I watched for perhaps the tenth or eleventh time this weekend and am still sorting through as though a great overwhelming text, full of footnotes and allusions and stultifying emotions, that I was convinced that the entire process is corrupt. If we call it a necessary evil, then can’t we at least demand more from critics? And from ourselves as writers. These excerpts reveal that not only are snap judgments what film culture is now and has always been based upon but that there is no searching, wrestling, or questioning of the filmic text, or of themselves as writers, just cheap moralizing.

"It feels creaky, ancient, hopelessly out of touch, infatuated with the hot taboos of his youth and unable to connect with that twisty thing contemporary sexuality has become. It's empty of ideas, which is fine, but it's also empty of heat." …."I still bow before no one in my love for Kubrick's earlier brilliance. But in this one, he lost it, if he had had it in the past decade. Eyes Wide Shut must be regarded as a failure betrayed from within by Kubrick's own hubris" – Stephen Hunter, Washington Post

"The stripping (to a waltz) that Kidman does in the first frames of Eyes Wide Shut serves only to display her high, tight buttocks and long thighs--the first of many high, tight buttocks and long thighs in the movie--and has nothing to do with who she is. Where's the drama in her husband's (and our) realization that she's fundamentally unknowable when she has been photographed from the outset as a blank, leggy doll?" – David Edelstein, Slate

"That obsessive precision, combined with the misanthropy Kubrick's films expressed, worked to make the actors nearly irrelevant. Throughout Eyes Wide Shut the actors are held immobile in static close-ups or positioned against cavernous sets that appear ready to swallow them up." – Charles Taylor, Salon

"When the orgy in Eyes Wide Shut, which is meant to be the apotheosis of Bill's experience, is stripped of its erotic violence and pumping automatons, the scene itself becomes coy, decorative and all but meaningless. The dreamer is left without his dream." Manohla Dargis, L.A. Times

Pulitzer Prize-winning (Common response: "Holy shit, you’re kidding!? "No. No, I’m not.") Stephen Hunter’s line of reasoning (if there’s any reason to it) presumes a single-minded understanding of the methods of production and of Kubrick’s intentions. Taylor’s trots out the old "misanthrope" canard. Dargis’s follows the publicity-refined idea that the film should have been "sexy," and that the mechanized sexual interplay in the film is unintentional. And speaking of lacking context: Edelstein’s interpretation is based upon his momentary understanding of the opening SHOT of the film. I trot them out not simply to embarrass these writers (although I’m sure I could find some opening-night doozies on Touch of Evil, Vertigo, and Au hasard balthasar) but to perhaps try to curtail my own frustration about critical mass and put things into perspective.

I don’t envy weekly film writers, having to evaluate Eyes Wide Shut and Lake Placid in the same month, trying to reconcile what is "art" and what isn’t. And I’m not dismissing anything here that I’m not guilty of myself. But I do know that my own writing has always improved when given the proper time for my brain to absorb. I want to grapple with a film, not exert authority over it. I want to open up a dialogue with a film, not shut off communication. Would my idiotic opening night assessment of The Thin Red Line (worthless complaints of length, editing, and performance…mercifully never in print) be a valid critical evaluation today? Not at all, I think.

Perhaps I’m operating under the assumption that everyone has at this point come to their senses about Eyes Wide Shut, certainly one of the most gorgeous and dense films of the past decade, and easily one of its director’s most challenging works. Upon first leaving the theater after opening night, I remember standing around with a bunch of friends on a New York sidewalk. We all just kind of stared at each other, baffled, moved, but not sure in what way, and whether or not we liked what we were feeling. There was too much to sort out, too many strange divergent threads tangled in my head. Thankfully I didn’t have a deadline the next morning at which time I had to tell my readers whether it was worth 10 bucks or not. I think now we’d all agree it’s worth a hell of a lot more than that. Like all art, it’s worth our consideration.

You don't mention a bifurcation which has plenty to do with snap judgments. Critics generally get to see foreign or independent films at festivals months before they're released commercially, thus having some time to mull them over before reviewing them at length. No one has that privilege with new Hollywood films, even if they're made by Spielberg or Malick, if they need to get copy in by the day the film opens. Maybe the problem is that critics are more open to challenges from Jia Zhang Ke or Apichatpong Weerasethakul, where they can expect a text that doesn't reveal itself immediately, than American cinema.

It is a problem and always has been a problem, and robbiefreeling is right to lay some of the blame on deadline pressures, but since that won't change, why can't the writing and writers be more modest? Why not make a habit of copping to a not-fully-formed opinion or a snap emotional response - which, for what they are, can be really interesting. But that would require a willingness to appear fallible, to admit on a weekly basis that you're not necessarily an expert, that you don't have the fastest bullshit detector in the west. Perhaps editors won't pay to publish that kind of modesty, regardless of how the art deserves it. Or, optimistically speaking, maybe they would, and we just need to phase out Kael's self-satisfied children.

As for critics seeing foreign and indie films months ahead of time and having more time to mull em over, many major dailies (The Times, famously) just rerun the original snap, breathless festival review instead of reconsidering or revisiting the film upon its theatrical release. You'd have to actually care about film - and considerations of art, more generally - to write or assign such a revisitation.