In the tradition of Reverse Shot’s Dictionary of Received Film Criticism, here are 20 shots to be henceforth retired from film vocabulary. Compiled by your RS pals filmenthusiast2000, clarencecarter, robbiefreeling, sean mcavoy, eshman, and bugs meaney.
1. Moving clouds sped up.
2. It starts off in a long shot and a guy’s all far away and walking toward the camera and you’re all “Uh-oh am I going to have to watch him walk the whole way?” and you do and it takes three minutes or more. “Ooh, look at me, I’m sculpting with time!” Fuck you.
3. Alienated teen or adolescent girl in the passenger side of a car driving down the highway, window rolled down, her hand swaying in the wind as she zips down a road to Who Knows Where.
4. Overhead shot of protagonist in the rain, arms spread, just letting the downpour COME. Laughing optional. (See The Shawshank Redemption, Pleasantville, Instinct)
5. All side angle above-boob shower shots of women “cleansing” themselves of previous events. (Also: Into mirror shots of people washing faces in the sink, then looking up to examine their wet face in the mirror, mouth open. Extra hate to those that move characters from grimaces to tears.)
6. Protagonist on mass transit, looking pensive. Literally everyone looks miserable on mass transit. This conveys no information other than maybe they don’t have a car. And turn off that fucking melancholic electronica, while you’re at it.
7. Mexican/Sicilian/Indian/Iranian children running through streets without a care in the world, smiling and laughing, running right by a mother who hardly notices them, so busy is she hanging laundry
8. Helicopter shots of anything meant to signify connectedness. (NOTE: Helicopter shots for no good reason, however, can definitely stay.)
9. Any shot of someone throwing or catching a football especially slow motion with background a crowd in soft-focus. (NOTE: Footballs thrown against rubber tires to signify erectile dysfunction can stay.)
10. Dude goes to open a safe or a refrigerator or whatever and PRESTO the camera’s shooting out from inside the safe or refrigerator or whatever. That’s some bush league My First Creative Camerawork shit.
11. Anything with barrel distortion. I will slap that fucking 10mm lens off your camera, hotshot.
12. Shots of people dropping objects from the perspective of the object being dropped.
13. Super close-ups of old people’s eyes. Waking up from a dream or something. It means the film will be from his/her point of view and will probably flash back because we don’t want to watch movies entirely about old people. These moments are meant to instill gravity, because seeing crow’s feet in extreme close-up makes us contemplate death. (See The Green Mile, Saving Private Ryan, Titanic)
14. Epiphanies while jogging—gliding tracking shot, then pull up short when they get winded, physically and existentially. alternative: keep going as they double over.
15. In documentaries: Stock footage of 1950s appliance ads and educational reels for goofy/eerie/conformism effect. Also in docs: comic beats that rely on holding the shot slightly too long on an interviewee after he’s obliviously said something weird/dorky.
16. In trailers: Character’s chest is heaving from the exertion of a hasty retreat. He or she is slumped but still wary, back to a wall. Is it gone? Can it hear me? You can hear the percussive thump-thump, thump-thump of their heartbeat, louder and louder, coming though on the Dolby. Stop heartbeat. Screen goes black. They’re safe? OHMYGODNO IT’S A 30-FRAME CUTAWAY OF SOMETHING SCARY AHAHHAHAHAHAHAAAAA.
17 Goes without saying, but shit blowing up while somebody walks away and DOESN’T EVEN TURN AROUND THEY’RE SO NONPLUSSED* (buttrock riffs on soundtrack, usually).
18. Old-timey camera flashbulb close-up opens shot. Often in slo-mo so you can see the scorching filament. (See: every Scorsese movie save Kundun—and I’ll have to go check that).
19. Over-the-shoulder long takes that supposedly get in the mind of the character but only show their shoulder, really, and maybe an ear. Doesn’t work anymore, post Rosetta. (See: The Wrestler)
20. Anything like the still from The Pope’s Toilet, above. Yes, that’s right, New York, the Uruguyan film The Pope’s Toilet is coming to MoMA.
* [ED. “unperturbed” or “self-possessed”?]
  
Hey loyal readers!
It’s time for this week’s round of crazy match-em-ups (and by “this week” we mean “literally the first time since August 2005”), courtesy of your RS friends, robbie f., clarence c., and filmenthusiast2000.
The rules are easy—connect a venerated auteur, living or dead, with his definitive, historically accurate, and unbiased description. Good luck! The first-prize winner will receive a free copy of Schmatty’s Millions.
1) Terrence Malick
2) Ousmane Sembene
3) Ingmar Bergman
4) Nicholas Ray
5) Alain Resnais
6) Carlos Reygadas
7) Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne
8) David Cronenberg
9) Béla Tarr
10) Terence Davies
11) Alfred Hitchcock
12) Martin Scorsese
a) It doesn’t come more art-school pompous or art-house trendier than this smug, sullen, Scandinavian self-proclaimed artiste, whose “insights” into life and death amounted to little more than an image of a chess match that was always just waiting to be ironed on to a Hot Topic T-shirt. His dime-store psychological portraiture now seems about as “timeless” as a turtleneck and a dog-eared copy of The Dharma Bums. Oh, and existentialist-tinged feminism from an unrepentant misogynist? No thanks. Worst father of all time to boot.
b) Displaying an unprecedented lack of work ethic after an early overestimation, this addled burner took twenty years of torching through bricks of Algerian hash before some no-doubt-exasperated professional editors held his hand through cutting his Bat Out of Hell II, which showed conclusively that . . . he’d learned how to cast movies like a celebrity roast. By then, the Boomers who’d originally “blissed out” on his Seventies-era jumbles of nature photography and underlined undergraduate philosophy texts were firmly tenured in academia, to teach a new generation of cultural consumers to exhibit their sophistication by forcefully processing incoherence as “open-ended” and “poetic.” His films are as cinematographically clueless as Doris Wishman’s, but with the added weight of hazy pretense. Universally detested by the Real Americans he worships.
c) Proving that sometimes two heads aren’t better than none, these Flemish brothers have quickly scammed their way to international renown by cinematically fetishizing the napes and shoulders of people festival programmers generally shy away from on the metro. Here’s a trick: buy a sound effects CD for $.99. Cue up, in this order: heavy footsteps, soft footsteps, running footsteps, the sound of a motorbike, and put the sequence on repeat. Then try watching one of their movies with your eyes closed and see if you can tell the difference. All the worse for forcing agreement with EW twat-bomb Owen Gleiberman—their 1999 Palme d’or winner was, yes, totally one of the worst films of its year. Forget these guys, we’re voting for the Polish brothers.
d) Postcolonial? Try post-entertainment. Further evidence that Senegal is not, never has been, and never will be a cinematic hot spot for a reason, this sometime novelist, most-of-the-time cinematic dilettante spent his entire career chastising the white world for its complete disregard for his continent and people without ever figuring out how to make his films accessible enough for those very same white audiences who evidently need to learn what he’s serving. Filled with incoherent editing, childish blocking, thoroughly unprofessional actors, and pleas for “social change” laid on with a trowel, his films prove that independent nations do not necessarily make viable independent filmmakers.
e) Thank goodness this anal retentive fussbudget spent so much time story-boarding his films to the point of suffocation—if he hadn’t we’d be forced to endure twice his already massively bloated, idiotically precise output. A bald, fat wannabe actor churns out a couple of English “thrillers” that, today, would rest comfortably in the minor leagues with One Missed Call, 21, or Taken, gets invited to Hollywood, stays forever, ascends to the top of the commercial, critical, and ivory-tower theoretical heap: only in the movie business. Turns out the joke was on everyone, especially Laura Mulvey. He was the “master of suspense” during his career, but now we’re only left holding our breaths to see how many times his oeuvre can be packaged and repacked into cruddy DVD sets.
f) By the end of the 19th century, music-box Budapest was the most civilized city in the world, and native geniuses like Gyula Krúdy and Ferenc Molnár produced works that were a scintillating dazzle of resigned melancholy, beauty, joy—in short, reflections of life. Now the tanks have left Hungary, but the monumental heaviness of a long-rationed spirit remains, of which this crusty Brutalist is the avatar. His most (in)famous work is a fortnight-long slog; in its concrete-solid monotony, it became a sort of badge-of-pride self-hazing ritual for would-be aesthetes, who would emerge equating their ability to endure the unendurable with a heightened sensitivity (see: “noise” music). Anybody approaching art as something other than a fix for their cool complex might learn more about cinema in 15 minutes of Laurel and Hardy, then just knock off and get their dick sucked the rest of the day. Should face trial for his effective murder of Humbert Balsan through unprofessional behavior and bull-headed overconfidence in his own genius. Almost certainly a drunk.
g) It’s barely a compliment to be called the greatest living British filmmaker (if you don’t believe us, check out the BFI Top 100 for laughs aplenty: Woo hoo, Brassed Off made the cut!). So the decks are already stacked for this insufferable pinky-raiser, whose tendency to wallow again and again in the shallow puddles of Liverpudlian misery is merely a front for a stunning lack of imagination. Yes, yes, good sir, we know: it’s terrible being poor; it’s terrible being homosexual; it’s terrible not getting state-funding for impenetrable, personal “memory pieces” that appeal to an ever-dwindling audience of introverted, cranky cinephiles. And judging by your latest, if you put as much energy towards crafting vital art as you do carping on such relevant topics as the monopolizing of pop music by the Beatles and the crassness of a Windsor wedding then perhaps the powers that be would be more willing to flush their money down your toilet.
h) Slumming rich-kid Socialist/Marilyn Manson surrealist. Evokes the kind of cinematographic “spirituality” aimed at atheist film critics (See also: Les Dardennes).
i) Grandstanding Artist-Stars Welles and Kazan begat this man, an emotionally crippled drug addict who was literally incoherent for at least half of his professional life. Like them, he brought the droning, pretentious loquacity of the posing-ass New York Federal Theater to a medium previously defined by taciturn company-man professionalism. Not surprisingly, his flattering cult of the Outsider, tolerated in his own time, gained cult traction with the Dr. Spock–coddled children of affluence who came of age in the Sixties. Were it not enough to have ruined the once-promising Seventh Art, this posturing Rebel was a primary architect of the self-image of the unprecedentedly solipsistic Baby Boomers, who ruined America and the world. Thanks a pant-load, ya’ one-eyed bi-curious junkie.
j) Most Italians go into sanitation and meat slicing; this one was so short, cartoonish, and effeminate, all that was left for him was the cinema. His films are little more than overlong examinations of the myriad ways nostalgic pop can be used to make violence against Italians ironic, that is, of course, when they’re not show-offy regurgitations of the better filmmakers he grew up watching (i.e. anyone who made a film before 1973). To add insult to injury he may also be the worst music documentarian of all time. Now at the point in his career where most consider it acceptable, and even quaint, for him to a drop a biannual three-hour fart packet of American History (it’s only a matter of time before we get the Constitutional Convention as a rapier fight set to Frankie Avalon), what he really needs to do is take a long, hard look back at all of the terrible, insipid filmmakers filmmakers he’s inspired to pick up a camera and give himself a really, really close shave.
k) How do you take what should be an effortless little genre film and make it seem like it took decades to shit out every single overthought, self-consciously ruminative, joyless minute? Just ask this most heralded of Canadian auteurs (titter). Eternally putting the carriage before the fetid, rotting horsemeat, he apparently gorges himself on monographs of his own filmography before starting each new project. There can be no other explanation for his eminently studied, theory-laden texts, oops, I mean movies. Not only does his FX-heavy sci-fi “excoriation” of “soul-devouring” media remain less diverting than any given paragraph by Marshall McLuhan, he remade the damn thing almost two decades later for “gamers,” and in the process showed that his grasp of new thresholds in virtual reality were about as sophisticated as Tron. In between? A nonstop parade of prurient gross-outs disguised as “corporeal investigations” and one Burroughs adaptation that proved him to be little more than a glorifed (er, gorified) Jim Henson . . . only with more, ya know, goo.
l) Creator of the least memorable films about memory ever, if he hadn’t spent a season or two grouching it up with better Left Bank filmmakers like Marker and Varda, no one would remember him at all. Perpetual trend-spotter/hanger-on, last seen on film sporting a Howard Hughes-gone-Nazi look in buddy Agnès’s latest reminiscence, this loser made his name shooting statues in a garden, then shooting people like statues all while soporific voice-over drones. (This, of course, after producing a Holocaust movie without any Jews in it.) Word is that he made other films after this epochal art fuck, but damned if anyone’s seen them.
Is this one of my nightmares? No, silly, it’s what this year’s Oscars will probably look like!
Ted Haggard and Diana Ross tried to stop us. But we will not be silenced, especially after an inspiring letter sent to us from eternal Oscar also-ran Banlop Lomnoi, whose overlooked performance in Tropical Malady still stands as one of the Academy’s all-time fumbles, despite a pricey ad campaign from Strand. Lomnoi, for whom we tirelessly said “For Your Consideration!” wrote: “I made mix tape for you. You have my heart.” The mix tape consisted of hiccups, beeps, and catchy Thai pop songs. We’ll never forget.
So, we couldn’t resist, and the best minds in the biz return for the 2009 round of super-cool (or is it hot?) Oscar predix.
Best Picture: While the consensus would have it that the re-release of Black Orpheus, oops, er, I meant Slumdog Millionaire, would seem to have captured the imagination of the world and the Academy, I am going to go way out on a limb and beg to differ. The Oscars just haven’t in the past proven themselves fond of faux Bollywood dance numbers and the scooping out of children’s eyeballs, so I think any of the other four nominees has a real shot at the gold guy. With the double bonus of being both the only documentary and comedy nominated (always two big pluses for a best-pic candidate), Allah Made Me Funny could be laughing its way to the podium, but steep competition from Academy favorite Ken Jacobs’ Razzle Dazzle, with its Oscar-friendly reappropriation of silent film footage, could make its chances less likely than a Ramadan BBQ. The other two nominees—the gentle, erotic, good-natured gay romance Shelter and the thought-provoking Canadian drama The Tracey Fragments—would seem to be also-rans, but let’s not count out two Oscar standbys: gentle, erotic good-natured gay romances and Ellen Page.
Who will win: Allah Made Me Funny. Who should win: We Are Wizards.
Best Actor: Despite my attempts to get Banlop Lomnoi his write-in (and damn all the naysayers: write-ins do work! Just look at Linda Hunt), his chances look slim. So with a sigh, I’ll go ahead with common wisdom and say that John Leguizamo will finally pick up his long overdue Oscar this year for his comeback performance in Where God Left His Shoes, which will basically double as a lifetime-achievement award. His To Wong Foo snub still smarts. (In all likelihood, he’ll lose his second nomination this year, for best supporting actor in The Happening, to Heath Ledger.) The rest can just enjoy their time in the glistening bask of Oscar’s shining glow—that thrilling month between nomination and ceremony in which press junkets and Leno appearances make them think that they’ll be remembered come April: Scott Prendergast (for his subtle work in Kabluey), Matthew Broderick (for mincing around in Finding Amanda), a fake Brad Pitt (he was CGI’d to perfection in Ben Buttons, but he still might have originated as an animatron), and Jacques Nolot (for his cuddly, Parisian, fallen-arched, naked-and-saggy, HIV-positive, Roland Barthes–fucking intellectual former hustler).
Who will win: John Leguizamo. Who should win: Jar-Jar Binks in The Clone Wars.
Best Actress: Fast becoming the Susan Lucci of the Oscars, Scarlett Johansson will probably have to accept that her eleventh nomination, for The Other Boleyn Girl, will be just that. It’s likely she’ll lose to one of two strong candidates, both household names: Tao Zhao, for her reliably restrained work in Still Life, and whoever played “Yum-Yum” in Gran Torino. The former is a Jia Zhangke standby, having appeared in all of the Chinese master’s films since Platform, and the latter barely had a line, or a character name, and was on screen for only a few minutes (Warner Bros. took a risk that paid off in campaigning her as lead), but Clint Eastwood’s irascible racial ribbing of her helped make a place for her in all our hearts. Other nominees include the lesbian who got a pole shoved up her cooter in Mother of Tears, which was Dario Argento’s comeback and one of the heartwarming stories of the movie season, and Gabby LaLa from National Lampoon Presents Electric Apricot: Quest For Festeroo, which apparently was a real movie.
Who will win: Yum-Yum. Who should win: Tori Spelling in Cthulhu (also a real movie).
Be there, Sunday, February 22, for all the winners, and for Hugh Jackman prancing around onstage with Miley Cyrus, an orangutan, Jerry Lewis, and, God willing, Jennifer Hudson. Night of a million stars!!
Last year’s predictions: See how well we did!
They say we’re assholes. But all we want to do is honor our favorite filmmakers. Help us do that in this week’s round of crazy match-em-ups! First prize is a set of Criterion DVDs of your choice.* Some are easier than others, so watch out!
-Your friendly neighborhood film critics, Clarence, Robbie, and Filmenthusiast2000.
(*From our used pile of scratched selections—only Armageddon, Chasing Amy, and Salo are left.)
1) Ozu, 2) Denis, 3) Welles, 4) Cassavetes, 5) Kubrick, 6) Bresson, 7) Fuller, 8) Eisenstein, 9) Godard, 10) Marker, 11) Bertolucci, 12) Minnelli
a) A pathetic mix of heady pseudo-intellectual post-Algiers revolutionary and squirming idealist, this four-eyed Commie prick mistakenly confuses the idea of “movie” with “lesson” in his pedantic, nearly unwatchable treatises on film and politics. Yes, we get it, we get it: history/cinema/genocide/image. Throw in a few random broken sound shards and we’ll lap it up. Hateful misogynist to boot.
b) Critically-pandered habitual overeater whose one acknowledged “masterpiece” is a rattling bag of tricks that betrays his true vocation: birthday party magician. David Fincher circa 1941.
c) The textbook case of cinematic pussy-loathing, his filmography never met a woman it liked. His phallocentric universe trades actual cock for ridiculous handmade lenses and ejaculation for slow, throbbing camera movements. For first dates only. (*We can use the same for John Ford, just substitute “squaw” for “woman.”)
d) Bombastic, semi-competent ham who delighted French intellectuals in the 1950’s by tickling the bourgeois Euro appetite for quaint American “crudity.” Turtle-necked homo-macho Left Bankers slobbered over his junky existentialism just as they enshrined any blind, barefoot Mississippi Negro who could twang out a chord; the canon has been shackled with his agit-slop ever since.
e) Labeled “transcendental” by those in the know, and “a real snoozer” by those who have sexual relations regularly, his small, mini-mustachioed career has cast an unpleasant shadow over an entire continent’s worth of cinema. In some alternate universe, 40+ films’ worth of stationary cameras and kimonos would be called tedious. Here it’s called genius.
f) Dessicated drunk ham actor who couldn’t crack it in the theater so took out his aggression on a pack of wounded outcast performers, forced them to bray and mime and shriek for the camera, all the while blowing endless amounts of cheap looking film stock in the hopes that someone somewhere would enshrine it as “edgy,” “honest,” and “real”. Guess what? It worked, and then he died, drunk.
g) A Midwestern transplant locked in the most fabulous, spangled closet this side of Liberace, reeled out enough tawdry Technicolor to keep ascot-wearing old queens shrieking and ironically applauding for a century to come. With an undisciplined sense of color that would consign him to thrift store bins had he been a painter, in cinema his orgiastic Italian-American tackiness is “riotously vivid.” Ever wonder why nobody takes the medium seriously?
h) Embraced mainly because of today’s paucity of relatively talented European filmmakers, she has such a lack of grasp on the fundamentals of film narrative, that she time and time again falls back on dreamlike, esoteric imagery to buoy her non-movies. Hey, lady, female sexuality was already covered way back in the days of Maya Deren—get over it already.
i) Foppy-haired pinko who some argue invented editing, in reality is nothing more than the direct progenitor of MTV and ADD. Obsessed over by academics because he cuts faster than their brains can work, he churned out a series of thinly veiled Stalin-cozies and capped it all with his very own Lord of the Rings Nazi-killing swashbuckler.
j) Frigid old French coot name-dropped roughly a thousand times more than his arid, airless movies are ever actually watched. If his ‘Notes on Cinematography’ were applied filmic practice, going to the movies would be as lively as a visit to the Medieval wing at the Met. Mouchette is an austere TV movie weepie, Pickpocket cliff notes Dostoevsky, The Devil, Probably a sullen adolescent melodrama. The worst filmmaker in history.
k) If Al Gore invented the internet, then this guy surely invented the artiste as a continual stream of boring video docs, hypertext handjobs and low rent Myst knock-off CD-ROMS (see also: Godard). A gnomic Left Bank recluse who should’ve sold it out along with Varda and Resnais when he had it, maintains his reputation through the sheer unavailability of his work, except of course, the fanboy Holy Grail of his photo scrapbook short La Jitney.
l) Despite early efforts, he could never crack it as a truly political filmmaker so he proceeded to fall back on soft-core imagery, whether it be the Nazi chic of his overlauded 1970 flick, currently enjoying a “large-screen” (ha!) run at Film Forum, or the truly risible apocalick-tic bedroom butter farce of a few years later, both luxuriating in bad-taste cinematographic gloss that covers up a venal banality. His unmitigated prurience extended to forcing viewers to witness Jill Clayburgh playing an incestuous mom, Gerard Depardieu’s wee-wee lolling about rather close to De Niro’s leg, and his Fu Manchu-lite winning nine Oscars. The apotheosis of this brainless shell’s career came with last year’s riotous May ‘68 parody, which unforgivably mistook youthful idealism for—youthful idealism.
***Yeah, okay, we really love all these filmmakers.
In yet another of Reverse Shot’s innovative, time-saving measures for aspirant film writers, we are proud to present the first installment of our Dictionary of Received Film Criticism. Rather than struggling under the weight of 100+ years of film history (much of which is difficult to easily grasp), this invaluable tool will allow writers to quickly and efficaciously locate the correct and established opinions, attitudes, and observations about any number of cinematic topics.
THE DICTIONARY OF RECEIVED FILM CRITICISM
Bring It On: SEE Guilty Pleasure.
De Palma, Brian: A mechanical genius, but his movies have no LIFE.
Disaster: SEE Parallels (Historical): post-9/11 anxiety.
Documentary (or Documentary-Style): There’s no tripod.
Eyes Wide Shut: Snigger upon its mention.
Guilty Pleasure: Anything that you like which you pretend that you don’t want other people to know that you like. The real answer is always pornography.
Horror movies: The sordid affair of 3rd tier staff critics; always improved by a “dose of necessary macabre humor.” Classics: Psycho, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Suspiria, Halloween, Nightmare on Elm Street.
Ming-Liang, Tsai: SEE Antonioni, Michelangelo and Keaton, Buster. Sad and funny chronicler of Urban Alienation.
Murray, Bill: A standard-issue comic before Rushmore; now “a deadpan genius.”
Ozu, Yasujiro: A master. To be cited on the occasion of any Oriental movie in which the camera does not move for 30 seconds or more.
Paradox: Originates between two smirks, in the New York Press offices. Catch the tenor in the screening room, then form an inverse opinion. Spew vitriol accordingly. Repeat.
Ex. “there is more poetry in a single shot from one of Hype Williams’ videos—which understand pop instinctually—than in all of Assayas’s hipster-touted filmography”
Parallels (Historical): For added contextual heft, choose from the following: post-War cynicism, Cold War anxiety, “counter-culture” cynicism/ anxiety, post-Nixon cynicism, post-9/11 anxiety.
Pornography: Feign boredom on the subject.
Solondz, Todd: “Chillingly funny”; there have been subsequent missteps, but Happiness remains a Masterpiece.
Spirituality: In cinema, comprised of long, contemplative, unbroken takes. An “elevated” style, per David Thomson. Key words: meditative, austere, transcendent, Bressonian, immaterial.
Ex.: “the measured pacing combines with X’s subtly luminous photography to create restive spaces for the inward-looking viewer; it turns the cinema into a chapel.”
Tarantino, Quentin: A live-wired 21st century celluloid DJ. Or: A derivative hack; “If you thought Kill Bill was cool, you’ve gotta see—”
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