THE OBLIGATORY DARK KNIGHT RISES POST

It's about Bat-time for some Bat-links, y'all:

1) Here are my collected reviews of every Batman movie up to and including The Dark Knight at Tor.com.

2) My non-spoiler review of The Dark Knight Rises, which says pretty much all I've got to say; you want to fight about particular elements in it that “don't make sense,” I'm not your guy. Besides, I already ripped whiny bullshit fan reactions the other day.

3) My piece in The Atlantic about where both Christopher Nolan and Batman stand at present.

Happy Monday, kids!

A FEW WORDS ABOUT HARRY KNOWLES

The gentleman in question

(Like a lot of bloggers, unencumbered by the professional obligation to churn out immediate responses to the brutal mass murder in Colorado Friday midnight, I'm prefacing this post by saying this was supposed to go up Friday morning. When I woke up and turned on my computer, I saw, yeah, maybe this isn't the best time to rant about Harry Knowles. It was a time for contemplation for many, and for me a full day of sitting around stunned at what that malignant little fuck—I'm not giving him the satisfaction of saying his name; he has no name—did. Anyway, I don't really have anything to contribute to that discussion beyond the anger and sadness so many others share, intensified in this particular case because movie theaters are a place I've felt safe and free my whole life, especially in times when I felt in danger or trapped. I basically co-sign everything my good friend Filmi Girl says in the introduction to this post, so check that out, then come back, and watch the below video to transition back into our completely unrelated regularly scheduled programming.)



So, earlier this week, before anyone other than critics and a few lucky bloggers (and people like me who aren't quite as fancy as the former just yet but still a little fancier than the latter) had had a chance to see The Dark Knight Rises, Harry Knowles, founder of Ain't It Cool News, and for better or worse the ur-Internet movie blogger, spoiled the sweet living fuck out of it. While that's a little shitty, Mr. Knowles did admittedly preface everything with a spoiler alert, so it's not as bad as it could be. What is, and what makes this more notable than just internecine nerd grumping, is the way in which Knowles registers his “[p]rofound disappointment.” It's a stunningly lousy piece of criticism, fodder for everyone who would join Kevin Smith's recent crusade against not only critics themselves, but the entire form.

Whether or not Knowles' piece was meant as a “formal” review or not is a bit beside the point. Ain't It Cool is, by virtue of having been around the Internet practically since before civilians even knew what computers were, an institution. Its editorial perspective is right there on its sleeve, with its heart: ain't movies cool? I'm hardly in a position to disagree. In principle I'm right there with them. I love movies with a fierce intensity. Movies can be about anything and everything, so to love movies is to love life itself, at a certain point. On the other hand, loving cinema does not mean one loves all movies. Some are better than others.

I would submit that if the way in which your love of movies manifests itself is in the desire to write about them, you owe it to yourself and other movie lovers to at least try to get at what a movie is, rather than focusing on your own personal reaction to it to the exclusion of all other things. Criticism is not a simple matter of “I liked it” or “I didn't like it.” A big part of it is considering factors outside the self; while ultimately purely objective observation is always going to be impossible because the observer is part of the observation, it's incumbent on the observer to do the best s/he can. The best parts of oneself—knowledge, wisdom, and empathy—are the best tools of observation.

Where Knowles fucks up in that Dark Knight Rises piece, and the entire experience of watching the movie itself, from the sound of things, is in that inability to step even an inch outside himself and the Dark Knight Rises screenplay he'd already written in his head. (He's no stranger to reading the wrong script, if you'll recall his embarrassing adventures with that fake Prometheus script back in April.) Reading his reaction to the movie (since calling it a “review” is a bit much), everything that pissed him off relates to a choice Christopher (and brother Jonathan) Nolan made either in transposing characters from the comics into the very different realm of cinema, or in the effects of those characters' action in a world they, the Nolan brothers, not Harry Knowles, created.

Among those effects is something that relates to a larger discussion of fandom and sexism that's come to a bit of a boil this year. In the case of both this summer's previous mega-blockbuster superhero movies, The Avengers and The Amazing Spider-Man, women critics were subjected to shit like “Stick with rom-coms, bitch” for weighing in with anything other than adulation. In gaming there was the whole “getting the player to identify with Lara Croft by her getting almost-raped” crap and that woman's Kickstarter to fund a study of sexism in gaming that led to a deluge of threats of rape and a Flash game where the player could punch her in the face. Given this context, a discussion that has been unavoidable in fandom circles for months, it's a sign of great negligence that Knowles would register the following complaint (bolded emphasis mine, not his; shitty writing his, not mine):

“It is just at this stage that the film loses all sense of urgency. I mean, you have a city with a strange respirator men with an army of thugs and every hardened criminal in the city – and it doesn’t end up looking like Old Detroit from ROBOCOP? I mean – there’s 1000s armed bad guys and the city isn’t being raped and pillaged. Instead they set up courts to make people walk on ice?”

Yes, Harry, there are thousands of armed bad guys and the city isn't being raped and pillaged. Perhaps Christopher and Jonathan Nolan do not share your lazy conflation of rape and pillage with dramatic urgency. Perhaps they also share a frame of reference not entirely derived from other movies with no aesthetic, philosophical, or any other connection other than being movies. If anything, the absence of rape and pillage in this case could be interpreted as a) Bane not being an anarchist, because he's not an anarchist, and b) a sign to pay attention because (pardon the overly literal reading) something's happening, and you don't know what it is, do you, Mr. Knowles?

I should clarify that accusing Harry Knowles of rape advocacy based on the above quote would be inaccurate. But it's indicative of a fundamental lack of taking a moment to think about other people and how they might think or feel, which is the same fundamental problem with his entire reaction. The near-mantra which the repetitions of “bullshit” become is derived almost entirely from the movie's interpretation of the comics being different from Knowles'. There is, I hate to break it to him, no one set-in-stone interpretation of the comics, which are, as a writer I rather like pointed out in The Atlantic recently, the product of many different authors and the different perspectives each brought to the material. Then, there are things such as Bane being “no longer South American,” which is an assumption based on the absence of it being spelled out, and not something there's any evidentiary basis to state as anything other than an assumption. And, even if he's not, not to be mean or anything, but who gives a fuck? If Knowles had liked the movie (on whatever squishy inarticulately-conveyed basis) he certainly wouldn't have.

While we're in an interrogative mood, another “who gives a fuck?” subject is Harry Knowles himself, as in “why should we give a fuck what he has to say?” His is not an a priori irrelevant voice. However irritating he's become both online and in Austin (and holy shit, if you want to hear invective, just wind Austin critic types up with a question about the guy and watch them go), and however many writers have come along who are better at doing what he does than he is (Ain't It Cool is home to some fine ones, as well as some not so fine), online movie and fandom discourse is what it is to a significant degree due to Harry Knowles' influence. And a lot of people still read Ain't It Cool. So when he hops on his computer the day before one of the biggest geek movies of the year and writes something this stupid, it's irritating.

It's also bad for criticism in general. I haven't had much to say about Kevin Smith's ridiculous and weird anti-critic tirades (in keeping with the “it's not always about me” theme here, Scott Weinberg basically nails the whole thing in this piece), but Smith and Harry Knowles are essentially on the same page on this subject. Their (apparent) weird mix of unquantifiable emotion, dogmatic certitude, and the utter refusal to address either is one of the most annoying things about movie geekery. Asking why something is “awesome” or “sucks,” or having to explain, does not in any way cheapen the experience of a movie, and in a lot of cases enriches it. Getting deeper on a movie you liked and discovering that, in fact, there are some things wrong with it doesn't mean the subjective, emotional experience of liking it is any less valid. All it means is that the movie in question did some things well and other things not so well. One can like a “bad” movie and not enjoy a “good” movie. No matter what the case, understanding is a net good.

Throwing stones at nerds, admittedly, will lead to a lot of shit getting broken in my glass house (which, because I'm a nerd, is a 1:1 scale replica of Dr. Manhattan's Martian palace in Watchmen). But, in terms of the discussion at hand, I find it particularly grating when unexamined feelings are presented as having any kind of relevance, and when the process of examination is dismissed as either boring or the occupation of sour-grapes killjoy assholes. I also think voices with large audiences of listeners should endeavor to say things of meaning and value.

Of, course, that might just be a by-product of my remembering that once upon a time, nerds were supposed to be smart.

RIP ANDREW SARRIS

Disagree on particulars or even fundamentals, the undeniable truth is that Andrew Sarris is the most influential American film critic there has ever been. It all comes back to him eventually. I would be speaking a different language if not for Sarris. And so, a salute to all he was and continues to be.

JESUS CAME FROM OUTER SPACE, AND ACTUAL PROMETHEUS SPOILERS

This weekend, I swear. For about 72 consecutive hours I've either been trying to avoid, actively engaged in, or stewing about some sort of impassioned discussion about Prometheus. And, before that, I'd been sitting around since Tuesday night trying to figure out what the fuck to write about it. And before that there were the months of faux-viral video clips and Stephen A. Smith bellowing about it during basketball games and the filmmakers being coy about it. It would have been too bad if after all that, the movie was just another boring, business-as-usual blockbuster. But that's the thing. It isn't. And it kind of is.

A movie that's at odds with itself about what the fuck it actually is is going to provoke some discussion. And holy cow did Prometheus ever set off a shitstorm. I saw it last Tuesday at an all-media, and after the whole clusterfuck of getting our phones back was done, my friend with whom I saw it and I spent the next hour or so walking to the subway and riding back to Park Slope repeatedly asking each other, “Why did Prometheus suck so bad?” Then, after we got back to our respective apartments, we hit each other up on Gchat to ask again: “WHY DID PROMETHEUS SUCK SO BAD?”

So, I had a couple days to think about it, which was actually really valuable because the review I ended up writing for Tor had evolved beyond that initial negative reaction and developed a bit of nuance. That extra time to think allowed me to sort the things that pissed me off about the picture and weight how important each was to the whole thing. Also, it allowed me to assess Prometheus in relation to Alien, to Ridley Scott's career as a director, and to the median 2010s-vintage Hollywood blockbuster. The result? I really respect what Prometheus (mainly Ridley Scott, Dariusz Wolski, the designers, and the cast) gets right. (Ed. Note: if only there was a way to make the incipient “but” in 400 point boldfaced type with an mp3 of Samuel L. Jackson hollering “BUT” when you clicked on it . . .)

BUT, Prometheus has some of the dumbest writing, from inexplicable character behavior to unnecessary and poorly-placed plot twists to clunky big-idea-conveying to those ideas not being as big as they would seem in more competent hands to an ending that can go fuck itself in the severed android neck, since Tommy Wiseau's proud nadir, The Room. I don't invoke St. Wiseau the Lowest of the Low in vain, believe me. Here's a partial—complete would take us all day—list of dumb shit in the Prometheus script (and in case subtle hints like the title of the fucking post didn't convey this, spoilers in the following):

—Despite having no reason to do so, CEO Guy Pearce of Evil White Guy Industries (a pre-Yutani merger Weyland Corp.) stows away on the Prometheus and only reveals that he's on board near the end of the journey. The reveal has no dramatic impact, no purpose whatsoever: it just happens and suddenly Guy Pearce is doddering around in Andy Garcia Dead Again makeup and everyone's acting like he's always been there. Why wasn't he?

—When all the scientists go down to the planet, the air isn't breathable, so they wear their space suits. Then they get inside what turns out to be an alien spacecraft and suddenly, whaddaya know, the air's breathable. Far out. The scene where some dude cracks open his space helmet to breathe air just like back home on Earth is a staple of SF. So some dude cracks open his space helmet. Then everyone else does. Even after they discover alien shit so alien it killed other aliens, they're still lollygagging all over the fucking place with their helmets off touching stuff.

—Per the last, to repeat, they're scientists.

—The “ticking clock” is a time-honored suspense device. Alien had a literal one that counted every last second until the Nostromo blew up. But in Prometheus, near the end when Noomi Rapace is running around while shit blows up, her helmet tells her she has like thirty seconds of air left. She keeps running around doing all kinds of strenuous shit like trying not to get killed by various kinds of aliens (at some point the fact that she was supposed to be running out of air kind of becomes a non-thing) and trying to convince Michael Fassbender to fly another dormant alien spacecraft (hold that thought) to the head aliens' home world to ask them “Seriously, what the fuck, guys?” Despite the fact that this is totally retarded and Fassbender's head, back when it was attached to his body, thought it was a good idea to convolutedly impregnate her with an alien squid thingie either to kill her or just because what the fuck, he agrees to set up the sequel with her. (It's okay, take an Advil, I'll be here when you get back.)

—Per the ticking clock point, the whole point of the climax was that there were two spaceships on the planet: the Prometheus and the flying alien death croissant. Idris Elba, Benedict Wong, and the other guy made a whole big deal out of kamikaze-ing the Prometheus into the flying alien death croissant so it wouldn't go to Earth and turn the sequel into a Roland Emmerich movie. So, Idris et al take one for the team. The aliens maybe get killed. Then Fassbender's head just tells Noomi Rapace “Oh yeah, and there was no need for Idris and everyone to get killed.”

—Last, and most fundamentally, there's a way to do the whole “larger forces are at work here, and they may be beyond our ken, and thus this movie shall lay things out allusively rather than run the risk of the explanation for shit being stupid” thing. Stanley Kubrick was up on that with 2001, and 2001 was awesome. If you look at 2001, it's all right there: A leads to B leads to monolith acid trip leads circularly back to Strauss in a clean, orderly fashion. Who the fuck the aliens are and what their whole deal was is left alone, because there was no answer that was going to be cool enough, and leaving it ambiguous has been giving us stuff to yak about for almost 45 years now. Prometheus wants to be this thing—which is why I graded it on the curve for ambition; they might have fucked it up but they at least tried—but, as that bit inside the em-dashses alludes to, they fucked it up. The movie over-explains who the “Engineers” are, literalizing them as these big white emotionless humanoids who somehow are a 100% match for human beings genetically and also started the evolutionary process that led from primordial ooze to us jagoffs (in case it's been a while since you took biology, those are mutually exclusive conditions except under staggeringly improbable circumstances; the whole “they created us but evolution is still a thing” is total bet-hedging controversy-averse screenwriter dicklessness). And yet, in spite of defining the terms of the explanation in such a way that there's shit that needs to be explained, it just leaves everyone hanging. Anyway, tl;dr Prometheus' handling of its own mythology is a total misfire. (Thank fuck they cut the part about Jesus Christ being an Engineer . . .)

So, yes, the script is a shitpile. The handful of wholly negative reviews have focused on this, to the exclusion of all other aspects of the movie, as in the case of this tantrum over at /Film. The whole thing focuses on stuff like I listed above, ending with the dismissive, “But boy, it sure is pretty.” To recap, that's six words devoted to any aspect of Prometheus that isn't the script. Writing a review of a movie and focusing solely on the script is almost like writing a review of a movie based on what the wallpaper looks like in each scene, or what kind of chairs everyone's sitting in (yes, the script is more important than the art direction, and if you'll note I actually agree with a number of the points the dude made, but come the fuck on, THERE ARE OTHER ASPECTS TO THE MEDIUM).

On the other hand, Roger Ebert (and others, not to beat up on ol' Rog) giving Prometheus four stars isn't any better an indicator of value. I mean, this happens every now and then, everyone's fretting about an uneven balance of quality between different dissonant elements of a given film and Ebert chimes in like “FOUR STARS! I WAS TRANSPORTED!” and everyone else is like, “Uhh . . . ok.” (Also, unlike the /Film review, to the former's marginal credit, Ebert spoiled nine kinds of fuck out of the plot before any civilians had had any chance to see the movie, and without warnings, either. Naughty, naughty, sir.) Prometheus' champions are almost all saying “meh, fuck the script, the movie's awesome, it's Ridley Scott's best picture in years and truly beautiful filmmaking.” And that's all true. The photography is gorgeous, and finally there's no reason at all to bring up Dances With Smurfs in the discussion of best use of 3D, because Prometheus raised the bar really, really high. The only problem with that is . . . the script really, really sucks. There's a degree to which direction, photography, sound, design, and the other elements that make cinema cinema can overcome a shitty script, and when all of those elements are at an elite level, as they are in Prometheus, that degree can be nearly enough complete to make the overall experience enjoyable. But with an elephant turd of a script like Prometheus', it can never close the circle and make for an unqualified masterpiece.

Prometheus is a frustrating one, for sure. It's too ambitious to be dismissed out of hand, but the train-wreck script undermines those ambitions and makes them seem more commonplace than they actually are. If it makes money, maybe someday someone else gets to make a big beard-stroker R-rated SF movie that actually works better. But the fact that it's out, and we all saw it, means that at the very least we don't all have to keep fucking talking about it coming up. Also, everyone had to re-watch Alien to prepare, and that's a net gain, because Alien fucking rules. Prometheus will never fuck that up. So, hey. Life goes on. Now let's all spend a month and a half driving each other batshit (get it?) talking about The Dark Knight Rises.

THE MOVIE CRITIC'S NATIONAL ANTHEM

Earlier today, I read this piece by Glenn Kenny about the way people perceive film criticism, and fail to understand what it actually is. I found myself nodding and going, yes, I agree with this and it's very well written.

But then, holy balls. I read this piece about the same thing by Jim Emerson and I'm ready to join the fucking Army. I don't know that I've ever seen an argument as methodically and completely laid to more desolate waste than Emerson reduces this dude (whose work, I should say, I'm not as familiar with as I am with A.O. Scott's, or Mr. Kenny's, or Mr. Emerson's, all three of whom are really goddamn good at what they do.)

Anyway, that's all I got for now, but if you have any interest at all in criticism, rhetoric, or good writing, check those pieces out. Peace.

WHAT THE OSCARS CAN LEARN FROM THE MTV MOVIE AWARDS

Elizabeth Banks getting carried offstage by an actor playing a stripper playing a fireman; aka winning at life

I know you all looked at the title of this post and went “What the fuck, dude, what are you, writing for Slate now?” If it's any reassurance, I'm not suggesting stupid shit like “the Academy needs to be more populist in its selections” because Oscar movies are certainly not a representation of the artistic elite in cinema; Oscar movies are just as much comfort food as the stuff that wins MTV Awards, just for the palates of people who've graduated from high school. Also, for all everybody's griping about inevitability, let us remember, the Oscars did give Best Picture to a black-and-white French movie with almost no dialogue this year, and whatever you thought of it, that is something. But let's not revisit that whole fuckin mess again. On to lessons:


1—Lighten up, Francis

Look, art is important. It's a prism through which the great mysteries of life can be contemplated, it gives us language to describe the exalted, and it's as old as human beings themselves, suggesting that it's a fundamental part of our character as a species. Cinema is art. But the Academy doesn't have anything to do with art, and the fact that they pretend to when at least three out of every five years shit happens like The King's Speech beating The Social Network or Crash beating Brokeback Mountain or Slumdog Millionaire running unopposed or Forrest Gump beating Pulp Fiction or Ordinary People beating Raging Bull or Rocky beating Network/All The President's Men/Taxi Driver/Bound For Glory is absurd. To clarify: this isn't about my personal taste. In every single one of those cases, the ambitious picture that dares to be dark (and, in every case except the Rocky one, is the only one that people still actually watch) lost to the reassuring, safe, forgettable picture. The Academy awards artistic achievement by accident, not by design.

So, as long as they're going to be kind of silly and dick over great filmmaking, why not let their hair down and embrace the silliness? Russell Brand is hit or miss as a stand-up—a little of his I'm-above-this breeziness and faux-edgy political humor that's designed to seem to the audience like he thinks it's going over their heads but is really supposed to flatter them for “getting” the “joke” goes a long way—but his hosting was in another fucking galaxy from Billy Crystal's this year because some of his jokes actually worked. Not to mention, one of Russell Brand's biggest strengths in a context as silly as an awards show is the way his perpetually sighing vocal delivery reminds everyone that what's going on is not serious. Because it's not.


2—Categories like “Best Kiss” and “Best Fight” are not stupid, they're actually great

A continuation of point 1. These categories are the greatest strength of the MTV Movie Awards, after its realization of its own existential absurdity. Considering that the Oscars are—whether they admit it or not—about what makes movies fun rather than great, why not have Best Kiss? Or Best Fight (maybe expanded to Best Ownage Sequence to allow car chases and shit as well)? Or Best Villain?

This isn't about getting more people to watch the Oscar telecast, because fuck that (and in any case the MTV Movie Awards ratings were down almost 30% this year, making it a less-than-ideal commercial model). I'm just saying, if they gave out Best Fight right after the dead people montage and then the clips of the nominees are things like Iko Uwais ramming a fluorescent light bulb into a dude's throat, that would be awesome.


3—Wiz Khalifa and The Black Keys showing up for no apparent reason

If you need to make it sound more pretentious call it the “Luis Buñuel Memorial Appreciation For The Stochastic and Ridiculous Nature Of Existence.” Also, the performance the Keys did with Lifetime Achievement Award winner Johnny Depp (who, it should be noted, looked like he was having infinitely more fun than he does whenever he shows up to lose an Oscar) is something the Oscars should do: if someone gets a lifetime achievement award for being an awesome performer, they should have to perform. The fact that Johnny sat in with the Keys on guitar and proved that, while he looks perfect as a rock 'n' roll guitarist, he kinda sounds like shit is even better: the performance should have to have a degree of difficulty increase. Make Francis Ford Coppola juggle. The what-the-fuck quotient would actually make that shit interesting.


4—The MTV Movie Awards are only two hours long

This is tricky for the Oscars, because the best speeches are ALWAYS for the awards “no one cares about” (implying, falsely, that anyone gives any appreciable degree more of a fuck more about Best Actor and Director; half the audience is watching for the dresses and the other half's attention is drifting toward the blog posts they're drafting about what bullshit it is that Terrence Malick doesn't have more Oscars that William Wyler). But dudes, you need to tighten. Not shorten. Just only put in what needs to be there. The fact that some fuckfaces at MTV who give their Best Picture award to Twilight are doing a better job than you should make you jump out the fucking window in shame.


5—Show clips from upcoming releases

So, to explain: I watched the MTV Movie Awards instead of the Game of Thrones season finale because I was lured with beer and a post-show trip up to a roof deck and it was gorgeous out Sunday night. And I have no regrets, because the company was great and I was able to catch GoT first thing the next morning online. I already forget who won what except for Kristen Stewart earning the nickname “Pinner” after the variety of joint, because pinners are skinny, white, and full of weed, and so is she (I'm not judging, I think she's great, I'm just saying, girlfriend was fuckin hiiiiiiigh). But one thing I do remember is the coming attractions.

They debuted the trailer for The Perks of Being a Wallflower, which I don't really care about except I hope it does well so Emma Watson gets her post-Hermione career off to a good start. And, later, they made a gigantic hullafuckinbaloo about an EXCLUSIVE NEVER-BEFORE SEEN clip from The Dark Knight Rises. Which I knew wasn't going to be anything really new but still, I can't lie, I got excited. And went ahead and spent a couple minutes speculating about the structure and how Anne Hathaway figured into things. So, you know mission accomplished.

It sounds like (and sometimes is) conceding the lack of interest in the history of movies to advise the Oscars to stop the all-necrophilia-all-the-time act and focus on the present and future, but there's a way to do it right. First, acknowledge past, present, and future as one, rather than just incessantly venerating the past, and all too often the wrong parts of the past. So, yeah, look back. Then there are the awards themselves, which acknowledge the present sufficiently. But seriously, what the hell's wrong with being like “movies are still a vital, thriving thing, and here's what we've got in store”? Nothing. Don't hard sell it up too much, but a trailer or two wouldn't do any harm, especially when presented the way the MTV Movie Awards did, bringing out Christopher Nolan to a thunderous ovation—seriously, a director getting that kind of reception? Kinda cool—to say a few opaque words before unveiling the clip. Most of it was stuff we've seen before, with the exception of a little dialogue between Anne Hathaway and Joseph Gordon-Levitt, but hey.


Now, the Oscars aren't in such dire shape that they really need fixing. They are what they are. And heaven knows taking too many pages out of the book of an entity that hails fucking Twilight as any kind of superlative is problematic. But none of these suggestions would hurt. At all. Especially the one about lightening the fuck up, which really is the one from which the other four derive. Silliness is a virtue, and so is self-awareness, Oscar.

A VOCABULARY LESSON FOR CRITICS

The other day, there was a piece on Flavorwire on the most “epidemically overrated” novels in history; I won't link to it, since the whole idea is that they're engaging in provocation for page views, but you can Google that phrase and find the thing easily enough if you really need to read something dumb. As a thing unto itself the list is the intellectual equivalent of a fart—seriously, anyone who reads James Joyce for the plot is a fucking asshat—but as an excuse for a state of criticism jeremiad it'll do just fine.

Here's the thing: the word “overrated” is an absolutely fucking useless term if the subject being discussed is something that can't be objectively quantified. In sports, being over- or underrated is an actual thing. There are objective metrics by which you can determine whether a sports guy is as good as people say he is. Variables like how big a city the dude plays in, high-profile successes or failures, or being white can skew perceptions from what the actual data indicates. In the arts, though, there's no on-base percentage, yards after the catch, or plus-minus, making objective evaluation trickier. One thing that helps, though, is the phrase “it's not all about you.” Or, in other words, whether or not you like something isn't the same thing as it being good. Thus, the fucktards who wrote that Flavorwire thing are really saying “we don't like The Catcher in the Rye, Wuthering Heights, Finnegan's Wake, Moby Dick, et cetera.” (Also, they kind of tip their trollface by having Twilight be the last thing on the list; no reputable critic puts Twilight in the same league as Bronte, Joyce, Melville, and Salinger, thus undercutting the “overrated” conceit.)

Here's an audiovisual aid (pay special attention at about 1:45):



Now, I know your mind is blown because you just thought about Ugly Kid Joe for the first time in 20 years, but stick with me here. That song is, to give it the benefit of the doubt, at least partly tongue-in-cheek, though it's sending up a real thing, namely the way people, in order to seem cool, will cop an attitude about absolutely fucking anything. Which isn't cool. If your coolness requires shitting on something else, you ain't swinging from the championship tee, dude. (Ed. Note: golf metaphors are an underrated way to describe the state of being uncool.)

But “overrated” isn't the only word misused to the point of meaninglessness by people who don't write criticism properly. Here are some others:


Uncinematic: The most apt usage I can recall of this was a review panning Susan Stroman's direction in the movie of The Producers from the play from the movie, because the compositions kinda sucked and just seemed like a camera plunked down on sticks while a play took place in front of it. But even then, calling that “uncinematic” rather than just not the best use of cinema as a medium isn't quite right, because the only way something can really be uncinematic is to not be cinema.

Literary: A word nekulturny douchebags use to describe Wes Anderson movies because Wes Anderson has the fucking temerity to read books. Yeah, heaven forfend Salinger, John Irving and Roald Dahl have any influence on the guy. (Also, if you have any pretense to knowing about movies and you're thinking of snarking on Wes Anderson, save yourself the trouble and skip ahead to the part where you go fuck yourself.)

Dry: Unless you're talking about a martini, think long and hard about how you use this one (and if you drink martinis, think long and hard about just drinking straight gin). Even if you're using it right, there's probably a better way to phrase things.

Fanboy: Already covered this one.

Sexy: This one drives me up the wall, because you'd swear the way this gets thrown around no film critic has ever actually gotten laid in their lives. Any actress with a hemline above her knee and a neckline below her neck is SEXY. Just, no. Look at the scene in The Last Days Of Disco when Chloe Sevigny's trying to shtup Robert Sean Leonard and says “I think Uncle Scrooge is sexy.” It was fucking funny, right? You know why? Because she was using words wrong. Uncle Scrooge is not sexy, as sexiness would not be a thing if everyone was sexy. (Ed. Note: Uncle Scrooge is not the only entity in the universe who isn't sexy, either. THERE ARE MANY OTHERS.) Sexiness is also not achieved automatically by a shot of some titties. Take Chloe. Chloe's a whole movie about how Julianne Moore secretly and then not-so-secretly wants to fuck Amanda Seyfried. Sounds hot, right? Well, with the exception of about five seconds when the two of them are totally naked and totally Doing It (which couldn't help but be), Chloe's about as sexy as a glass-topped coffee table. And yet all the reviews were like, “sexy” this,” “erotic” that. Come on, y'all.

X-meets-x: For an example, from Owen Gleiberman's review of Wes Anderson's Moonrise Kingdom in Entertainment Weekly: “[Anderson's] rarefied, Salinger-meets-The Graduate-meets-music-video-meets-postmodern-TV-ads whimsicality.” This is an impressive pile-up of words, but it doesn't really mean anything. Salinger and The Graduate, sure, you can argue an intertextual relationship with Anderson's picture, even if they're kind of low-hanging fruit in terms of references. But holy shit “music video” and “postmodern TV ads” are vague descriptors, not to mention redundant, as they're both short-form audiovisual media made by most of the same directors. (He's also using “postmodern” wrong, but that's art geek hair-splitting.) X-meets-x is so rarely an illuminating tool and so frequently a “heyyyyyy, loogitme being all hip and shit” crutch that it really ought to just be sidelined.


Anyway, that's enough of that. Basically, all I'm trying to say is words mean things and they don't mean things that they don't mean. It's not all about you. And tits are awesome and everything, but you still need to make a good movie. You're welcome.

CLEANING LEXICAL HOUSE: A FAREWELL TO "FANBOY"

On Saturday, Roger Ebert tweeted “Removing the word 'fanboy' from my vocabulary.” I know the feeling: last year I made this argument to retire the phrase 'chick flick' from the vernacular, and I've made a conscious effort to stop using words like “retard” and “fag” ironically, the former because if I can't find a better word than “retard” I'm, well, a retard (Ed. Note: this one's a work in progress, clearly), and the latter because even though I'd probably put out for Michael Fassbender or Hrithik Roshan, there's a difference between having a shortlist and being family. But this raises the question, with regards to the word “fanboy”: is it really on that same level? Actually, yes.

It's no n-word. That's still the big boy on the epithet block. The silver medalist is the c-word, which is only acceptable under extremely rare, extremely intimate conditions (or in the UK or Ireland). Then, to paraphrase Brad Pitt (speaking of the above-mentioned shortlist) in Moneyball, there's fifty layers of crap, and then there's the field, your retards and fags and, per the focus of this discussion, your fanboys. “Fanboy” is actually a matched pair with “hipster,” in that the hateful fuckface in question is always some other hateful fuckface, it's never you. But, where cracking on someone for being a hipster is essentially saying “That person is thin, dresses fashionably, lives on the first couple Brooklyn stops on the L train, and listens to music I very well may claim I always liked in five years,” because even though there's a lot to be annoyed by with that vague genus of urbanite, there is a sliver of class envy there. Sometimes.

The “fanboy,” though, everyone pictures roughly as being like this guy:



The Simpsons has been fucking with that guy—not specifically him; “that guy” in the cosmic sense—for decades. And it's not like “that guy” is always just benignly bitching about Bioware's avarice or confronting William Shatner about the fact that he was holding his phaser wrong on some episode or other of TOS. Sometimes shit gets ugly. The week or so leading up to the release of The Avengers when the reviews started coming out, there were a couple nasty incidents of guys telling female critics who committed the unpardonable sin of not fawning over the picture to “stick to rom-coms, bitch” and accusing them of having to check with their boyfriends because girls clearly know nothing about comics, don'tcha know.

Almost as bad was the return volley of sneering about “fanboys” after all that shit. Heaven forfuckingfend we get deep on the origins of this kind of stupid misogynistic bullshit. The problem was not “fanboys” taking comics too seriously, or even the way Samuel L. Jackson impulsively tossed a lit match onto the gassed-up mob mentality of Avengers movie fans (n.b., before anyone other than critics had actually seen it), siccing them on A.O. Scott for his lukewarm review in the New York Times. Fandom, much like the Chinaman (why not just get all the offensive nomenclature into this post, amirite) in The Big Lebowski, is not the issue here.

The problem with the condescension and hostility toward women critics is with a warped variety of hetero male privilege, and an inability to assume responsibility for personal inadequacies. It goes like this: sometime after the onset of puberty, boy meets girl, boy wants to make sex with girl, girl does not reciprocate but due to there being other things in the world besides coitus maintains polite interaction with boy, boy interprets girl's politeness as an indication that she wants to sex his penis, girl meets other boy to whom she actually is sexually attracted and becomes boyfriend-girlfriend with him, first boy interprets this as meaning that girl has been manipulating him and that second boy is ipso facto a douchebag for making sex to first boy's beloved, with said sexmaking being entirely assumed by first boy. The end result is an abiding belief that any time a girl does not make sex with one, the girl has “friend-zoned” one, and that all girls like douchebags, and that nice guys (because one always perceives oneself as being a nice guy) are prey for manipulative, scheming villainesses who will weaponize nice guys' niceness against them. One awesome side effect of this avalanche of paranoia is a bitterness toward women that makes it impossible for the guy in question to get laid. This feedback loop has other byproducts, such as regarding women as the enemy and ascribing all kinds of weird, occasionally baseless characteristics to them a la the commies in the Cold War. Meanwhile women—with their own massive array of shit to worry about—are sitting there going “what the fuck did I do?”

But, the next chapter in this story is not “Frustrated by sexlessness, boys turn to all-male fandoms and become that supervillain . . . THE FANBOY!” Fandom has nothing to do with gender or how often one gets laid, it has to do with consuming, uncritical enthusiasm. One will note, the term “fangirl” is usually self-applied, by girls who are fans of things, i.e. “I'm a huge Buffy fangirl,” and there isn't the pejorative, always-the-other-never-me taint of “fanboy.” That's because the shit that pisses people off about so-called “fanboys” has nothing to do with fandom, and everything to do with a lot of bullshit repressed dysfunction, and denial of privilege and agency. Fandom is fandom, though, and doesn't have to do with penises and vaginas (unless you're in a really fun fandom), it has to do with the heart. Y'know, in the gooshy sappy emotional sense.

Fandom and criticism exist on a polarity, since fandom is an a priori, uncritical state of being, and criticism is concerned with rationalism, observation, and leaving one's own tastes at the door. This is why people like Roger Ebert occasionally toss around the term “fanboy” derisively, because to a critic, someone who reacts as a fan actually is the other. Until now, though, as—while I obviously don't know what his actual motivation was for deciding to purge his vocabulary of the word “fanboy,” I'll take the risk of guessing—it would appear Ebert realized that “fanboy” is a reductive term at best and, to my eyes per the above, not even really a thing.

I'll take it a step farther and say that fans and critics could do well to consider the other, or at least not dismiss the other out of hand. There's something to be said both for an emotional, visceral, experiential approach to the arts, and for understanding what in the given work of art creates that reaction. And, at the very least, we all need to remember that the world is not an extension of the self. So fare thee well, fanboy. And for fuck's sake get laid.

NEITHER GOOD NOR IMPORTANT

You gotta hand it to Armond White. He may hate comic books, but he still knows that with great power comes great responsibility, and that when one of the year's most anticipated movies is imminent, it is time to let loose. Behold this review of The Avengers, and bask.

ON THE CABIN IN THE WOODS AND SPOILERS (WHICH THIS CONTAINS)

(Seriously, DO NOT READ THE REST OF THIS until you've seen The Cabin In The Woods, unless you don't mind knowing about what surprises it contains. The subject of this post requires discussing them a bit, but it's really a movie best seen completely blank, because even the trailers don't reveal much of anything really important about it. So, if you haven't seen it, STOP RIGHT HERE and DO NOT READ ANY FURTHER. Check out my review at Tor, which is light on specifics, but long on reasons why to see it. Alles klar? Okay, let's continue. But do not say you weren't warned.)

Yesterday, the long-delayed (for reasons having nothing to do with quality and everything to do with its initial distributor going tits up) Joss Whedon-Drew Goddard collaboration The Cabin In The Woods finally came out. For most of the week leading up to it, there was a furious argument online about a number of reviews and whether or not they were in the right, divulging as much of the picture's plot as they did. Here is, in broad strokes, the situation:

1—The trailers and official plot synopsis focused mainly on a group of five stereotypical-ish horror movie characters: the two hot girls, representing the “virgin/slut” (horror's terms, not my own) dichotomy, and three dudes, the jock, the intellectual, and the stoner. HOWEVA, there are oblique hints that All Is Not What It Seems (the movie's poster, aside from the tagline, featured a cabin floating in a void, unmoored to the earth, the trailer had a shot or two of a control room-type space). But, it must be stressed, those were not explained any further than serving as an indication that there was probably something up and that it was not a paint-by-numbers slasher picture.

2—That last observation could very easily be reinforced by the presence of names like Joss Whedon (and to a lesser extent Richard Jenkins and Brad Whitford) in the cast/crew listing.

3—It screened at South by Southwest to a borderline unseemly amount of critical fapping; between it and The Raid it's amazing hospitals in Austin weren't working around the clock reattaching penises that had accidentally snapped off.

4—Since point 3 was in large part related to point 2, the kind of film critic whose formative years predate the assimilation of fandom and criticism (meaning, very roughly, people who were too old, be it chronologically or otherwise, to have grown up with Star Wars) looked at all those tweets and advance reviews and some of them bristled; “Ah, shit, here we go, another one of those fuckin' nerd movies.”

5—Whether as a reaction to their younger (chronologically and otherwise) counterparts' enthusiasm or simply because it wasn't their kind of picture, people like Rex Reed wrote things like this.

6—Eric Snider, Scott Weinberg, and other members of said younger generation, hit the fucking ceiling. Not only because Reed spoiled plot elements, but because a lot of his scorn, like that absurdly gratuitous “writing on crystal meth” swipe, was so disconnected from the reality of what the movie was. I've never done crystal meth, but I've done old-fashioned speed, and let's just put it this way, speed writing is nothing like The Cabin In The Woods. Not to mention the fact that he indiscreetly yaks about a number of plot points that would be surprising if he hadn't told you about them.

7—But, because neither life nor the Internet is simple, an increasing number of people coming out of Cabin are taking, if not in its bitchily irresponsible totality, a similar side to Reed and other critics' seeming belief that there is nothing in The Cabin In The Woods that really merits caution about spoilers.

It's a big fucking mess. Although I'm more on the Snider/Weinberg side of this particular fence, having thoroughly enjoyed my near-clean-slate viewing of The Cabin In The Woods the other day, the non-Rex Reed contrary opinion is equally valid, and one that I personally find myself on more frequently than not. A lot of plots don't spoil. But The Cabin In The Woods is a bit of a unique case. (Seriously, I'm about to start talking about it, so if the opening spoiler warning paragraph didn't chase you away, going any further is your own damn fault.)

(I'll give you another minute.)

Okay. What makes Cabin a bit of a rara avis in terms of the whole spoiler discussion is the fact that the very first scene is something unexpected, based on what the movie was obliquely hinted to be. A lot of the people making point 7 in the above list do so because, hey, if the first scene gives away the alleged “surprise”, how the fuck's it supposed to be a spoiler? Well, that's the thing: when I saw that opening scene of Richard Jenkins and Brad Whitford being awesomely loose office douchebags, I was like “whoa, holy fuck.” Because that had nothing to do with anything I'd theretofore heard about The Cabin In The Woods. I thought it was a movie where a bunch of kids go to a cabin in the woods. WTF are Richard Jenkins, Brad Whitford, and the foxy WASPacita in the lab coat doin up in this piece, yo?

So, yes, the first scene makes it clear that the subsequent stuff where the girl dancing around in her underwear, her newly-blonde friend, the NBF's jock boyfriend, the dude the NBF and JBF are trying to get the girl dancing around in her underwear to shtup, and the stoner with the bong that collapses into an apparent travel coffee mug is all in some way being controlled by Richard Jenkins and Brad Whitford. Fine. But that opening scene is just an opening scene if someone tells you there are control room guys. How the fuck were we supposed to know there were control room guys? That one tiny insert of a lever with a lit-up button next to it in the trailer?

Since everyone still reading at this point has already seen the movie (RIGHT?) we know that it subsequently transpires that Jenkins and Whitford are manipulating the cabin-bound college kids into a situation where they enact horror movie plots in a ritualistic fashion, only to be killed off one by one in true horror movie fashion, to placate the dormant (for now) “Ancient Ones” with blood. If the kids don't get killed, the Ancient Ones will, presumably, rise and end life on earth as we know it. The Final Girl, or the Virgin as she's called here, is allowed to live only if everyone else dies.

It is thus that The Cabin In The Woods manages to be both horror and meta-horror (even if it succeeds far more decisively as the latter), light and dark, observer and the thing observed, and have any number of either/or dichotomies both ways. Most importantly, with regards to the spoiler question, it's simultaneously completely upfront about what it is and yet consistently surprising. This is why, however Richard Jenkins/Brad Whitford-y that first scene might be, it's kind of shitty to tell people who haven't seen the movie that it's about Richard Jenkins and Brad Whitford manipulating stuff. First off, because spoilers, fuckface. But second, because over the course of the movie you see the extent to which the two of them halfass their jobs, and because they're gradually laid bare as a couple dorks who play God to hide their own impotence, describing The Cabin In The Woods as a movie about Richard Jenkins and Brad Whitford controlling shit is patently inaccurate. They don't control shit. And the movie isn't about them. It really is about horror, and the rules of the horror genre. The movie's (inevitable, really) conclusion serves as a darkly tongue-in-cheek warning against violating those rules (when comrade Final Girl neglects to murder the stoner Fool, the Ancient Ones do indeed rise, in the form of a giant fist rising from the Earth and coming right at the camera, ending the movie and thus the world), a firm reinforcement of the picture's theme, which is, again, genre and the rules thereof.

Now, that might not be everyone's cup of tea. Because I am, however scruffy and foul-mouthed, an intellectual and an academic (especially when it comes to genre), The Cabin In The Woods was basically Joss Whedon gift-wrapping a movie to me. And I'm thankful, not to mention relieved that there aren't any lingering hard feelings about the time Hudak and I set up camp in the TV room at Bard's student center to watch the Knicks and pre-empted that evening's Buffy conclave. But I am not the world, and the world is not me. So I understand people maybe not being so thrilled by the fact that it's more meta-horror than horror-horror. I could even understand the movie losing people when it goes bugfuck at the end of the second act when ALL THE MONSTERS come out. Shit, I could even understand people feeling cheated by the ending when the Giant Fucking Hand eradicates existence. I loved all three, to be clear, but if things like that are gonna bother you, they're gonna bother you.

Where I have a problem is in the unilateral decision that because the genre being deconstructed isn't one's personal cup of tea that said deconstruction is without merit. I'm not, comparatively, really a Joss Whedon fan. I've seen a couple episodes of Firefly and Dr. Horrible, and as above I've gone to extreme measures to not see Buffy and antagonize its fans; the Joss Whedon piece I'm most familiar with is his script for Speed, which he wrote approximately 95% of the dialogue but was ineligible for credit because the WGA requires any writer subsequent to the original to have created a certain percentage of new scenes as opposed to “merely” doing dialogue rewrites. But fan or no fan, I can recognize that the guy's extremely intelligent, a master of genre, and really goddamn fucking good with characters. I'm probably never going to see The Cabin In The Woods again, and will have to check out of the kind of massive fan geek-out conversations that'll result should it become the classic it's being heralded as, but I'd be staggeringly disingenuous if I were to claim that it didn't succeed almost perfectly in being the kind of picture it set out to be, which is the most important metric in determining if a movie is good or bad. “I didn't like it” and “It's bad” are not the same thing.

This is why, however entitled we all are to our particular opinion, criticism is more than simply I liked it or I didn't. It's about looking at what a thing is, rather than what we want it to be. If a picture you're reviewing is outside your frame of reference, do a little research. It's not going to kill you. Google exists. Shitting all over something for the sole reason of it not being within the realm of one's own personal taste is irresponsible criticism. If one doesn't particularly care for horror pictures (for example, since we're talking about Cabin), when reviewing a horror picture one is nonetheless responsible for determining how effective the given picture is within its own context. And if one is unable to properly determine how well a given horror movie is within its own context, one should offer the disclaimer that one is out of one's depth as a critic in the given instance. But hey, who the fuck wants to confess fallibility.

Empirically, this all comes down to one thing: consideration. All spoilers aren't created equal, and there is a point, undefined though it may be, when one can take the cultural temperature and begin to publicly discuss things like “she's got a dick” or “he was dead the whole time,” or “holy shit, Woody Harrelson really does need a stepladder to dunk a basketball.” But before a picture's release, when there is a clearly stated desire within the community for whom (almost exclusively) the picture in question was made, maybe shut the fuck up about its reveals. Even if you personally think those reveals are done really early. Just don't be a dick. Especially if the way in which you're going to unzip is by accusing the writers of a movie of being on crystal meth, when you clearly have no idea what that drug does to cognition.

Oh, by the way, feel free to ram this post straight up my ass if I ever fuck up and spoil something in the future. Even I'll admit I deserve it. Until then, though, I'll just stick a “This Machine Kills Fascists” sticker on the side of my soap box and enjoy the view from up here.

"BRAD PITT, ACTOR"

This essay by Isaac Butler is great, and should be read by anyone who has to write about film acting. The rest of you should read it, too.

THE PERILS OF STEPPING TO PAULINE

I count myself as very unfortunate to be just a hair too young to have been around for the prime of Pauline Kael. There are several new books about her, which I have not yet read. Instead, I'll turn over explication to two women I greatly respect, the first of whom I have the great pleasure of knowing personally:

The Self-Styled Siren on Pauline Kael.

Camille Paglia on same.

Two very different perspectives, but there was no easy and consistent way to sum up Pauline Kael. Even though if she knew me she'd probably think I was a fatuous, pretentious jerkoff, I still think she's just swell and I encourage all of you who are not yet acquainted with her work to get up on her body of critical work. Even in death, she'd probably be able to win an argument (the perils of stepping to Pauline in life were dire).

And remember this very important lesson: you do not always have to agree with someone to know they're smart.

FOR YOUR READING PLEASURE

You gotta check out this interview with Dave Kehr. That's all. I'll be back soon, but that should tide y'all over.