![]() And you should write about "The American" if you want to. I merely strongly disagree with him about the aims and the tactics of criticism in this case. Jaime: Matt IS a stand-up guy, from stem to stern. Suppose it's nice to know you hold every damn critic out there to such a high standard.(That was meant at least a little jocular-like.) But that hardly completely invalidates his point here, which I allow is on the melodramatic and overstated side, but which still has some valuable insight, I think. I recall John Holmstrom seething over Bangs' calling out the "Punk" staffers in "The White Noise Supremacists" while tossing around racist epithets his own bad self all the time. Septemat 12:25 Fuzzy B.: No, Bangs didn't entirely walk the walk, not in a lot of ways. Had weird dreams of Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce turning into a torrential bloodbath.) Ended the evening with wine and high-carb Spanish food. (Postscript 2: watched the "Suitcase" episode of MAD MEN on the train ride home from those two films. So I had the weird experience of being quite moved WELL AFTER the movie, by a sequence that made me cringe at the time.) The key to the film, I think, is Jack/Edward/etc's one-foot-in-front-of-the-other motivation, which we have to work out, sort of piecemeal, by contemplating his actions in each section of the film, + the finale. (For the record, I didn't hate THE AMERICAN, although I thought I did until thinking about it afterward. I have more to say about it, and waving my hands in the air and shouting "not impressed!" about another film feels.I don't know. (I skipped the middle two.) I loved that one, and it sounds like you thought it was "iight." As a critic, I feel like I should write about both, but about the one I loved in greater depth, and try to drum up pageviews for the loved film. Anderson supporter, I saw the new RESIDENT EVIL. The way I look at it, okay, I saw THE AMERICAN yesterday and I didn't like it. And the "overrated" trigger is like Trixie in THE CRAZIES, it brings out the lumbering, dumb murderer in all of us. His idea? Something he has to do to pay the rent at Salon? Dunno. It's disappointing that he also has to write these slide-show puff pieces masquerading as oratory/discourse. I haven't had any substantial conversations with MZS but he strikes me as a pretty stand-up guy who, for the most part, writes meaty film and TV criticism. This is an occupational hazard of the professional critic, who has little time for unforming an opinion or changing his own mind. I do love Bangs' writing, but his philosophy in this column (and in a lot of his columns) is the apotheosis of critical self-importance: A call for universal love poorly concealing an insistence that everyone shut up and share his opinions.īangs is a thrilling stylist, but he's was always terribly short on curiosity-uninterested in things that didn't immediately move him, totally uninterested in understanding why anyone else might be moved by something he didn't like (yes, I know, beginning a column with "I didn't like this at first but now it's the GREATEST RECORD EVER!" is sort of a tic for Bangs, but it strikes me as more a literary device than an actual timeline). That maybe it means something to "you" just like The Stooges to to him, and maybe his gleeful contempt towards artists people feel strongly about inspires the same kind of defensiveness that Bangs feels to the kids who just don't get Elvis. What's problematic about the Bangs quote, though, is how little interest Bangs ever had in understanding why "you" might like Joni Mitchell. Lester Bangs, "Where Were You When Elvis Died?" The Village Voice, August 29, 1977 SO I won't bother saying good-bye to his corpse. But I can guarantee you one thing: we will never again agree on anything as we agreed on Elvis. We will continue to fragment in this manner, because solipsism holds all the cards at present it is a king whose domain engulfs even Elvis's. ![]() I thought it was Iggy Stooge, you thought it was Joni Mitchell or whoever else seemed to speak for your own private, entirely circumscribed situation's many pains and few ecstasies. If love is truly going out of fashion forever then along with our nurtured indifference to each other will be an even more contemptuous indifference to each others' objects of reference. ![]() Philip Larkin, "Fiction and the Reading Public," Essays in Criticism, February 25, 1950 Write reviews and the bull on the jacket. That 'somehow' God plaits up the threads, Matt Zoller Seitz, "Trash Talking Nine Classic Movies," Salon, Sept. Let's talk about movies the way most people talk about movies: not as art objects to by studied or parsed, but as sounding boards for the self.
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