Film Critic Bash-a-Thon

If you'd like to bash Uwe Boll, called by some the world's worst director, lace up your gloves and step into the ring. Mr. Boll has issued a challenge to his fiercest critics to fight him, not with their words, but with their feeble writer's fists right here in Vancouver. Boll's bullring antics point out an interesting state in the film criticism world. Not since Vincent Gallo laid his voodoo curse on old Roger Ebert has there been such a slap and tickle fight between an artist (although with Boll I use the term advisedly) and his critics. Who's slapping and who's tickling? I'm also not certain.

Meanwhile, the critics are also battling their own critics.

The Boston Globe recently published an article-cum-rant, about the death of film criticism that is actually critical in favour of the Harry Knowles-ain't-it-cool style blurb-a-rama. It quotes critic Dave Kehr writing about how older and often far-bitchier critics are being tossed in favour of young whelps "who seem excited merely to have been invited to an early screening of MI:3 and who can be counted on to file frothingly appreciative, advertiser-friendly copy." To his credit, Mr. Kehr quotes, at length, comments from some other critical voices that point out how many of the most prominent critics in American media are usually well into their 50s, 60s, 70s, even 90s, and thus have been espousing their critical opinions for decades. But for the most part these are TV shills and talking heads.

Do all serious film critics end up embittered and bilious, crabbed as elderly women, spitting venom like cobras? They often have good reason to do so. If you had to sit through The Da Vinci Code, you'd be bitter too. Worse still is to be utterly irrelevant "In the arts, the critic is the only independent source of information. The rest is advertising." So said Saint Pauline Kael, long gone to the big screening room in the sky. But it's an opinion that has been voiced by many other thinking people, some who are still here on Planet Earth, including writer/theorist David Bordwell.

Canaries in the coalmines of culture?

Are critics the canaries in the coalmines of culture? Or should that be coal minds, blackened as they are with the dark sludge of mass culture or what critic Dwight MacDonald called “masscult” -- described in his book Masscult & Midcult as “an instrument of domination". But MacDonald had even more dire predictions for the "tepid ooze" of “midcult” which doesn't even have the temerity to be truly bad, but worse, pretentious mediocrity. Say what you will about Uwe Boll, he embraces the bizarrely awful like a long-lost lover. Anyone who can put Tara Reid in a film, playing a museum curator no less, has to have a sense of humour. Or perhaps perversity is more like it. But there are two sides to every story. Or as Pauline Kael once put it, "When we see Dwight Macdonald’s cultural solution applied to film, when we see the prospect that movies will become a product for “masscult” consumption, while the “few who care” will have their high culture cinema, who wants to take the high road?"

The French apparently.

There is another option as well to being someone who comments on what someone else has done. Become the thing you love and loathe in equal measure and make films yourself, as in, “physician heal thyself.” The ranks of French auteurs are staffed with (mostly) men who both critiqued and directed and sometimes both at the very same time, such as Godard, Rivette, Chabrol, and so on. The Pacific Cinematheque is offering up a slew of films, including seven films from Luc Moullet (June 22-29th). Moullet started out a critic at Cahiers du cinéma,.

Not only did he direct, but also he acted in them as well, and was often very funny. His first film, Brigitte and Brigitte features cameos from the likes of Sam Fuller, Claude Chabrol (especially good as the dirtiest cousin you have ever seen), André Téchiné, and Eric Rohmer. It is as ridiculous, and surreal as only a 60s French film about two swinging chicks hitting Paris, and Paris hitting back, can be. Whether it's attempting to open a bottle of Coca Cola in the short Opening Tries, or The Comedy of Work, a film which people will do anything either to get a job or to get out of a job, Moullet's films have a breezy spontaneous feel. The humour is so silly, that one can divest oneself of one's critical mind and merely have fun. Although it's easy to assume that's what the director was also doing, in fact, the mixture of high art and low humour is not possible without careful attention. There is much art in the artless. Moullet started as a critic at the tender age of 18, a numerical number that seems barely out of nappies for many current youth. But the French are different from us in North America. Theory runs in their blood, along with good portions of red wine and cigarette smoke.

Making the transition from remora to shark isn't as easy as it once was (not that it was ever all that easy) but the ranks of critics turned filmmaker aren't as populous anymore. There have been a few: Rod Lurie (The Contender), Paul Schrader (Light Sleeper), and maybe even Katherine Dieckman (The Good Child), who in an interview with Indiewire said, "I think it's a very American stigma that you have to split those two things into two parts. But you know I feel like all my years as a critic helped me be a director."

Champions of clarity?

And not all critics are simply failed artists or artists-in-waiting. There are those who are born critical and their task is important; they exist to offer clarity, to champion the just, to give aid to the underdog, to notice whatever else has failed to notice. Blessed with insight and farsightedness, they offer new ways to seeing and understanding. But these types don't come around very often. They live lonely lives, impatient with the rest of us, and our dumb bumbling for meaning. One of the father's of film criticism, André Bazin, has maintained that critics ought to only write about films they like.

Which is a very far cry from a recent Gallo-Ebert exchange, which began with Gallo calling the Chicago-Sun Times' critic a "fat pig with the physique of a slave trader" and ended with Ebert maintaining that a colonoscopy was still better than watching Gallo's film The Brown Bunny. Unfortunately, it is almost too easy, in a culture of snark and egotism masquerading as opinion, to take potshots at artists. But anyone who has ever tried to make anything knows how hard it can be. If the artist's job is to be open, to be immersed in the messy process of creativity, then criticism during that process doesn't help matters. In fact, it's probably the last thing artists ought to be doing to each other. Said the inestimable Ms. Kael, "I see little of more importance to the future of our country and of civilization than full recognition of the place of the artist. If art is to nourish the roots of our culture, society must set the artist free to follow his vision wherever it takes him." Although lately, the definition of art and artist seems to be again in the eye of the beholder and what he or she choose to behold -- from French New Wave to Pixar's Cars (I shudder as I write that).

Still, you'd think that after watching hundreds, maybe even thousands of films, critics would come away with a better understanding of humanity. More compassion, more empathy, more love. Reverence. Awe. God-made manifest. Whatever. But are these simply empty words? It's a question anyone who devotes their life to watching films ends up asking him or herself, usually around 3:00a.m.. Yes, we can, and do, kill joy. But what is art but to make sense of life? And what is the task of the critic but to make sense of art? Well, you'd think so anyway, but in the words of Albert Einstein, "Whoever undertakes to set himself up as a judge of Truth and Knowledge is shipwrecked by the laughter of the gods."

That's the problem with art, it's just so damned subjective. You might watch The Da Vinci Code and say, "It was good!" Although, I really hope you don't. And I might watch the very same thing, and say exactly the opposite. Who is to say which one of us is right or wrong? Time can help separate the wheat from chaff, but the role of the critic is to do that same thing without the benefit of history. They can only do so because of all the endless hours spent watching, reading and talking about film. Therefore, it behooves you to listen to them (the ones you trust at least), and let them point out the holy moments, frame by frame.

"A critic is someone who comes onto the battlefield after the battle is over and shoots the wounded." I don't actually know who said that, but it may well have been Uwe Boll himself.

Dorothy Woodend reviews films for The Tyee every Friday.