Quotes

The scariest thing about The Devil Inside (2012) is that a major studio like Paramount Pictures, which is distributing it, may be able to squeeze more profit out of a tedious, tediously exhausted subgenre that was already creatively tapped out when The Blair Witch Project (1999) spooked audiences more than a decade ago.

[on All About Steve (2009)] ...the concept of an intelligent woman is apparently so exotic to [Sandra Bullock] and her director, Phil Traill, that they frantically kook the character up, as if female smarts were a kind of disability. This being a contemporary big-studio release, I suppose it is.

Higher culture's inherent snobberies allow critics not simply to love and hate freely but to think about the gray area in between; pop culture demands love and only love, hate and only hate. In this tyranny of absolutism, one born more out of the free market than any postmodern imperative, the dissenting critic risks being labeled an elitist or, worse yet, irrelevant, which is often just a code for "too old."

Each year we review movies that, teasingly or didactically, successful or not, dispatch with either the whole or part of the mainstream storytelling playbook. They don't seem to have three (or four) well-defined acts or characters who seem particularly motivated. They drift along rather than shift into drive. In other words, they look a lot or a little bit like art films.

The Academy [of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences] has been accused of snobbery for nominating "small" critical darlings over populist picks, as if movies like Lars von Trier's Melancholia (2011) were even in the running. If there's a disconnect between most moviegoers and the Academy, it's mainly because the studios now bank on their blockbusters (ostensibly for Joe and Jill Popcorn) and hang their award hopes on smaller titles (for fancy-pants elites like us), many released by their divisions.

[on Kathryn Bigelow] But here's a radical thought: She is, simply, a great filmmaker. Because while it is marginally interesting that she calls "action" and "cut" while in the possession of two X chromosomes, gender is the least remarkable thing about her kinetic filmmaking, which gets in your head even as it sends shock waves through your body.

As critics, all we have are our beliefs, ideals, prejudices, blind spots, our reservoirs of historical and personal knowledge, and the strength of our arguments. There are empirical truths that we can say about a movie: it was shot in black and white or color, on film or digital, in widescreen or not, directed by this or that filmmaker. But beyond these absolutes there is only our thinking, opinions, ideologies, methodological approaches and moments in time. That isn't to say that criticism is a postmodern anything goes; it is to admit that critics are historical actors and that our relationships with movies, as with everything in life, are contingent on those moments.

Let's acknowledge that the Oscars are bullshit and we hate them. But they are important commercially... I've learned to never underestimate the academy's bad taste. Crash (2004) as best picture? What the fuck.

I'm of two minds. Sometimes I think what women should do what various black and gay audiences have done, which is support women making movies for women. So does that mean I have to go support Nora Ephron? Fuck no. That's just like, blech.

To say that Charlie Kaufman's Synecdoche, New York (2008) is one of the best films of the year or even one closest to my heart is such a pathetic response to its soaring ambition that I might as well pack it in right now.