As a reviewer – and before that, as a reader of literary and film criticism – one thing I’ve learnt is that it’s more challenging to write intelligently about a popular work (whose artistic merits are forever under question, or rarely discussed at all) than to write about a book or film that has already found a place in the canon of Cultural Respectability. You need a highly original mindset to begin with. (There’s bound to be so much existing criticism on the “respectable” works that it’s easy to fall into the trap of subconsciously borrowing ideas from other writers, or simply going with the accepted wisdom.) You also need the courage to disregard the bullying of people who think certain types of films or books can only ever be endorsed as mindless entertainment – that it’s a waste of time to engage deeply with them. ***
This is one reason why I have so much admiration for writers like Danny Peary, whose wonderful Cult Movies books are marked by accessible, open-minded yet always insightful writing on a huge range of films – including popular movies like The Terminator and Where the Boys Are, and “disreputable” underground hits like Cafe Flesh and Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! And this is also why I encourage you to read Abhimanyu Das's fine weekly columns in The Sunday Guardian. Among other subjects, Das has written about the glory days of Eddie Murphy, an early Kathryn Bigelow film that reveals the "action director as auteur”, the TV series Friday Night Lights, a Sid Vicious biopic, and thoughts on the art-vs-entertainment debate. There’s a consistently interesting sensibility on view here, and I look forward to seeing more film writing – including long-form writing – by him.
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*** Consider Pauline Kael berating younger critics like Peter Bogdanovich, V F Perkins and Andrew Sarris in her seminal essay “Circles and Squares”:
If they are men of feeling and intelligence, isn’t it time for them to be a little ashamed of their ‘detailed criticism’ of movies like River of No Return?
Now I love Kael, but such views – and, more generally, her airtight distinctions between “great trash” and “art” – have not dated well, to put it mildly. Though she remains the standard for film criticism today, I think her refusal to acknowledge the deeper resonances of popular cinema slightly undermines her legacy.
This is one reason why I have so much admiration for writers like Danny Peary, whose wonderful Cult Movies books are marked by accessible, open-minded yet always insightful writing on a huge range of films – including popular movies like The Terminator and Where the Boys Are, and “disreputable” underground hits like Cafe Flesh and Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! And this is also why I encourage you to read Abhimanyu Das's fine weekly columns in The Sunday Guardian. Among other subjects, Das has written about the glory days of Eddie Murphy, an early Kathryn Bigelow film that reveals the "action director as auteur”, the TV series Friday Night Lights, a Sid Vicious biopic, and thoughts on the art-vs-entertainment debate. There’s a consistently interesting sensibility on view here, and I look forward to seeing more film writing – including long-form writing – by him.
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*** Consider Pauline Kael berating younger critics like Peter Bogdanovich, V F Perkins and Andrew Sarris in her seminal essay “Circles and Squares”:
If they are men of feeling and intelligence, isn’t it time for them to be a little ashamed of their ‘detailed criticism’ of movies like River of No Return?
Now I love Kael, but such views – and, more generally, her airtight distinctions between “great trash” and “art” – have not dated well, to put it mildly. Though she remains the standard for film criticism today, I think her refusal to acknowledge the deeper resonances of popular cinema slightly undermines her legacy.
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