Leaning in with Film Nerd 2.0

Plus a look back at Robert Altman's breakthrough hit from 1970

Written criticism is an ongoing exercise in balance.

It would be easy for me to spend my time complaining about things I don’t like, and it certainly feels like there’s an entire economy built around loudly venting nonstop hatred for pop culture’s most sacred cows. As an Old White Dude, I’m sure I could tap that economy quite ably if I ever decided to lean in, but that sounds genuinely miserable.

The truth is, I still like more things than I don’t, and I’m happy to spend my time writing about the things I like. I just broke 100 new-release films for the year, and I liked about 3/4 of them. I can’t imagine having to get up every day and put all of my energy into pouring out bile and hatred. I don’t like being disappointed by a movie, sure, but my disappointment comes from the hope that I carry into every screening of every movie. The easy part about hating something is that you can take your anger out in the way you write about it. The most vicious pans you read by critics are written to turn that anger into entertainment. I would argue that the primary audience for a savage pan of a film is other critics. It’s a way of venting some steam, especially as the spaces for long-form criticism continue to crumble thanks to nearly twenty years of venture capital/tech bro rot chipping away at every good goddamn thing on Earth.

I’ve written enough ill-tempered pans that I have no room telling anyone else what they should or shouldn’t do as film critics. I have my own feelings on the subject that come from not only thirty years of writing online but also a life spent reading film criticism for fun and as a form of education. I read a lot of film criticism every week, some of which I like, and much of which I don’t. I am frustrated by a landscape that I absolutely helped create, which is another reason it is hard to point fingers. The only way I can fully engage with things these days is by suggesting ways we can all do better, knowing full well there are people who will dismiss what I say simply because it’s me saying it.

image courtesy of Lucasfilm/Disney+

There is real power in curation. This is something I have become more and more aware of over time, and there is an argument to be made that one of the most important film critics working today is Quentin Tarantino, and not just because of his current efforts as the owner of the New Beverly and the Vista and the co-host of Video Archives Podcast and the author of Cinema Speculation. Quentin’s whole career has been filmmaking-as-curation, movies that exist not only as stand-alone texts but also as study guides for budding film nerds who inevitably follow Tarantino’s loudly-stated cinematic fetishes down various rabbit holes. When Quentin used to program his quasi-annual film festivals in Austin, they were so much fun because he would create theme nights and show movies you would otherwise never see in movie theaters, much less paired in the ways he paired them. Now that he has two of the nicest theaters in Los Angeles and can program them any way he wants, he is teaching a new generation of young and hungry film nerds by exposing them to things they would never seek out on their own. Many of these young people I see at these rep screenings are seeing the films for the first time, and I love that they seem hungry to soak up as many different things as they can. I recognize that fervor that kicks in once you really go movie-crazy, and part of the reason Tarantino is such a powerful spokesman for this kind of omnivorous movie diet is that he never appears to lose any of that fervor. Quentin’s 61 now, and seeing the energy he still has for his cinemania gives me hope. I’m 54, and I don’t feel like any of my love of movies has dimmed at all. I may be critical of many different things about the state of the industry, but that all comes from the underlying truth: I love movies madly and I hope every single one I watch is good.

If we’re really worried, as film critics, about the future of the art form, the greatest weapon we have to help convert people is the past and our knowledge of it. Curation is the most effective way we can wield that weapon. I know that not everyone lives in a city where you have several different ongoing repertory screens and the film program at the Academy Museum as well as the LA County Museum of Art and at least a dozen other rep programs and festivals during each year, so it’s not easy for everyone to go see these things in the theater. Curation does not just refer to in-person programming for public screenings, though. A show like Blank Check is curating for their audience by picking filmmakers and working their way through their whole filmography. Their audience watches along with the show, week to week, and it creates a conversation around these films and filmmakers for the duration of each of their miniseries. I hope that our new podcast, The Hip Pocket, is able to do the same thing, sending people out to find and watch these movies, many of which they may have never heard of before, so they can feel like they’re included in the conversations we’re having. I don’t think there’s any real value in simple binary reactions as criticism. What you like may not be what I like. What I love may be something you hate. I can’t tell you what you’ll think of something, nor should I try to guess what the majority opinion on something might be. Good criticism is about reacting honestly and being able to explain that reaction to a specific movie. Great criticism has nothing to do with release schedules and is instead focused on curating an ongoing conversation about Movies In General, and in particular, it should help foster an overall curiosity about older films.

One aspect of my relationship with my sons is the way I have curated their film educations so far. For a long time, I picked movies based entirely on entertaining them. When you’re first showing films to children, you just need to convey to them the magic that movies can contain. The longer you program for someone, though, the more you get to understand what they like, what they don’t, and why they respond to movies the way they do. Even so, there are plenty of times I put something on that I love and it does not land for them the same way. Watching people argue online about movies, they often behave like someone else’s like or dislike of something is a personal referendum on them as human beings, which is an overreaction, but an understandable one. The movies we love deeply feel, in some way, like they become part of who we are. Watching and rewatching something is a way of trying to absorb these movies and understand that impact they have on us, and when someone dismisses something that matters to you, it’s easy to take that as a personal slight. When that happens, I try to understand why something I’ve shown didn’t land for someone. It helps when I’m showing them other things in the future. And, honestly, sometimes it doesn’t matter if someone enjoys something. It just matters that they’ve seen it.

Film is a cumulative art. Each film you watch exists in the context of all the films you’ve seen before it, and your understanding and appreciation of film as an art or a language (and I think a case can be made that it is both things) grows with every film you see, whether you like them or not. You may watch something and hate it, then watch a hundred other movies before you return to it and suddenly love it because you’ve changed. The movies are the movies. Once they are released, that’s what they are (unless Coppola or Cameron or Lucas get hold of it), and they become fixed points in time and space. We change around them. We change each time we return to them. And as a result, it feels like they change. One of the things I love most about Jane Schoenbrun’s I Saw The TV Glow is the way it addresses the way nostalgia works on us and the way we remember the things we saw at important points in our lives. It is a powerful film on many levels, but the moment in the film when Owen sees The Pink Opaque and it’s a totally different show than what we’ve seen up to that point is devastating and laser-accurate. Movies are alchemy. The actual movie is only part of the equation. We each also bring our own experiences and aesthetic preferences into the theater with us, and what we see when we look up at that screen is as much mirror as movie.

image courtesy of A24

One way or another, I think curation is the most important function any film critic can serve right now, and however this newsletter changes shape as things develop in time, curation is going to remain a key part of what I do. More than ever, I feel the future of film depends on all of us who share this faith doing our best to share what matters most to us, in as many ways and as many places as we can.