This week's non-crisis in criticism

We're making some real mountains out of molehills this week

It’s Friday, February 12, and here’s where we are…

This year is already moving incredibly fast, don’t you think?

I have not had a chance yet to see Judas and the Black Messiah. I’m watching it today, so I’ll be able to talk about it sometime next week. Warner Bros wasn’t particularly interested in screening their films for me theatrically the last few years and they don’t seem to be any more interested in providing me with screener links to anything now that everything’s streaming.

Whatever. To some degree, it’s been interesting just to see how little it matters with you, the readers. The conventional wisdom in our business is that the latest you can publish a review in order for it to help you as a publication in any way is the day of release. That does not seem to be the case with you guys, and I appreciate that. The moment you let go of a need to publish a pre-release review, you disconnect yourself from any obligation to the company that’s releasing the film. I watch about 95% of what I watch on my own at this point. I’m not on a lot of screener lists these days. The studios don’t really give a shit if my newsletter subscribers know about something or not. I am not a priority and in many cases, I’m more of a nuisance.

I used to get surprised all the time by things. When you work as a film critic, it gets harder and harder to be surprised by films. I think it’s why festivals are so essential for a critic’s diet. That’s a chance to just see one film after another with very little warning about what you’re going to watch. Last night, I was profoundly surprised by Barb & Star go to Vista Del Mar, the new film starring Kristen Wiig and Annie Mumolo, and I’m guessing this was a case of a distributor not really knowing how to even begin to describe the thing they’re selling.

I didn’t really get the trailer when I saw it. At the same time they released the teaser trailer, they released this, which you have to admit is one hell of a strange thing to drop on an audience out of context:

Having seen the film now, I can see why you’d cut that and show it to the cast and crew or put it on the DVD for an audience who already loves the film, but it still seems insane to me to put that out as a way of selling anything to anyone. I am definitely a fan of the movie. It is wall-to-wall weird. Any audience who watches this because they want another Bridesmaids is likely to be disappointed, but that’s not the film’s fault. Wiig and Mumolo just decided they wanted to make something insane, something with a wild comic voice where pretty much everyone’s committed to the same frequency of crazy, and those kinds of films can be incredibly difficult to sell because of how much they depend on context to succeed.

Directed by Josh Greenbaum, there’s a big vibrant silliness to every choice that’s been made here, and it all starts with Wiig and Mumolo, both in front of the camera and behind it. Mumolo wasn’t one of the co-stars of Bridesmaids, but from the time I spent on-set, it was clear that their chemistry as co-writers was baked into every great thing about that script, including the relationship between Wiig and Maya Rudolph. Wiig may be the old pro with the SNL experience but she and Mumolo have been performing together for the better part of 20 years now and Mumolo never gives an inch in this film. She’s every bit Wiig’s equal partner in the madness. It feels like this all started like some of the great Groundlings-driven comedies like the Cheech & Chong films or the Pee-Wee Herman movies, just the two of them doing these characters mainly to make each other break, and then it just metastasized from there into this entire world of weird where every character who comes into contact with them seems equally deranged.

Jamie Dornan has certainly never done anything quite like this before, and if he leans into it, he could easily find himself in the same lane as James Marsden. There’s a willingness to bend his own image to any subversive end that is really appealing here, and that’s true of Damon Wayans Jr. with his work as well. I am impressed that the film is only a PG-13 because it seems absolutely filthy. That’s a testament to how silly and light everything is. Even when they’re being “dirty,” they’re winking broadly at you, as with the steady stream of smutty lounge music from Mark Jonathan Davis as Richard Cheese. There are lots of familiar faces here, comic weapons like Michael Hitchcock and Wendi McLendon-Covey and Vanessa Bayer and Fortune Feimster, and I particularly loved the way Phyllis Smith gets a few perfectly timed moments to just roll in and kill. Movies like this feel generous to me, like they’re built to show off just how funny all of these people can be, and while Wiig and Mumolo are center stage for the whole film, they continually build moments for other people to score monster laughs around them.

image courtesy of Lionsgate Films

I did not realize Wiig was playing a dual role and her work as Dr. Lady in the film is next-level weird. This is her riff on a Bond villain and she is willing to push things just as ugly as Mike Myers ever was on the Austin Powers series. The film tells the story of two midwestern friends who suffer the unimaginable trauma of losing their jobs at Jennifer Convertibles and being ejected from Talking Club in the same day. They decide to try to recover by taking their first vacation ever, heading to Florida, where they end up staying at a resort that’s about to host their annual seafood jam. What they don’t realize is that the hotel has been targeted as ground zero of a terrorist event that’s being staged by this mysterious Dr. Lady, and their first night in town, they end up getting drunk at the hotel bar with Dr. Lady’s main henchman, Edgar (Dornan), and from there, things get progressively even more insane. The film starts at an 8 or a 9 on the lunacy scale, and it seems like that would be hard to sustain. I’ve seen plenty of films aim for this kind of frenetic energy that peter out twenty or thirty minutes in, but Barb & Star has plenty of energy all the way through, right to the gloriously weird end credits.

This is very much a YMMV comedy, and not everyone’s going to be on the right wavelength. That’s fine. I know people who have never thought Pee-Wee Herman was funny, either. This kind of character-focused comedy is always a big swing, and I love how it feels like a very different kind of thing than what they were Oscar-nominated for writing. They could have made Bridesmaids 2 through 19 by now if they wanted, variations on the same basic thing, and I’m sure they could have made some good ones and they could have made a fantastic living doing it. The idea that they did this instead is both wildly nervy and also says a lot about the way Wiig views her career. She genuinely appears to make choices based on what she thinks is interesting, and that is a terrific place for any performer to be in, working purely from strength. She always had a deeply freaky side on Saturday Night Live, and she has not always been able to indulge that in her film work. Barb & Star go to Vista Del Mar is her flying that freak flag proudly, Mumolo right there at her side, encouraging everyone around them to indulge as well.

And it is goddamn delightful.

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CRITICAL

I use the term “critical community” from time to time, but I would like to be clear about something.

There is no critical community. Community implies something that is united. We pretend at it, but we’re not serious about it, and there’s nothing that makes anyone genuinely accountable in any way. Small things get blown up into incidents that lose people jobs or that even take out entire outlets while there are behaviors by critics and directed at critics that go unaddressed for years. I see controversies flare up and suddenly people want the entire critical community to come together in support of this or that, and fingers get pointed and names get called and we’re all supposedly united. But I’ve never really seen that support appear at times I’ve needed it, and it seems like it only manifests in very specific circumstances.

People have such a weird relationship with the idea of criticism anyway. Sam Levinson’s Malcolm & Marie features John David Washington as a filmmaker on the night of his film’s premiere, and there’s a scene where he goes on a prolonged rant about film criticism that is simultaneously childish, ill-informed, and specifically and pointedly misogynistic. It’s a terrible movie, but that scene feels like someone trying to bulletproof themselves from any conversation about all of the ways in which their film is terrible. All Levinson has to do is claim that a film critic was “offended” by this and that they can’t be fair about the film as a result and he can dismiss anything anyone says about it. It’s a passive-aggressive move that I think seriously hurts his movie, but then again, I think there’s a lot about that movie that is problematic.

image courtesy of Focus Features

I don’t really have much of an opinion on what Dennis Harvey wrote about Promising Young Woman. That’s not to say that I think he’s right or that I think he’s wrong. I just don’t think it’s important. I think Variety was ridiculous to go into a review a year after it was released and add an apology, and I think the language of their apology was absurd. However, I’m not running a trade paper that is largely dependent on keeping publicists happy, and this kind of pushback is nothing new for people who write for this kind of outlet. One of the primary reasons I did not immediately jump from HitFix to a similar job was because I decided I couldn’t stomach the politics anymore. I couldn’t handle the way access was parceled out based on how well you play the game. I couldn’t pretend that every single film that came out deserved the same exact amount of energy and attention and interview space. I couldn’t contend with the uneven playing field until I took myself off of it completely.

Film criticism is a very strange thing overall, and as I’ve made painfully clear here over the last year, I think too much of what is called criticism in this industry is actually an extension of the marketing campaign. If your idea of a review is a synopsis and either “I liked it” or “I didn’t like it,” that seems generally useless to me except in a Consumer Reports sense. A review is not just a statement that a film exists, and your opinion isn’t enough to make it a review. Good criticism is about imparting some sense of the experience of a film to the reader. It’s about providing context. It’s about insight that helps them appreciate the film or it’s about challenging something you feel doesn’t work. Good criticism engages with the work and engages the reader in a conversation. If you get mad at something you read, that’s not necessarily a bad thing. If you realize that you disagree radically with someone who you’re reading, that doesn’t make them a bad person and it doesn’t make them wrong. More than anything, when you read a really well-written review, it should make you consider your own opinion and clarify it, even if only as a response or a reaction or a refutation.

I have written plenty of words that have bruised people’s feelings over the years. I have said some horrible things. Some of that is because you’re writing so much, and often so quickly, that you don’t always carefully consider the weight of what it is you say. Some of that was intentional because the only weapon I have at my disposal is what I say and how I say it, and there have been powerful people I have intentionally tried to wound. I have been insensitive. I have been racist and ableist and misogynist and all sorts of other “ists,” never intentionally but unavoidably, and I have worked to address that in my own work, but I acknowledge freely that I am the sum total of my programming. I am sure I have hurt people I did not mean to hurt in ways I can not imagine that I hurt them, and that sucks. But it’s also the price of doing business. The kind of work I do can’t be done without bruising someone somewhere along the way. I regret that there is a human toll to my work, but at the same time, I think knowing that gives the work some weight. The older I get, the more aware I have become of the responsibility of engaging in this ongoing conversation, and everything I write is ultimately (I hope) about how film should work to help further empathy and understanding.

The National Society of Film Critics may have felt the need to write a self-important open letter about this Dennis Harvey thing, but I think they’re picking a dumb fight. More than that, though, I’m tired of being asked to wade into every dumb online blow-up. I don’t want every day to be a battle. That’s not why I write about film. I don’t want to fight everyone else’s war, especially when it doesn’t feel like any other critics were interested when I had studios or publicists attacking me for things I’d written. Until we, as a group, get serious about addressing the power dynamics in this business and the way certain publications are given clear economic advantages because they are valuable promotional tools for their “studio partners,” I’m not particularly interested in any individual squabbles or problems. Sorry an actor felt mistreated. Sorry a critic got railroaded by his outlet. Ultimately not invested in either enough to take a stand or treat it like it means anything in the larger conversation about either the film or film criticism.

Honestly, you know what the best film criticism I read or listened to this week was? The Empire Podcast just released a three-hour-plus episode that is basically just Edgar Wright and Quentin Tarantino talking about what they miss about movie theaters. That part of the conversation is entertaining enough, but it really gets cooking in the second half when Edgar brings up a back-and-forth he had with Martin Scorsese.

There was a young film fan who once got a chance to spend an afternoon with Scorsese and he asked him for pointers on how to start exploring the world of international cinema. I get it. It can be daunting to just dive in if you don’t really know what you’re interested in, and Scorsese has proven himself to be one of our most engaged filmmakers when it comes to restoration and preservation. His career is not just about his films. He has put real time and energy into making cinema history available and also making it interesting to people. When that young man asked Scorsese for some tips, Scorsese sent him back a list of 39 titles to help get you started.

Edgar worked his way through whichever of those 39 titles he had not already seen as lockdown began last year and he wanted to reach out and thank Scorsese directly. When he did, he mentioned how he was currently interested in exploring British cinema, and Scorsese sent him back a brand-new list, this time focused on the UK’s film history. Edgar shared that list with Quentin and some other friends and they’ve spent the last few months having a sort of book club, discussing what they watch, bringing new titles to the table based on what they’ve been watching.

Listening to their conversation, I was pleasantly lost. I know a lot about film, but I have plenty of big blind spots. I watch movies all the time specifically to try to address that, but there are movies I’ll never get to. All you can do is constantly try to follow your interests and to keep yourself open to suggestions, and a conversation like this one or a list like this one is invaluable. I shared this list with one of my Plex buddies and now we’re already locked and loaded so we can watch all of these in the next few weeks and months.

I’ve spent personal time with both Edgar and Quentin, just talking about movies or watching movies, and this podcast was a pretty terrific simulation of what those conversations are like. Edgar and Quentin aren’t putting on a show. They’re not trying to impress anyone. They’re just talking about these movies they’ve been watching, getting excited about what they like, being blunt about what they don’t. It took me back to the lobby of the Alamo Drafthouse, made me feel like I’m standing there between movies at a triple feature, like it’s the middle of a festival and there’s nothing else going on in the world but these movies and these conversations. It made me feel normal again.

If you’d like to work your way through the list, I’m sure other sites have run it as well, but I thought I’d include it here. I love that I know so few of these movies, and the ones I do know are so good that it makes me confident that this is going to be a rewarding and enjoyable addition to my own film knowledge. If that’s not great criticism, what is?

The Martin Scorsese Brit List (via the Empire Podcast)

Shooting Stars (1927)
Underground (1928)
Brief Ecstasy (1937)
Went the Day Well? (1942)
The Man in Grey (1943)
The Halfway House (1944)
This Happy Breed (1944)
Dead of Night (1945)
Madonna of the Seven Moons (1945)
Pink String and Sealing Wax (1945)
The Seventh Veil (1945)
Green for Danger (1946)
Hue and Cry (1947)
It Always Rains on Sunday (1947)
Uncle Silas (1947)
To the Public Danger (1948)
The Queen of Spades (1949)
The Blue Lamp (1950)
So Long at the Fair (1950)
Mandy (1952)
The Sound Barrier (1952)
Stolen Face (1952)
Four-Sided Triangle (1953)
The Good Die Young (1954)
Yield To The Night (1956)
The Snorkel (1957)
Nowhere To Go (1958)
Sapphire (1959)
Scream of Fear (1960)
The Innocents (1961)
Burn, Witch, Burn (1962)
The Mind Benders (1963)
Station Six Sahara (1963)
These Are The Damned (1963)
Guns at Batasi (1964)
The Pumpkin Eater (1964)
A High Wind in Jamaica (1965)
The Nanny (1965)
Plague Of The Zombies (1966)
Quatermass and the Pit (1967)
The Devil Rides Out (1968)
Whistle And I’ll Come To You (1968)
Flesh of the Fiends (1969)
Dr. Jekyll and Sister Hyde (1971)
The Asphyx (1972)
The Legend of Hell House (1973)
Vampyres (1974)
The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne (1987)
The Enfield Haunting (2015)

If you’ve seen the films on this list, let me know which ones you dig and which ones you recommend. I’ve only seen about six of these, so I’m looking forward to digging in as soon as possible myself.

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AND FINALLY…

Hey, did you know you can get more than an occasional free version of this newsletter? For just $7 a month, you can get access to things like my new series The Library (I wrote about A Shot in the Dark this week) or the new ongoing Nothin’ But Star Wars series (this week’s issue is running late, but it’ll be up tomorrow) or the fiction I’ve been publishing or my upcoming 20 Reasons 2020 Didn’t Totally Suck piece… well, you get the point. There’s a whole bunch of other stuff, and you can read it! But you gotta pony up first… and if you buy a whole year at once, it’s an even better deal!

Here’s my media list for the week. As always, anything I had a particularly good time with is in bold.

THIS WEEK’S BOOKS: Pick of the Week / Mike Nichols: A Life by Mark Harris
also - The Case of the Lonely Heiress by Erle Stanley Gardner; Rough Cut by Brian Pinkteron; 100 Years of the Best American Short Stories edited by Lorrie Moore

THIS WEEK’S COMICS: Pick of the Week / Darth Vader #11
also - Star Wars: The Empire Vol. 2 - Epic Collection; The Avengers #41; Star Wars: Legacy Vol. 1 - Epic Collection; Amazing Spider-Man #58; Star Wars: The Rebellion Vol. 1 - Epic Collection; Star Wars: The Rebellion Vol. 2 - Epic Collection; Inhumans #2

THIS WEEK’S PODCASTS: Pick of the Week / The Empire Podcast - “Edgar Wright and Quentin Tarantino”
also - How Did This Get Made? - “Minisode 258”; Doughboys - “Five Guys 2 with Andy Daly”; The Boogie Monster - “Unskilled Cryptocurrency”; The Kingcast - “The Stand with Vincenzo Natali”; The Dollop - “The San Jose Bees”; Screen Drafts - “Cannon with Elric Kane and Patrick Bromley”; MBMBaM - “Chilli Wonka”; Blank Check with Griffin & David - “The Great Mouse Detective with Fran Hoepfner”

THIS WEEK’S TV: Pick of the Week / WandaVision S1 E5
also - Babylon 5 S1 E2; The Expanse S1 E4 - E6; Married At First Sight: Australia S2 E1, E2; Firefly Lane S1 E1, E2; Your Honor S1 E2, E3; Resident Alien S1 E3; The Lady and the Dale S1 E3; Framing Britney Spears; Columbo S9 E1, Somebody Feed Phil - “Seoul”; Dickinson - S1 E5, E6; Painting with John S1 E2; Perry Mason (2020) S1 E1, E2; Perry Mason (1957) S1 E1, S2 E1; Search Party S2 E6 - E8; This Is Us S5 E7; Kid Cosmic S1 E1; Zoey’s Extraordinary Playlist S2 E6; The Stand S1 E9; Taxi S1 E17; Married at First Sight S12 E5;

THIS WEEK’S GAMING: Assassin’s Creed Valhalla; Hitman III

THIS WEEK’S MOVIES: Pick of the Week / Barb & Star Go To Vista Del Mar
also - A Glitch in the Matrix; Bliss; Little Fish; Malcolm & Marie; The Lone Ranger; Space Sweepers; A Shot In The Dark; Cherry; Another Round; Psycho Goreman; The Great Locomotive Chase; PVT Chat; The Ghost of Peter Sellers; Cloverfield; Treasure Island