Metacritique

Dana Stevens’ review of Robert Siegel’s Big Fan is smart but too short. Stevens tosses off glimmering insights in a few words without letting them expand – they’re sparks without kindling.

An example is her description of the movie as an extension of its central character. She writes of Big Fan, “it’s ungainly, imperfect, a bit too self-serious—but so sincere you can’t help rooting for it anyway. Those same adjectives could also be used to describe Paul Aufiero (Patton Oswalt)[.]” This is kind of like a self-simile, but it’s fuller and subtler. I like the idea that a character’s essence can pervade a movie so that the two become coextensive.

Stevens returns to this thought, again too briefly, later in the review, when she says that the movie uses “digital video that looks appropriately dingy and cheap.” It’s as though Oswalt’s character determines the color and texture of the world around him, the way a bag of tea steeps in clear water.

In the first sentence of her review, Stevens calls Big Fan “a critique of American masculinity,” which was definitely my impression from the trailer, and one of the reasons I’m looking forward to seeing it. But Todd McCarthy, in his Variety review, writes that it’s “unlikely to appeal much to women, non-sports fans and mainstreamers.” This surprised me, and based on the trailer, seems wrong. The movie looks like it’s about sports fans, but not necessarily for them; like Stevens, I’d taken it for a critique of American masculinity through the lens of sports fanaticism, and so I want to know what it has to say.

But Stevens’ review just calls it “a critique,” and drops the issue after that. Maybe that’s for film scholars, not movie reviewers, to explore; but I wish that Stevens didn’t shy from addressing whatever questions the movie raises. There can be fruitful commentary about that stuff for us “mainstreamers” without getting dry and academic.

Maybe the critique is obvious (lonely, insecure men find fraternal community and masculine identity through sports fandom), or is so fundamental to the medium of film that it evades paraphrase. Stevens seems more interested in engaging the movie as a character study, an immersion into one guy’s little world. But here, too, her take is inconsistent.

Stevens criticizes the supporting cast as caricatures, calling them “overdrawn, a gallery of working-class grotesques with spray tans and boob jobs.” If Stevens had fleshed out her suggestion that the aesthetic climate of Big Fan is really an reflection of Paul Aufiero, then she might have argued that these characters are distorted by Paul’s perception of them. Stevens is basically faulting Big Fan for having the filmic equivalent of a novel’s unreliable narrator. This is would be a really exciting interpretation, if Stevens had actually claimed it: it would challenge our assumptions about film-as-factual (the indisputability of “photographic evidence,” etc), and could even help to unpack critique of sports culture that Stevens references but never explains. But by scattering her good ideas without showing readers how they might connect, Stevens frustrates the reader with her own unreliability.

Quentin Tarantino needs movie reviewers. They are among the few pedantic enough to follow his allusions, as Manohla Dargis does in her New York Times review of Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds, when she writes that “you admire how neatly the German soldiers outside are positioned within one of the windows, a shot that recalls the framing of an image in Monte Hellman’s 1971 cult classic, ‘Two-Lane Blacktop.’” Tarantino loves movies with the same indexical fixation that film reviewers do, but for some reason, reviewers resent this quality in his movies. They see these winks and nods as mere cleverness.

Dargis seems to share this view that Tarantino makes movies for the love of moviemaking, rather than storytelling. Dargis argues that the opening sequence encapsulates Inglourious Basterds’ strengths and weaknesses, as though the movie were a fractal, composed of littler versions of itself. The strengths, she says, are formal: marvelous camerawork, “tightly coordinated performances,” framing, development of suspense. The faults are all content: the vulgar, boundary-pushing insensitivity of the dialogue; the uneasy juxtaposition of humor and horror; and the film’s (Tarantino’s) referential narcissism. “What matters, to Mr. Tarantino, is the filmmaking,” she observes.

Here, Dargis is aligned with the prevailing take on Tarantino: that his films are well made but empty, the Dargerian opuses of an auteur who cares more about the medium than the message - a virtuoso without virtue. Dargis herself is given to formal indulgence: of Brad Pitt’s performance, she notes with a writerly flourish Pitt’s character “pulling his southern-flavored vowels out like chewed gum.” It’s a nice reference to Keats. So it’s intriguing that she claims that her opposition to the movie is not based on its vulgar discomforts. “[T]oo often in ‘Inglourious Basterds’ the filmmaking falls short,” Dargis writes:

The film’s most egregious failure — its giddy, at times gleeful embrace and narrative elevation of the seductive Nazi villain — can largely be explained as a problem of form. Landa [Christoph Waltz] simply has no equal in the film, no counterpart who can match him in verbal dexterity and charisma[.]

Casting and screenwriting are formal problems, but it’s not clear that Dargis is actually referring to something merely formal. To say that Nazism is polarizing is the understatement of the last century; the discomfort that Dargis voices presumes that the charming Nazi should have a counterpoint. That presumption isn’t based on the filmmaker’s techniques, but on his values, which Dargis hints are either weak or sinister, most pointedly articulated in her reference to Tarantino’s “chortling exploitation of spectacular violence.” By referring to these elements as formal flaws, Dargis positions her criticism as fact instead of opinion, as though pointing out a crack in a piece of sculpture.

Do Tarantino’s movies exploit violence? There are whole sections of university libraries devoted to this question. Some argue that Tarantino’s movies are in fact about cinematic violence, or violence in general, commenting on exploitation more so than perpetuating it. That’s all beside Dargis’s point, though, which has more to do with the moral integrity of the world in which the movie is set. Anthony Lane’s New Yorker review speaks to this stuff more directly:

By making the Americans cruel, too, [Tarantino] escapes the customary division of good and evil along national lines, but he escapes any sense of moral accountability as well. In a Tarantino war, everyone commits atrocities. […] It’s disconnected from feeling, and an eerie blankness—it’s too shallow to be called nihilism—undermines even the best scenes.

Tarantino’s fascination with the moral trials of criminals pervades all of his movies, and just because the characters may not wrestle with self-doubt doesn’t mean that the audience isn’t meant to. But Dargis thinks the movie’s frightening ambiguity is a fault:

Mr. Tarantino’s Nazis exist in an insistently fictional cinematic space where heroes and villains converge amid a welter of movie allusions. […] ‘Inglourious Basterds’ […] is simply another testament to his movie love. The problem is that by making the star attraction of his latest film a most delightful Nazi, one whose smooth talk is as lovingly presented as his murderous violence, Mr. Tarantino has polluted that love.

It appears that Dargis is the one who’s insistent about the movie’s status as fiction. The idea that a charming villain needs to be opposed by a compelling hero is an entirely fictional conceit. Dargis may have borrowed a nice image from Keats, but she apparently missed this passage, from a letter Keats wrote to his family:

several things dovetailed in my mind, & at once it struck me, what quality went to form a Man of Achievement especially in literature & which Shakespeare possessed so enormously - I mean Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.

Not having seen the movie, I can’t comment on whether Tarantino employs that negative capability in Inglourious Basterds, but Dargis’s and Lane’s reviews make it sound that way. That Nazis are evil goes without saying. And precisely because of that, I’m not at all convinced that the “eerie blankness” in Tarantino’s movie, or the seductiveness of its villain, is any kind of error.

Roger Ebert is copying me! He’s now reviewing reviews. Vulture reports that Ebert wrote a defense of Armond White’s negative review of District 9, and then, upon further reflection (partly because of the above table), reconsidered:

On Thursday night I posted in entry in defense of Armond White’s review of “District 9.” Overnight I received reader comments causing me to rethink that entry, in particular this eye-popping link supplied by Wes Lawson. I realized I had to withdraw my overall defense of White. I was not familiar enough with his work. It is baffling to me that a critic could praise “Transformers 2” but not “Synecdoche, NY.” Or “Death Race” but not “There Will be Blood.” I am forced to conclude that White is, as charged, a troll. A smart and knowing one, but a troll. My defense of his specific review of “District 9” still stands.

Read the whole thing here. I’m tempted to review Ebert’s review of White’s review.

I like to make lists. This is a common thing to like to do. To-do lists are therapeutic, taking responsibilities off my mind (once it’s written down, I don’t have to think about it), and bringing future plans into the present (the list of movies to see, and the list of restaurants to check out, puts many things I’m looking forward to into one concentrated space). I forget about the list once I’ve made it. Like taking notes in class, the act of listing can be more valuable than the product. Lists are geekily indexical (top tens), and politically charged (blacklists, hit lists). The shared quality between all these is “making order from disorder.” Getting the ducks in a row.

One of the striking qualities of the District 9 reviews is their reliance on lists, particularly naming the other movies that District 9 references. Peter Travers compares the movie to Moon, Alien, Cloverfield, and The Fly. The Baltimore Sun writes, “It’s mainly a compost [sic] of other sci-fi movies, as old as ‘RoboCop,’ ‘Aliens’ and ‘The Fly’ and as recent as ‘Cloverfield’ and ‘Transformers.’” But Slate’s Daniel Engber does it best. He begins with a list of preceding Hollywood alien types:

If we’re lucky, the visitors might dazzle us with a musical starship (Close Encounters of the Third Kind) or pleasure us with cosmic sex energy (Cocoon). Or perhaps they’ll descend from grim saucers to steal our water (Independence Day) or harvest our blood as crop fertilizer (War of the Worlds).

Engber explains that District 9 defies the “angels or demons” binary, breaking from convention to present an unexpected alternative, that aliens could be “intergalactic schlubs.” He finds this a welcome innovation, but criticizes District 9 for breaking from other expectations, namely those established by the 6-minute short on which it’s based, and the marketing campaign that presents the movie as a dark satirical commentary on Other-ness.

Engber calls the campaign “nifty” and laments that District 9 doesn’t stay true to its, and the short’s, “alien-apartheid theme.” He writes, “As an allegory of racial conflict and mass immigration, District 9 never really goes anywhere: The appealing premise fades into the background before 20 minutes have elapsed.” Engber thought he knew what to expect, but the movie unravels into overwhelming disorder: the “serious holes in the story’s logic are too numerous to list here.” (In other words, an ordered list would be powerless against this movie’s unreason.)

This is the point at which Engber really starts using lists to understand District 9’s relationship to disorder, and to negotiate his own. He’s disappointed that the movie takes up an anti-corporate stance, at once defying his expectations and adhering to genre formula:

Could there be a more egregious sci-fi cliché? In Moon we had Lunar Industries Ltd.; in Wall-E it was Buy N Large; Blade Runner featured the Tyrell Corp. And let’s not forget the executives from the bio-weapons division of Weyland-Yutani, who cause all the carnage in Aliens.

Earlier, the unconventional District 9 couldn’t be grouped with the movies that angelicize aliens, or those that demonize them; now, the conventional District 9 takes its place as a tired immitator of numerous predecessors.

There are two surprising features to Engber’s suggestion that District 9 should ditch its corporate complaints. One is the idea that the movie focuses on corporatism to the exclusion of immigration and race (implying that the two are not related). That seems to miss the point completely. The counter-argument is obvious: District 9 shows that intolerance can’t be resolved if it’s against the market’s interests. The aliens aren’t assimilated because they’re worthless to the market. Their only value is their technology, which the market can unfairly extract, on the large scale (MNU raiding the slums) or on the small scale (Nigerian gangsters exploiting the aliens’ catfood addiction). When Wikus’s body becomes a valuable commodity, his human worth is obliterated. District 9, it would be easy to argue, doesn’t give up on its examination of racial conflict; it examines those problems through an economic lens. One scene in particular jumps to mind, in which Wikus anxiously patrols the slums with a clipboard, trying to force efficiency amidst disarray, checking off the alien residents from a list of assigned English names.

But Engber doesn’t see the connection. Of the corporate satire, he writes that “It’s a little odd, if you think about it, that District 9—and the whole sci-fi genre—should be so hung up on this one issue. Especially since creatures that arrive from another planet so clearly stand in for humans who arrive from another country: space aliens, illegal aliens.” This brings us to the second surprising feature of Engber’s objection to the litany of corporate-bashing sci-fi movies: he bases his objection on more lists. Namely, Charlie Jane Anders’ list of science fiction about refugees, and a Metafilter list of science fiction about immigration.

Engber concludes by considering the intent of director Neill Blomkamp, mentioning that Blomkamp didn’t want the movie to be too politically pointed. Engber decides it would have been better without any politics. But to start out with disappointment about the movie’s abandonment of its political conviction, and end with a plea to “just keep things on a popcorn level,” simply recreates District 9’s alleged trajectory. The reader is left with the impression that Engber wanted District 9 to be one kind of movie, and when it turned out to be something at once different and familiar, incoherent and formulaic, in the sci-fi tradition and out of it, he soured against it, with little recourse against the disorder.

Sometimes, I decide to like a movie ahead of time. I’ll be disheartened if the reviews are bad, but I’ll want to see it anyway, thinking that the reviewers just don’t “get it,” whereas I undoubtedly will. The hope of seeing a truly good movie is potent. We will ourselves to be entertained. I feel this way about Judd Apatow’s Funny People.

David Denby’s New Yorker review of the movie, while positive, is unsatisfying. In it, Denby faithfully represents the movie, but withholds himself. A reviewer is more than a reporter or a scholar. He’s supposed to involve sensibilities, reactions, and a sense of humor.

Don’t get me wrong: Denby’s observations about Funny People’s humor are keen. He wonders, for example, “how L.A. comics, who sit in cars and paradisal gardens rather than in the pickled depths of the Carnegie Deli, can stay so dark in their jokes.” Right away, a buoyant thought balloon bubbles up above the reader’s head, tumbling sunshine and melancholy against each other like one of those colorful liquid tide machines. Or consider Denby’s description of bodily topics as “the infantile sources of comedy.” It’s a brilliant phrase, playing “infantile” as both puerile and primary. But for all of the review’s acuity, it lacks laughter.

Not that the review has to laugh. It could wince, or groan, or flare up in outrage. But instead, Denby presents one part of the movie after another, apparently under the broad header “Things I Noticed.” The main device at work here is paraphrase; though perceptive, it’s indication in place of evaluation or analysis. Paraphrase simply illuminates the item in question with a touch, like Vanna White, and then stands aside with a silent gesture to ask, “Need I say more?”

More is occasionally said. Denby does convey a sense of the peculiar alchemy behind Funny People, and clarifies points that get messy in others’ hands, such as when he says, “This is the Apatow touch—the male panic about women which seems to veer toward homosexual attraction and then pulls back.” The remark is convincing, but inert. Denby doesn’t say whether the movie’s representation of male panic is insightful or indulgent, effective or clumsy, a mirror held up to the audience or to Apatow’s subconscious alone; he doesn’t try explain how it works, or what it’s for.

Denby writes, “A comic who comes off the stage proclaiming ‘I killed! I murdered them!’ is sure that he risks death every time he faces an audience; his attitude is kill or be killed.” It’s a great thing to notice, but he doesn’t put it into play. I mean, here is a movie about a comedian facing his own mortality, and Denby makes this canny observation about the vocabulary of death that pervades comic performance, but he doesn’t put them together.

Perhaps aware that he’s not drawing his observations into coherent conversation with one another, Denby makes lazy summaries, like this one: “The meaning of ‘Funny People’ is that a comic can’t be saved by anyone, not even himself. There is only the next joke.” Got it? That’s the meaning of Funny People. Riddle solved. Denby then concludes:

Apatow, who probably understands the obsessive loneliness of comics as well as anyone, also knows a thing or two about family life. The miracle of ‘Funny People’ is that it brings these two entirely dissimilar, even antagonistic worlds into a single, resonant whole.

So that’s the miracle of Funny People - not to be confused with the meaning of Funny People. They’re different, two disparate items among many others, all suspended in isolation. Being so excited about the movie, I’m thrilled to hear that its drama draws together comic isolation and domestic love into “a single, resonant whole.” But it’s a shame that this review can’t be described the same way.