Metacritique

(500) Days of Summer never looked very good. Despite Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s extraordinary goodness in Brick and The Lookout, the (500) Days trailer made it seem contrived and superficial. It lacked authenticity, was too clearly a glossy, studio-slickened ploy. For a movie pitched to hipsters, this would never do. There’s always been a place for seminal, counter-cultural, zeitgeist-y movies in the past. One thinks of, say, Manhattan, or Easy Rider, or Taxi Driver, and a half-dozen others; the kind of movies that grabbed an audience traditionally skeptical of the commercial machine. These were white FUBU movies, films for the gentrifying class, the young, educated, poor white people who felt as though they’d finally discovered a movie that was meant “for them.”

This could be why we find (500) Days of Summer so dispiriting: it’s too well-financed and mainstream to be properly “alt.” But that’s never stopped the likes of Wes Anderson, Michel Gondry, et cetera. Hipsters await Spike Jonze’s upcoming Where the Wild Things Are with rabid enthusiasm; and, as though to boost that FUBU feeling, cinema giant Warner Brothers has your very own tumblefriend Magic Molly blogging away as authentically as possible. But Where the Wild Things Are is a movie about nostalgia, perfectly aimed to urban hipsters. It presents a vision of a wide-open wilderness that’s sure to stir the spirits of us worn-down citydwellers; shaggy, homemade costumes abound instead of too-smooth CGI; and the story is, of course, about the end of childhood, dreaming of a time when nightmare and magic were exhilaratingly real. That is exactly what hipsters want. We don’t want to look at lives that resemble our own. There is no romance in watching Natalie Portman play the Shins into Zach Braff’s ears – there is only the cringe and pain of losing to the mainstream what we had thought was ours alone.

Armond White’s New York Press review of (500) Days of Summer is, in this capacity, right on target. He writes that Tom Hansen (Gordon-Levitt)’s Brit-pop enthusiasm is “really just a class marker,” not an expression of his character. White is always alert to the ways that movies declare themselves to their target demographics. He says that this movie has nothing to do with universal male-female love. Instead, it’s merely an exercise in “hipster self-congratulation” for “the smartness of middle-class young white people,” through the immature drama of “its super-cute bourgie characters.” White writes, “When the media elite praises mumblecore, it should be understood as minority group egomania.”

White’s review then ditches the requisite hipster-bashing for a studied and too-brief (verging on simplistic) rumination on cinematic masculinity. This is a welcome turn, especially considering most reviewers’ (and audiences’) hypnotic fixation on Deschanelian whimsy. White compares Tom to Woody Allen’s heartbroken hero in Annie Hall, “a clever, early expression of his snide misogyny”:

Tom’s self-absorption conceals his real lack of self-examination. (Woody Allen got by with often-humorous distractions.) There’s no parity in such malecentered sob-stories; it’s always from the selfrighteous guy’s point of view[.]

It’s true, these movies are hard to imagine from the quirky female perspective. But rather than crying out against the movie’s emosogyny, White is repelled by the mushy tweeism of the contemporary leading man. He presents in contrast the steely resolve of Humphrey Bogart’s Dixon Steele in “In a Lonely Place”:

Bogart’s stardom idealizes the virility and resoluteness we must then distrust. Steele continues Bogart’s great masculinist exposés that started with Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon. American movies don’t frequently examine machismo so much as exploit it—which is what most contemporary movies do with male adolescence—and (500) Days of Summer proves the latest folly.

This clarifies everything. If the movie lampooned hipsterism, hipsters would flock to it. We need not an exploitation, but an examination. A debunking of the emo-romance would finally give hipsters a cinema of their own, a cause to rally around.

Sadly, White wraps up his review with vague observations that don’t work for anyone who hasn’t seen the movie. He writes that “Deschanel’s best scene […] is ruined by director Marc Webb misreading the signs and tone of a misfit relationship.” What does that mean? I dunno. The final sentence is equally useless: “Tom and Summer’s good-bye—nicely performed—is spoiled by an ending that really is the most obnoxious movie moment since Juno.” Well, okay. That’s a bummer. Slate’s Dana Stevens (reviving her drawn-out metaphor motif) grounds her review in particular images that, isolated from their narrative context, stand as naked clichés. Despite all of his precise interpretation, White’s review fizzles for want of specificity.

Partly, we go to see the Harry Potter movies to be entertained; but we also go because we must, because it’s what everyone is doing, and to not see the Harry Potter movies is to be left out of a common language and contemporary cultural touchstone. That being the case, the reviewer’s job is largely to report on what it is that we’re all sharing in, and to question or explain its value. Eleanor Morrow’s This Recording review of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, titled “Harry Potter and the New Victorians,” is full of sound and sensitive criticism, refreshingly independent from the mainstream complaints against the movie as a trashy, bloated spectacle.

Morrow starts out with the half-disclaimer, “Many have written themselves into a corner trying to hate on Harry Potter,” but seems to take this as a challenge to criticize smartly. She falters by starting out with a pretty unoriginal view, attributing Harry Potter’s success to the emptiness of the story:

[I]t is so general, so easy, it can take on any cultural phenomenon and incorporate it within the flexibility of the narrative[…] Harry and his friends are a projective lense through which we view the younger part of our population.

This seems half-true. Yes, Harry Potter is another in a long line of vacuous heroic orphans, vessels into which others can pour themselves (think of Brontë’s Cathy exclaiming, “I am Heathcliff!”). But it seems unlikely that Harry Potter’s success is that arbitrary. Sloppy or wrongheaded as her stories may be, it seems likelier that J. K. Rowling found a way to channel a myth for which there was a deeply held, common affinity in Western culture. Why wizards? Why children? Why mystery? Why academy? Why Voldemort? Why British? These are the questions I’m curious about, and to call Harry Potter simply “generic” treats the formula as something that could be transposed to, say, septuagenarian ninjas fighting a termite infestation in a French hospital, which I doubt would have caught on.

But Morrow’s main point gets a lot closer to the above questions. She claims that wizards, or perhaps simply Brits, are muzzled by a kind of Victorian repression. She seems to say that this repression is just one symptom of an overall impotence enervating the wizard world. She uses the example of Voldemort, the most powerful evil force in modern wizard history, who is continually thwarted by a trio of children. And as they mumble awkwardly through adolescence, Harry and friends are sexually incapable:

[W]hat’s left over is a bunch of teens who bear more resemblance to the cast of Gossip Girl than the fearsome force that created Dumbledore’s Army in the previous novel. In addition, Rowling clumsily wrote all her best characters out of the script. Harry’s uncle Sirius, played by Gary Oldman, formed a unique relationship with the orphan wizard. And then Sirius was killed off for no real reason, and Hagrid got turned in an impotent animal lover. For shame!

This connection between impotence and animal-loving is tantalizing, and I wish Morrow would have said more.* But the case for the teens’ impotence is made brilliantly through the standard This Recording format of alternating images with paragraphs of text. Lush glamour shots of a smoldering Emma Watson are juxtaposed with the innocent, cheerful, dopey-looking childhood trio of Watson, Daniel Radcliffe, and Rupert Grint. This highlights the anachronism of their family-friendly romances, child stars as sex symbols. As Morrow puts it, “Harry, Hermione and Ron are juniors in high school and yet they haven’t ascended much further than heavy petting.” Get on it, you guys. What are you waiting for?

Plenty of other reviewers have addressed Half-Blood Prince’s limp innuendo. Armond White writes,

Love potions, teenage crushes, phallic Quidditch tournaments and spiritual guidance counselors are dully mixed together. Strangest of all, this unerotic make-believe depicts flight without gravity, magic without mood, fantasy without wonder. It’s dramatically flat.

And Anthony Lane says,

Unless I am mistaken, [Dumbledore] himself has a quiet thing for Harry, forever putting an arm around his shoulder. ‘Wands out, Harry,’ he commands. The film is fairly nervous about these crushes, eager to show its heroes consumed by the pleadings of desire but equally determined not to contemplate its natural conclusion.

The movie nervously shifts back and forth over the surfaces of sex and power and never penetrates. And somehow, Morrow’s review is perfectly matched to address this problem. As with many of This Recording’s essays, the entire body of text feels as though it’s made up of asides. There’s a candid, chatty, ADD quality. Any of Morrow’s pithy, disconnected remarks could be expanded into an essay of its own, but instead, she allows a composite impression to filter through. And rightly so. Who among us thinks in full-length essay form? Morrow’s writing is relatable because it’s true to the way we notice, the way our attention flits nimbly from this to that, based on something like a hunch that two things might be related. It makes the reader feel as though his or her experience of the movie will be a shared one.

*I’m reminded of a professor of mine in college who one day talked about the role of pets in domestic life. He remarked that animals are often treated as family members, sometimes sharing the family’s last name; and yet they are clearly different enough from the family that to caress them is regarded as “safe,” i.e. non-incestuous. He connected the word “pet” to the phrase “heavy petting.” The touching of pets, he said, allows people to sublimate sexual tension within the family. Morrow seems to be striking at a version of this thought – that Hagrid’s virility is misplaced into a love of animals.

What is there to say about Brüno? It looks very similar to Borat. In both movies, a crass foreign stereotype says outrageous things to unsuspecting people, and their reactions expose American ignorance and prejudice. But while Borat was controversial, Brüno appears not to matter. Maybe the climate has changed, and the political urgency and wild pleasure that we took in Borat’s exposure of American bigotry – or tolerance of bigotry – have lost their power under Obama.

Borat deserved to be controversial. It publicly mocked well-intended people who never expected an audience of millions. And it drew laughter from a vicious stereotype of third-world barbarism. But many people felt that the ordinary folks onscreen deserved humiliation, and that Sacha Baron Cohen’s performance exhausted the barbaric stereotype of its power, rather than inflating it.

Reviews were essential to making sense of this stuff. A new language was needed in order to talk about this unprecedented type of sketch-shock-documentary. And that was really fun. Unexpectedly varied and thoughtful opinions of Borat were given: Christopher Hitchens wrote that Borat wasn’t a display of American intolerance and xenophobia, but rather of a tolerance that would be unimaginable anywhere else, as one person after another politely and patiently corrected Borat’s puerile idiocy. George Saunders harshly criticized the movie’s cruelty. Almost at once, moviegoers had a very sophisticated framework within which to form an opinion. Borat’s impact wouldn’t have been possible without reviews. And today, the conversations around Brüno are sharper and savvier than the noise that Borat spurred, maybe because reviewers have had time to sort through Borat’s subtleties, and are now better able to identify the formula.

Maybe because of this, it was really hard to write a review of a Brüno review. It seemed like nothing more need be said. I could have butted heads with Anthony Lane, whose New Yorker review was attentive and opinionated. But this observation made him untouchable, since I’m certain he’s right: “I’m afraid that “Brüno” feels hopelessly complicit in the prejudices that it presumes to deride. […] A schoolboy who watches a pirated DVD of this film will look at the prancing Austrian and find more, not fewer, reasons to beat up the kid on the playground who doesn’t like girls.” What a sad and noble thought.

The fairest review of Brüno was A. O. Scott’s in the New York Times. Scott is almost legalistic as he identifies what’s going on in the movie. It’s not an emotional review, with the notes of humor and frustration that underpin Lane’s writing. It’s candid and clear. One of Scott’s finer points is that the subjects of Baron Cohen’s humor are damned if they do, and damned if they don’t: “They — Americans just like you but of course nothing like you — were exposed as bigots either for being outraged at the things Borat did or for politely agreeing with his misogynistic, anti-Semitic or otherwise objectionable statements.”

Scott says that “It’s not all that hard to find people in America who will expose their fear, ignorance and hatred on camera, as anyone with access to YouTube during the last presidential election knows. Derision, though, is not the same as insight, and ‘Will you look at those dumb rednecks’ is not much of a punch line.” I tend to be a little skeptical of the You-Tube-has-changed-everything arguments, but it’s true that when thinking about those videos, the thrill of getting people to say bigoted things is largely gone.

This might be especially true in the case of Brüno, since homophobia is the most mainstream and accepted form of bigotry in America. Where Borat got ordinary people to say unexpectedly disturbing things, there’s little unexpected at this point in the public conversation about homosexuality. However, Scott writes,

What “Brüno” tries hardest to be, and fails most significantly to become, is a sendup of the empty vanity of celebrity culture. Brüno, in his quest for stardom, encounters and exploits bottom feeders, hangers-on and desperate aspirants for membership in the charmed circle of fame. “Will you look at those dumb losers” is the punch line here, and it sometimes elicits a spasm of shocked laughter.

This is the one point that I wish more reviewers would have gotten to: the confused and difficult blending of homosexuality with immorality. Brüno, as an Austrian, is uncomfortably comfortable with the Holocaust; and, as Scott insufficiently addresses, part of Brüno’s satire appears aimed at the gay community for divorcing itself from its own politics, turning away from the painful trials of activism and toward the escapist fantasies of fashion and celebrity. But generally the reviews haven’t really gone there, and now that the movie’s been out for a week, nobody seems to care very much. It’s possible that the moment passed a week ago; it’s also possible that the moment passed years ago.

It’s tempting to listen for sound-related commentary in David Edelstein’s movie reviews for Fresh Air. One expects that a review written for radio listeners will pay more than average attention to a movie’s non-visual elements. Or maybe, leaving the eyes to close and the imagination free, it might actually lean more on visual details. Either way, one’s senses perk up at the sound of Edelstein’s slightly congested voice, friendly and somewhat out of breath. The self-consciously softened inhalations between sentences give a clear impression of a body behind the words.

Edelstein’s review of “Public Enemies,” titled “Michael Mann’s Mobster Waxworks,” lushly renders the sensory. He notes the impact of “the sight of a luscious, soft-curled Marion Cotillard,” blending touch into the visual. He sets up an audio clip of Cotillard by noting that “her American accent sinks somewhere in the mid-Atlantic.” I love this metaphor, the idea of a French-sounding voice traveling across an ocean of difference to arrive on the shores of true American speech. What a tangible, intuitive expression of something so hard to pin down.

Edelstein devotes much of his review to the effects of shooting the movie in hi-def video (as opposed to traditional film). He says, “Branches in a forest at night are so sharp they’re like etchings on the screen, while the air itself seems thick, the perspectives shortened.” This is a great explanation of the movie’s feel, again with tactile descriptors like “sharp” branches and “thick” air – as though you could feel the weight of it. Even as he integrates sight and touch together, he’s distressed by the decoupling of sight and sound: “there’s an eerie disjunction between the over-bright muzzle fire and the guns’ muffled pops, like distant firecrackers.”

David Denby’s New Yorker review, “Tommy Guns and Toys,” makes a dutiful catalogue of the movie’s appearance, noting cleverly first that the gangsters race around in “beautiful cars with curved grilles,” and later that they “dress in perfectly tailored suits and wear their pomaded hair swept back, like the grilles of those fast cars.” To Denby, the aesthetic is smooth and coherent, and Mann is “an incomparable maker of svelte, flawlessly integrated images.”

Denby makes the movie sound slick, whereas Edelstein’s view is at once simpler and subtler. Edelstein notes, for example, that the video’s clarity can make for a smudgy picture: “You can detect the male actors’ pancake make-up — which is especially unfortunate in the case of Bale, who now looks as well as acts like a wax dummy.”

Given this evocation of the movie’s texture, it’s surprising that the review turns out to be negative. There are hints along the way – Edelstein says that “the most powerful emotion in Public Enemies is Johnny Depp’s love of being a movie star,” which sounds like a slam, except that he goes on to explain that it serves Depp’s performance as John Dillinger, an attention-hungry antihero. Edelstein has as much positive to say as negative. While Chistian Bale’s fakeness is awkwardly underscored, Billy Crudup plays J. Edgar Hoover “in an astounding transformation, fatted and vaguely effeminate.”

Both Edelstein and Denby agree that, despite (as Denby puts it) “everything looking so good,” there’s some invisible quality that’s missing. Denby calls Public Enemies “emotionally neutered,” a clumsy phrase almost vulgar in its simplicity. Edelstein, in perhaps a stretch, reaches to Michael Jackson for comparison:

After Michael Jackson’s untimely though perhaps inevitable death, I re-watched his music video of the song ‘Smooth Criminal.” […] It’s everything Public Enemies isn’t: madly inventive, genre-bending, at once a study in urban paranoia and a passionate tribute to the artist as outlaw-loner. The video reminds you why the gangster became a pop-culture existential hero.

I don’t like this turn, because Edelstein hasn’t done anything to set it up. He hasn’t said that Public Enemies is conventional, generic, or passionless. He’s focused only on what it feels like to watch. He has a few remarks on the film’s moral equivocation, saying that if the movie has a moral point of view, he “couldn’t discern it,” and that the movie “doesn’t really have a theme.” But that isn’t saying much.

And Edelstein’s final words, though vaguely insightful, aren’t grounded in any of the rich sensory clarity that most of the review works to establish. He suggests that there’s some kind of spirit residing within a film, beyond the image onscreen: “Michael Mann’s vision lacks that inner spark. He’s made a period gangster museum piece — it doesn’t dance.” It’s a shame that Edelstein can’t tell us what that spark is made of. If this “something” is missing from the movie, it shouldn’t also escape the review.

I don’t often read Roger Ebert’s reviews. He seems more like a television personality than a writer, maybe because so much depends on his little eyes and full, androgynous pout. I followed his hilarious feud with Vincent Gallo, and liked him; I watched this video of Ebert and Gene Siskel teasing each other, and liked him even more. I just usually forget that his reviews involve more than the direction of his thumbs.

But this weekend, I kept coming across quotes from Ebert’s review of Transformers 2. Ebert calls the movie “a horrible experience of unbearable length,” the plot “incomprehensible,” the dialog “meaningless word flap,” and says the appearance of the computer-rendered robots “looks like junkyard throw-up.” He suggests, “If you want to save yourself the ticket price, go into the kitchen, cue up a male choir singing the music of hell, and get a kid to start banging pots and pans together.”*

So I went into the review expecting a snooty critic’s baseless vitriol, or at least vague, unsupported criticism. But I was happy to find that what seemed on the surface like a harangue was deceptively thoughtful and principled. For example, Ebert writes, “This isn’t a film so much as a toy tie-in.” And while that at first seemed like a weak, tired argument about the commercialization of Hollywood, Ebert is actually in favor of toys, and the remark leads into a sweet aside about the death of the imagination and the loss of play (Ebert recalls a boy who cried over a toy truck he lost at the movies, suggesting that Transformers 2 will steal away your beloved truck and leave you with noisy, soulless confusion).

Or consider this line: “There are many great-looking babes in the film, who are made up to a flawless perfection and look just like real women, if you are a junior fanboy whose experience of the gender is limited to lad magazines.” My first reaction to this was, “Well, yeah, and how many movies could that have been said about?” But then I started wondering about cycles of artifice and authenticity (robots in disguise), and the manufacture of ideal bodies, and the relationship between the transformers and the “great-looking babes.” (Consider, in this context, the word “objectification.”) And while I didn’t end up anywhere, since I haven’t seen the movie yet, I now have something to look for when I do. Although, this probably isn’t a new thought. I bet a doctoral dissertation already exists about it.

Maybe the most intriguing lines in Ebert’s review are the following:

The two most inexplicable characters are Ron and Judy Witwicky (Kevin Dunn and Julie White), who are the parents of Shia LaBeouf[.] They take their son away to Princeton, apparently a party school, where Judy eats some pot and goes berserk. Later they swoop down out of the sky on Egypt, for reasons the movie doesn’t make crystal clear, so they also can run in slo-mo from explosions.

At first I thought, “Ebert, that’s not a paragraph. It’s disjointed and irrelevant. Furthermore, of course there are parties at Princeton. The money, the eating clubs - and didn’t you see Harold & Kumar?” But, despite calling Ron and Judy “inexplicable,” an explanation is suggested: that the movie has contempt for intellectualism, and so represents one of the most presitigious universities in the world as a threatening hotbed of drugs where not even quiet, middle-aged suburbanites are safe from corruption. That may be a stretch, but even if that’s not what Ebert’s getting at, it was a good instinct to include that non sequitur. It raises the question, “What is this doing here?” and invites the reader to consider possible answers.

Ebert’s review closes with a nice sense of community. He talks about checking the other reviews as soon as they’re out, in order to compare his take to the rest. He’s comforted that the movie is reviled, because it means he’s not alone. People will see through Transformers 2; and they’ll hear what he’s saying.

*That’s kinda funny, but doesn’t quite make sense, because you do normally find pots and pans in a kitchen, but you don’t normally find a choir in the kitchen singing the music of hell. Choire Sicha had it better: “it will pretty much look like two or more enormous microwaves with swords violently mating.”

Dana Stevens has written an interesting review of Woody Allen’s “Whatever Works” for Slate, titled “Please Disregard Your Enthusiasm.” It opens with a well-formed thought that is worth quoting to begin with:

Imagine if Annie Hall had been forgotten in a Ziploc bag under your couch cushions and left there for 30 years. By the time you pulled out the bag, Alvy Singer’s endearing misanthropy would have decomposed into its constituent elements of vanity and contempt, and Annie’s charming naiveté would have curdled into ditzy cuteness. The New York City that once seemed like a living, breathing entity would be a desiccated and barely recognizable skeleton.

This, she says, is the experience of watching Whatever Works. It’s a nifty metaphor, turning the cliché cry of “garbage” into something specifically textured. And it cleverly connects the movie’s faults to the passage of time, which is insightful because, as Stevens notes, the movie was originally written in the 70s, and was pulled out of a drawer when Allen needed to shoot a movie without the time to write a new script.

But it’s also a puzzling analogy, because it can be interpreted in at least three ways.

1. Whatever Works was always a crappy version of Annie Hall, and had it been made at the time that it was written, it would have been just as coarse, crude, and mean then as it is today.
2. Had it been made when it was written, Whatever Works might have been thought of as good, and remembered fondly today (like Annie Hall). But the popular culture has shifted, the audience’s taste has changed, and we can now see, in the light of the present, a moral ugliness that might have gone overlooked (or been celebrated) in the dimmer, more brutish past.
3. In fact, Whatever Works represents the passage of time, rather than defying it. It is a modern-day Annie Hall, true to contemporary movie culture, which over time has grown angrier, dumber, and more leaden. New York City was, in the 70s, a living, breathing entity; and today it really is a desiccated and barely recognizable skeleton. The good, subtle, lively spirit that Allen captured in the 70s has withered and died in the decades since, and cannot be recreated. Had the script of Annie Hall been kept on a shelf and made today, it would have come out just as awful as Whatever Works did.

Stevens doesn’t really choose any of these three options (or suggest others). Instead, she lets this thought dangle from the top of her review like an epigraph, unresolved. But it’s like the crime scene at the beginning of a mystery novel: the reader happily reads to the end, wanting to solve the mystery. This is a typical Slate-ism: many of their essays are deliberate teases, ending on points that could have been stated at the beginning and saved the readers a few minutes of false deliberation. But the pleasure of reading Slate is its short-form, conversational, intellectual version of mystery and suspense.

Unfortunately, Stevens doesn’t give us the answer (doesn’t seem to have one), and so the formula is slightly botched. And without that answer to head toward, the review loses focus. Since critics agree that the movie is bad, there’s not much point to adding just another negative review to the pile. The value of the negative review in this case is to answer the question, “Why is it bad?” – hoping that if it can be diagnosed, then it can be prevented.

Instead of pursuing that question, Stevens goes on to somewhat smugly state the movie’s plot in a flat, disinterested way. This type of writing could make any movie sound bad, and is inspecific about the movie’s shortcomings. Stevens does address sexism and meanness, and while I’m sure she’s correct (honestly, I have no interest in seeing this movie, it seems offensive and dumb), there’s a part of me that doubts, because she fails to make a case. For example, Stevens notes with frustration about Larry David’s character that, “the fact is, David’s Boris is not so much a lovable curmudgeon as he is a priggish cocksucker,” and says of Evan Rachel Wood’s character:

she never tells [Boris] to stop calling her a “submental baton twirler” who’s “stupid beyond comprehension”— she just sweetly tolerates his insults, and the viewer spends the last third of the film waiting for a comeuppance that never arrives.

Well, so what? Do angry characters have to be loveable? Can’t verbal assault be a kind of courtship? This criticism – “that female character should not enjoy receiving that male character’s abuse” – is the same kind of argument that drove me crazy when Secretary came out. And in my head, I start to compare them (not having seen Whatever Works), and think, “Jeez, Dana Stevens, this woman doesn’t have to be with someone conventionally beautiful, or superficially friendly. Real feminism means that it’s up to her who she loves and what she likes, and if she likes a cranky old man to call her an idiot, then that’s her right!”

Clearly this thinking is a little goofy, and Stevens is probably right that Whatever Works is a bunch of classist, sexist garbage. But without a clearly defined argument to explain what’s wrong with the movie, some readers like me might just end up going to see it.

Now this is a review.

The New York Press’s Armond White is a contrarian provocateur: he gives positive reviews to movies that other critics pan, and negative reviews to movies that other critics celebrate. His reviews have generated controversy for years, and people take his criticism personally. In fact, I’m not the first person to review his reviews: there’s an entire blog devoted to writing about his writing. (See this New York Magazine profile for a fuller explanation of his work.) If it were arbitrary, this contrarian pattern would quickly expose itself as thoughtless. But, man, White is a thinker, and a really, really good movie reviewer.

So it’s no surprise that A) his review of Pixar’s Up, titled “The Way of Pixarism,” is a negative one, and B) it’s motherfucking awesome. His argument is that Pixar flattens and narrows human experience into something saccharine, cutesy, cloying, and simple, feeding the audience’s addiction to a melancholy and nostalgic vision of childhood.

White uses the simile of American car fanaticism to make his case against Pixar. He writes that the studio’s “rote whimsy is as dispiriting as a productionline gas-guzzler,” says that audiences “buy animation to extend their childhood like men who buy cars for phallic symbols,” and says of critics’ unwavering support of Pixar films that “they would pass this on to their children, the way autoworkers once instilled union loyalty.” It’s a good analogy. Pixar movies occupy a space at the beginning of this century that cars held throughout the last: at once industrial, domestic, patriotic, symbolic of technological advance, and central to the American identity. The implicit suggestion is that our shortsighted infatuation with Pixar will lead to a crisis down the road, brought by emotional depletion and pollution rather than the environmental kind.

White goes on to identify Pixar’s clichés, explaining that Up follows “the same Journey/Rescue/Return blueprint as Finding Nemo, Cars, Wall-E, Monsters, Inc., A Bug’s Life, Toy Story 1 and 2,” thereby processing its main characters’ loneliness through a grinding mill of narrative formality. I don’t agree that this is necessarily bad, but I appreciate the naming of the pattern. White sees Capitalism as the vicious mechanism behind Pixar’s cute cartoon façade, trafficking in a mythology of lost joy as though it were a drug.

White describes this device as the first half of a bait-and-switch, arguing that Up leads with emotional manipulation that doesn’t develop, instead exploiting its sweetness to propel the movie through formulaic contrivances: “Up drops its emotional elements for chase mechanics and precious comedy.” There’s a hint, but not an explicit acknowledgment, that White sees in Pixar movies a violence against the individual. He says that “critics who forget that movies should be about people defend this reduction of human experience,” and claims that “Pixarism domesticates and homogenizes animation.” And in his conclusion, he writes of the sad splitting of the singular into the indistinguishable many:

After ripping-off Albert Lamorisse’s classic The Red Balloon, dispersing it into Carl’s thousands of colorful orbs, Pixar then literalizes the meaning of flight as a commercial icon: Up. Here, it’s simply the means to “adventures” and not an ecstatic elevation of individual identity.

I haven’t seen Up yet, and I’m excited to. But thank goodness for a reviewer who takes a broader view, is principled in his evaluation, and talks about a movie not just as an entertainment, but as an artwork, with problems to dramatize and lessons to teach. I will probably love Up, as I have the other Pixar movies. But, just like my enjoyment of Hitchcock’s Rear Window was troubled in college by Laura Mulvey’s “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” I’ll now be able to better understand the reasons for that satisfaction, and to question its terms and its value, thanks to this enriching critique.

Kimberley made a special request for a review of a Night at the Museum 2 review, and I was happy to oblige.

I probably won’t see Night at the Museum 2, and I didn’t see the first one. But, having watched the mercilessly ubiquitous TV spot, in which Hank Azaria lispingly ridicules Darth Vader’s cape, about seventy billion times (Ahh we going to the operahh? I don’t think thohh), I am a little curious. My main question is roughly: What?

The ad features dozens of mismatched characters (pharaoh, Darth, a T-Rex skeleton, Sacagawea, talking statues, etc), whose unlikely juxtaposition resembles the broken syntax of dream imagery. It’s like the film is a depiction of our national subconscious, with weird, zany voices springing from the formerly stoic mouths of our socio-cultural forebears. As James Joyce wrote, “[The American Museum of Natural] History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.” And so, given these incomprehensible images, I turn to the paper of record to help me make sense of it all.

The New York Times’ A. O. Scott shrugs away any weighty concerns about the movie, colloquially tossing off an “or something,” followed by a “Whatever,” in his review “Dad’s at Another Museum. Does That Make Him an Exhibitionist?” He goes through the motions of a review, briefly characterizing the movie for anyone who has (enviably) avoided the trailer, and explains that the movie follows a formula, some of it’s nifty, and most of it’s pointless. He concludes, “whether [Amelia Earhart] would ever have developed a crush on Ben Stiller is a matter for scholars to ponder. Perhaps the only such matter in this shallow and harmlessly diverting picture.”

I have no idea what A. O. Scott is trying to communicate with those words, except, “this movie is not worth questioning.” This is unsatisfactory. The fact that Scott calls the movie “harmlessly diverting” is telling: he’s saying that it doesn’t matter whether the movie has any merit.

It must be exhausting to be a movie reviewer. Imagine: you think and care so deeply about movies that you dedicate your life to them. And despite all of your deep thought and feeling, Hollywood movie-makers appear to be, by all evidence, craven, greedy, and fatuous. They keep making movies that are not just empty, but soul-diminishing, and people keep going to see them. It must breed a kind of misanthropy, like the reelection of President Bush did for Democrats. Eventually, the only way to cope is to withdraw emotionally, resign from the crusade against crap, and say to yourself, “It’s entertainment. Americans are leading painful, difficult lives. They’re going through divorces, they’re falling ill without health insurance, they’re accruing enormous credit card debt. If they can find some peace and joy watching Ben Stiller get slapped in the face by a pair of monkeys, then God bless them.”

To be fair, Scott does attempt to form a thought. He notes that “Whether the movie pays irreverent homage to cultural treasures or trivializes them for fun and profit is an interesting question,” and says that in his opinion, the movie “does its part to encourage the museum world’s embrace of spectacle, sensationalism and pseudo-pedagogical pop-cultural pandering.” Wait—are we supposed to be concerned about Ben Stiller’s impact on “the museum world?” What does that have to do with anything?

I don’t even think this is a review. Is the movie good? Is it bad? A. O. Scott has given up. He’s not serving as a filter, sorting out the good from the bad and explaining the difference. Perhaps more importantly, he doesn’t help me at all with my question. I am still wondering, “What?”

And I have more questions, including: Why do we want to give “serious” historical figures funny voices? Is this a way of bringing the mythic down to a human scale? Is it more like the bullying power of nick-naming? Why would we want to see all of these historical figures tumbled together in the same anachronistic fantasy? Is this related to other comedies of similar premise (Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure, Clone High)? Why, when they spring to life, do these creatures remain representations (the skeleton doesn’t become a real dinosaur, the statue doesn’t become a real man), and what does that say about the relationships between the represented and the real, the living and the dead, the body and the spirit? Why is gay Egyptian Hank Azaria making fun of Darth Vader’s clothes?

Unfortunately, to get those questions answered, this review would have me go and see the movie for myself.

Alex identified an emerging pattern in my review reviews: doing negative critiques of the New Yorker’s pissy write-ups of summer blockbusters (Wolverine and Star Trek). I’d only done it twice in a row, but on the other hand, I’d done it 100% of the time. A single repetition is all that’s needed for a pattern to emerge.

That idea – that the same thing twice makes a pattern – is fundamental to Jim Jarmusch’s “The Limits of Control.” The New York Times’ Manohla Dargis is quick to say so in her review, “Mystery Man on a Mission in Spain, Meeting Other Mystery People”: “Repetition, it emerges, is the film’s central structuring device.” It’s as though the script has a stutter: the anonymous Lone Man drinks two espressos in separate cups, eats two pears together, exchanges two matchbooks back and forth, etc.* But the patterns never amount to anything, inviting the viewer to crack an indecipherable code.

Slate’s Dana Stevens, whose reviews typically read like emails from a thoughtful, funny friend, is offended – outraged – by the meaninglessness. She calls the The Limits of Control “pretentious,” “a self-indulgent bucket of hogwash,” and says that the unnamed hero’s “smug stoicism made me want to give him an unnamed sock in the jaw.” Her review is unsatisfactory, because her outrage has a tone resembling “the emperor has no clothes,” as though anyone who thinks that the movie merits interpretation is a liar or a fool. Her hand-wringing does nothing to make this opaque movie clearer, more talk-about-able, whether positively or negatively.

Dargis, by contrast, writes a welcome lukewarm review, inventing out of thin air a workable way to talk about the movie. She at first acknowledges the repetition motif and lists the visual and scenic components without critique. Her writing is lucid and sensitive, with a novelist’s knack for the turn of phrase:

Mr. Descas’s low-key intensity imbues the setup with a shiver of menace — despite the unhurried pace, it feels as if something heavy were at stake — an air of unease that’s counterbalanced by the dryly amusing fashion in which the Creole’s sidekick translates the orders.

Well put. And there’s a likably cheeky tone as Dargis adds up an increasingly absurd list of the movie’s motifs, like when she says, “Sometimes, he visits a museum.” Manohla, you slay me.

Dargis works best in her own words, and the review gets cluttered farther down with an unnecessary list of the movie’s possible allusions. It’s useless to prop up the movie with tenuous claims about its uncertain lineage. But overall, Dargis does the work of a critic well. She’s less interested in finding creative ways to be mean, and more interested in bringing the film to light through language. She concludes with a quotation of her own selection:

Philip Glass has said that repetitive music “must be listened to as a pure sound-event, an act without any dramatic structure.” At least for its first hour, before its repetition strategy turns tedious, the same could be said of “The Limits of Control,” a nondramatic work best appreciated as a pure image-and-sound event.

Keeping Philip Glass in mind helps me to appreciate the movie in ways that I couldn’t before. This is clear thinking and good reviewing, free of the glib, derisive frustration that pollutes most conversations about disappointing, confusing, or otherwise baffling movies, whether cartoonish blockbusters or pretentious indies.

*Part of the pleasure (or frustration) of the movie is tracking these repetitions. Spoken phrases are repeated more than twice, the Lone Man is constantly mirrored in the surfaces around him, and each of the paintings that he studies at the museum depict some real-life corollary: a guitar, a blank sheet of paper, a naked woman. The movie involves the viewer in an internal repetition: What does it mean? What does it mean?