Too Beautiful, the blog

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Saturday, July 04, 2009

Another road not taken

Why I never went to grad school

Labels: adolescence, education, film criticism, working

Sunday, November 09, 2008

Chicken-or-egg question

"Sunset Boulevard" is being shown in rotation on TCM these days, and it brings to mind a question I've never seen properly addressed: Which came first, Gloria Swanson's portrayal of the compensating, overly made-up past-it movie star Norma Desmond -- or the campy, overly made-up, deliberately outrageous drag queen who, explicitly or not, evokes her? Did the makeup artist on the film consciously or unconsciously imitate the way drag queens portrayed women, or did drag queens use "Sunset Boulevard," with its misogynist portrayal of a washed-up, delusional former star, as a Rosetta stone for their own complex portrayals of femininity and self-hatred? If Norma Desmond had never been conjured by Billy Wilder and Gloria Swanson, would they have had to create her anyway? (Or was Joan Crawford enough?)

technorati: drag, cinema, Billy Wilder, film, Gloria Swanson

Labels: drag, film criticism, queer

Monday, May 19, 2008

Woody Allen not dead yet, critic laments

An American critic, Joe Queenan, has written an attack on the later films of Woody Allen in which he pleads with European producers to "stop funding this man":

Americans can be blamed for many things, but the perpetuation of Allen's zombie-like career is one atrocity for which we refuse to be held accountable. It is Europeans who are providing much of the money for these projects, Europeans who are welcoming the director to their communities, Europeans who are marching through the turnstiles in support of Allen's interchangeably neurasthenic films.

I've written before about my despair over Allen and his career. Queenan gets it about right. I couldn't last through Allen's last successful film, Match Point, and I only stayed through several others out of morbid curiosity over how bad they could be.

technorati: Woody Allen, cinema, film criticism

Labels: film criticism, films, Woody Allen

Saturday, May 10, 2008

Credibility

I have a few closing remarks on the third (1965) New York Film Festival. Thirteen symposiums took place as part of the festival. Now I know what Pauline Kael lost at the movies: the taste for cinema. Hollis Alpert spent much time trying to persuade us that his reviews are really too intelligent, that cinema does not deserve the intelligence he is giving it...

A curious thing: Although I haven't seen any of them at any of the avant-garde and underground film screenings, all critics participating at the symposiums kept stressing their deep concern with the young and new cinema.

-- Village Voice film critic Jonas Mekas,
writing in the Village Voice, 23 September 1965

That's one of my idols, Jonas Mekas, as collected in the invaluable anthology of his Village Voice columns from the late 1950s to the early 1970s, Movie Journal. Another critic writes here about coming upon Mekas' book. I mentioned it here in 2005. An early Voice column is here.

technorati: film criticism, Pauline Kael, Jonas Mekas

Labels: film criticism, zeitgeist

Tuesday, December 11, 2007

Coppola enters his sage period

From an interview with filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola in the December-January Bookforum:

One of the most wonderful things about being a filmmaker is doing the research. When I made The Godfather I got a number of books about the Five Families and how they came about and about the families before that. Knowledge is a string that keeps going back and back. ... I've always felt that when you're making a movie, you're essentially asking a question. And when you're done, the film you have is the answer.

technorati: narrative, Francis Ford Coppola, filmmaking

Labels: film criticism, films, narrative, novel writing

Thursday, August 09, 2007

I happen to have Marshall McLuhan right here

The meaning of a story should go on expanding for the reader the more he thinks about it, but meaning cannot be captured in an interpretation. If teachers are in the habit of approaching a story as if it were a research problem for which any answer is believable so long as it is not obvious, then I think students will never learn to enjoy fiction. Too much interpretation is certainly worse than too little, and where feeling for a story is absent, theory will not supply it.

-- Flannery O'Connor,
rejecting a wild interpretation of her story "A Good Man is Hard to Find,"
from a letter dated 28 March 1961,
in "The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor"

This reminded me of an incident from my college days. I was a film criticism major, and being an undergraduate was much vexed by the grad students who tended to throw their weight around.

Two of them particularly annoyed me, Greg B. and Louis B. The latter once offered an interpretation of a classic film, whose director I later had the opportunity to speak to in person. When I described Louis' interpretation to him, he dismissed it and said there was nothing like that at all the scene. I dutifully reported this back to Louis, who scornfully said: "Well, you can talk about intentionality all you want, but..."

Louis is the main reason I wanted never to become a grad student.

technorati: Flannery O'Connor, literary theory

Labels: fiction, film criticism, literary theory, short stories

Saturday, April 23, 2005