Movies into Film

On Not Reviewing Jonathan Nossiter’s Mondovino:

Notes on the impossibility of writing or publishing movie criticism

in an age of falsely Puritanical hipsterism

 

In the vineyards: Battista Columbu, Jonathan Nossiter, and Lina Columbu explore Mondovino (Photo courtesy of ThinkFilm)

 

I missed Mondovino during its limited theatrical run earlier this year, catching it on tape, finally, just as the movie debuts on DVD this month. It’s worth renting, no question about that, yet the more I think about Mondovino, the more it repels me.

 

And while, in better times, I would fall forward onto the keyboard to share my insights with you—on the ways that the director, Jonathan Nossiter, degenerates his fascinating material on French winemakers and their American rivals into a finger-wagging screed (using his middle finger)—I can’t.

 

The readers who re-visit this site with some degree of consistency will have noticed that the waits in between new pieces being posted have grown longer, that there are fewer reviews added, that the same ones remain under the home page’s “recent” header for months and months. The reason is this: I’m tired. Tired of watching movies, tired of writing about them. I’m especially tired of writing about them without remuneration.

 

I began this site because the paper I used to write for had none of its own; I wanted a wider audience for my work (and I have gotten that, to an extent), thus Mn2F (as D.D. Wigley calls it) consisted initially of re-prints from the late, little indie paper that could—for only so long. Vigilance, of Port Townsend, Washington, ceased publication with its May 2005 issue. I didn’t learn this until the end of June; I had been away from Vigilance for several months, publishing online or in some of the Seattle papers, venues with greater reach than Vigilance’s modest distribution of a few thousand copies. (The news of its demise saddens me, all the same, just as if a person I knew had suddenly died.)

 

Joan Allen in an exquisitely composed shot from Yes (Sony Pictures Classics)

 

Besides serving as an archive, Mn2F, I hoped, would lead to something else. It hasn’t. I’ve gotten a few random gigs, partially because of having the site, but not anything sustaining or even reliably semi-permanent.

 

And so: I’m drying up. I have almost nothing left to say about movies and almost no reason to say it. Out of habit, I continue to go to (a few of) them—in the hope that I’ll be inspired to keep writing, to keep plugging away, to keep approaching editors who usually turn out to be non-responsive. The movies, however, are bad. They are so bad that they aren’t even fun to trash.

 

I had planned in this essay to touch on the intriguing Thai failure Tropical Malady; Spielberg’s relentlessly one-note War of the Worlds (the 9/11 parallels are slathered on with a trowel); Gus Van Sant’s Last Days (it’s wretched); Sally Potter’s agonizingly pretentious Yes; the English-language version of Howl’s Moving Castle (it’s too convoluted to be any fun); and to lob a few more grenades at child pornographer Miranda July for her tasteless Me and You and Everyone We Know, which I panned on the Siffblog. But why bother? I don’t have the strength, and…

 

I’m not making any money from this site. Granted, I could toss up ads everywhere, such as the currently prominent one where Roger Ebert proclaims July’s fiasco, “This year’s Sideways,” apparent shorthand for “This year’s most overrated piece of crap,” but I don’t want to do that. I cleverly placed a few “Make a Donation” (via PayPal) buttons on various pages, hoping readers might take the hint; this has yielded scant returns to say the least.

 

Simmons and Bacall, at least, were in good voice: Howl’s Moving Castle (Disney)

 

It’s shocking to me who’s able to get a job (and more shocking still, keep a job) writing about film (or any of the arts, for that matter) for a newspaper. From time to time, I search the websites of gestalt–weaklies, thinking that I might unearth a few who’d welcome (and pay for) my freelance pieces. In doing this, I’ve come across some of the worst writers I’ve ever read anywhere in any medium on any subject. Granted, most internet-only “critics” aren’t exactly great aesthetes; still, I was appalled to read the prose of one Lois Wadsworth from Eugene Weekly. You’d think that a town that has the University of Oregon could produce a better arts writer than her? Unh uh.

 

I happen not to like Wes Anderson movies either, yet I’m at least capable of penning a savvier phrase than (to quote Ms. Wadsworth) “His characters are weird.” Oh, really, Lois? Is that meant as an observation or as a criticism? Or just an admission of banality?

 

Readers in Seattle scarcely have it better. After a screening of Ingmar Bergman's Saraband, as masterful and rewarding a film as we are likely to encounter in the Year of Our Emptiness 2005, I walked a high-profile local critic back to his sporty, canary yellow coupe a few side streets away from the Neptune Theatre. What did he think of this extraordinary movie? "Erland Josephson is a genius," he conceded, before admitting that the absence of cell phone use in Saraband irritated him. He couldn't possibly relate to Liv Ullmann and company because they weren't gabbing away on Nokias. That's what passes for critical insight in Seattle, and that reviewer unfortunately holds an editorship at a major paper, instead of being buried in the back pages of The Doofus Register-Gazette where he properly belongs.

 

“There should be no film critics,” said a friend of mine recently, a friend who happens to make his (modest) living as a critic. “There should only be writers who are versed in all the arts and can write compellingly about theatre, dance, painting, books, music, and movies, instead of having all these idiots who don’t know anything except movies.”

 

It’s discouraging to skim through the two camps and see no place at all for my approach. The two camps, by the way, consist of what I would call “the plot summarizers,” those legion dullards who laboriously tell you everything (and yet nothing, because the only real function of those “writers” is to remove any element of surprise) about a movie, and a group of scribes less easy to label, although they share such characteristics as a knee-jerk devotion to solipsistic, self-referential, pseudo-ironic junk and an ongoing inability to stop making (elaborate) excuses for the senile Jean-Luc Godard. In all seriousness, there should be an Olympic category just for the strenuous sport of pretending to find meaning in Notre Musique.

 

Into the woods: romance mixes with Thai folklore in Tropical Malady (Photo courtesy of Strand Releasing)

 

It’s difficult (as in finding the time, and finding the rationale) to pursue writing movie criticism, even as (God, I hope not) a “hobby.” This is for two major reasons (I’ll leave out all the minor ones). One, there aren’t enough hours in the day, nor enough Riboflavin supplements on the shelf) to go to screenings, to transcribe and sculpt some sort of piece from the notes I scribble in the dark) and then go out and self-promote, send emails, send clips, pitch ideas to editors who automatically assume I’m just as mediocre as all the other hacks vying for their attention. I loathe self-promotion, anyway. I can write or I can hawk. But I cannot do both. I either need a job or an agent.

 

Two, as Renata Adler expressed in her legendary pan of Pauline Kael’s When the Lights Go Down, writing about movies (even if a writer has a staff job, which I don’t) isn’t a day’s work for a thinking adult. There just isn’t enough meat on the bones, and two of the summer’s most critically ballyhooed films (Last Days, Me and You and Everyone We Know) feel like a starvation diet to me. In Van Sant’s film, an ostensible “tribute” to the late Kurt Cobain, I could hardly wait for the mumbling Muppet played by Michael Pitt to go ahead and pull the trigger: anything to bring the navel-gazing emptiness of the damned movie to an end.

 

Another observation from Adler, from her book Gone: The Last Days of The New Yorker: “An audience, for anything in the arts, does not pre-exist. It is part of what is created.”

 

I wish that some of the mindless editors I’ve worked with, editors whose foremost allegiance goes to preserving outmoded formulas at the expense of anything “out of the box,” (i.e. innovative), knew and understood Adler’s sentiment. What she wrote applies as much to arts criticism as to the works themselves. Instead of shred-to-fit “editing,” which renders a piece senseless in order to make it conform to column space, why not let the piece (even it’s “just” a review) run as long as it needs to make a coherent, entertaining argument? And if the writing’s good, a reader won’t care that the piece runs long. That is, a real reader won’t care—the “general” reader, who exists only in the small ante-chamber of an unimaginative editor’s head, will (it’s assumed) be up in arms. At one so-called “culture magazine” here in Seattle, an editor hit me up with: “But is it really right for us?” That’s the other killer of good writing—the “brand” mentality. “Is it really right for us” was a way of saying, “we’ve positioned ourselves as x, and anything that’s the least bit y, forget it.”

 

Michael Pitt stars as “Blake” in Gus Van Sant’s vaporously neurasthenic Last Days (Photo: Fine Line Features)

 

Neither of those examples, however, touches the bizarre, almost completely internal phenomenon of being Web-stalked by an editor, by someone local who was (and remains) in a position of sufficient power to improve my fortunes, yet chose to do nothing. Except continue to read, comfortably seated at his desk at The Stranger (circulation, 90,000), what I post to this site, until the day that I blocked his IP address. I’m referring to Bradley Steinbacher, who’s both the managing editor and the film editor for the aforementioned weekly paper.

 

I’ve written before about the preponderance of visits from 216.254.2.66, Brad’s IP address at work. For several months, he would log on to Mn2F daily or at least three times a week: my admin pages have all the visitor statistics. It’s true that I once trashed Bradley in print; I mocked his enthusiasm for the ghastly Sofia Coppola’s equally ghastly Lost in Translation. A certain checking up on “the enemy” is to be expected. But the visits continued. After a while, what conclusion do you draw? That he actually likes what he’s reading? Why return over and over again?

 

I was pleased, and although how/what I write seems incompatible with The Stranger’s “brand,” I thought—well, why not? In the essay that marked this site’s one-year anniversary of being online, I baited him. Without calling Brad by name, I indicated—have commission, will travel. I didn’t expect anything to happen right away, and nothing did. He must have spewed coffee all over his computer monitor that morning—he disappeared for a bit, then the visits, predictably, resumed.

 

In early May, at the press launch for this year’s Seattle International Film Festival, there was Bradley in earnest conversation with Tablet’s Karla Esquivel. I walked over. “Brad, do you know N---- Thompson?” she asked by way of making an introduction. All sweetness and light, he shook my hand, and then I corrected her: “N.P. Thompson.”

 

His change in facial expression was electrifying. His eyes widened and he spluttered, “You called me out!” And then I knew. All my guesswork was dead-on. Brad shifted gears so as not to call himself out any further: “You called one of my reviews shit!” And pleasant chatter ensued, in which he assured me he hadn’t “taken it personally.”

 

Nothing continued to happen, no further contact until I emailed Brad to say I’d enjoyed reading his Kingdom of Heaven review. Which was more or less true. What I didn’t say was how much his own writing has improved since he’s studied mine so assiduously for months on end.

 

Stalled traffic suggestive of an alien tripod, from Spielberg’s War of the Worlds (Photo: Paramount)

 

He replied. He thanked me for my kind words and remarked how “curious” he’d been about who I was. Let’s grab a drink, he suggested, at the SIFF opening gala. I skipped the gala, but emailed my itinerary of movie-hopping for the opening weekend and, in a moderately bold move, I gave him my cell phone number. No call, no email, but the visits to my site went on unabated. He had no interest in me as a writer except to continue reading me in secret while at the same time delegating plum freelance assignments to that desperately untalented crabapple Andrew Wright, he of the massive goatee and even more massive ego. I got the idea: the mediocrities don’t want to be upstaged.

 

I decided to experiment. I blocked Brad’s IP address. How long would it take for his withdrawal symptoms to kick in? Not long. An email finally came, ignoring my counteroffer of a drink other than at the gala, but expressing, in a somewhat snickering tone, “I hope you haven’t shut down your site.” I toyed with him a bit. Maybe I have—where are you going to read me now?

 

In the end, if that’s what this is, “the end,” what Brad wanted was to keep me sequestered in the realm of his private obsession. He should’ve known that an up-start such as myself would never allow that. I may not receive widespread exposure in his newspaper (and not, alas, those attendant hefty paychecks that go with it) but neither am I letting his close and entirely hypocritical following of me escape public knowledge.

 

An editor, an editor of a newspaper, one might suppose, has certain obligations to his readers. One of those obligations isn’t to suppress the voice of a writer whom the editor himself apparently cannot get enough of. In the case of The Stranger, hasn’t the predictably contrarian, Hitchens-esque reverse outrage of Dan Savage, Charles Mudede, and Sean Nelson run its course? Wouldn’t new writers, writers less beholden to the same-old posturing, infuse new life into the operation? Ah, but you see, that would be upsetting the hipster status quo: those professional “outsiders” have grown so accustomed to a certain style of living, to a level of prestige that they pretend to disdain. A genuine outsider would (possibly) expose the “brand” as a canard. Seattle’s craven, neo-illiberal “alternative” press has too much at stake ever to let that happen, but that’s just between me and you and everyone we know.

 

And with that out of the way, maybe I can say a few things about a couple of the movies I mentioned earlier. Don’t forget to tip before you click away. A mere $5 from each lurker keeps the site going for another year—but that may not be enough to keep me going.

Miranda July: the flavorless flavor of the month

(Photo: IFC Films)

 

A scene from the documentary Mondovino perfectly segues into other aspects of my disenchantment. Late in the movie, after a few sequences that portray the wine critic Robert Parker as a jingoistic rube (Parker may very well amount to just that—in his office hangs framed fan mail from Ronald Reagan), Nossiter interviews a consultant at the company Enologix, a man who informs us, “I’ve had lunch with the critics. They tell me they tend to agree, and they’re proud to agree with each other.” Well, he’s talking about wine critics, but the same could be said for movie reviewers. Look at all the nodding (or is bobbing?) heads who went uniformly gaga last fall over that threadbare idiocy Sideways. In one of his few genuinely on-target notebook entries, A.O. Scott, back in January, intimated that the reason critics (especially middle-aged, white male critics) swooned over the film was the closeness in sensibility between themselves and the schmucky loser a little too convincingly inhabited by Paul Giamatti. Summer’s here, and now the horrendous Miranda July has her ill-deserved turn as poster child for the standards-less, post-postmodern, nebbishy, nerdy, hipster poseur types of either gender. She has written and directed (if those terms even apply in something as unformed and as self-consciously affectless) her first—and I hope last—feature film Me and You and Everyone We Know. The post-grunge, lockstep neo-fascists who claim to favor July’s movie, a movie simultaneously flat-footed and reprehensible, appear to be falling in line: no one has yet been able to defend her film on aesthetic or any other grounds. None of the reviews or interviews I’ve read call July on the big question her movie rather sleazily raises, then discards: what is so important to her, as an artist and as a woman, about the sexuality of children? At some point during or after watching Mondovino, a friend of mine said that Nossiter’s movie asks whether the limited taste of influential critics leads to homogenized product. In Nossiter's persuasive presentation, we understand that wines lose their individuality by the winemakers' desire for a high rating from Robert Parker, thus they cater to the prejudices of his palette. So it goes with cinema. These indie movies that are so unthinkingly adored—the ones that we’re badgered into believing are somehow brilliant works of art—are almost all bad in the same (or similar enough) ways. Think of Rushmore, Napoleon Dynamite, Adaptation, I Heart Huckabees, and now July’s film—each one a rancid example of a “style” that might be dubbed tiddlywinks nihilism. In The Life Aquatic, Bill Murray’s Captain Zissou pulls a revolver on the reporter interviewing him, because he feels threatened by a question she’s asked. The journalist, played by Cate Blanchett, is in an advanced month of pregnancy; Zissou points the gun directly at her bellyful of unborn child, and the moviemakers Wes Anderson and Noah Baumbach, snickering with glee on Aquatic’s DVD commentary track, are beside themselves with how “funny” Murray supposedly was in this scene. In Seattle, conversely, a woman who was adamant in her pursuit of me for close to a year (yes, she’s a movie reviewer, and yes, I gave her a ride home one morning when she was too inebriated to drive herself) no longer speaks to me, because I’m not towing the party line on Miranda July. My denunciation of the movie at the Siffblog (in which I insinuated that only a charlatan stoked from substance abuse could locate of a trace of profundity within July’s ditzed-out longueurs) offended her (and other local luminaries, too, it seems, none of whom are noted for an appreciation of biting satire). Her anger over what I wrote has revealed the lady in question, a good liberal Democrat, as quite the totalitarian. She gave me the boot from her own publication, and she tried—unsuccessfully—to get me banned from press screenings. So much for fostering dissent in blue Seattle. If asked, nonetheless, this aggressive defender of hipster moral values couldn’t elucidate why she likes Me and You and Everyone We Know; the reasons to me are fairly obvious.

 

Down with the ship: Bill Murray in The Life Aquatic (Photo: Touchstone Pictures)

 

My ex-colleague, the movie fan turned scribe of capsule reviews, responds to the film because it features at its center an unattractive woman of unabashed dorkiness (to whom she and others like her can relate), and because July’s scatological fixations—the child in the chat room, trading excrement “back and forth” anally with an unseen adult—appeal to the infantile, smutty sensibilities of the supposedly “hip” persons who still respond (as perhaps they might have as teenagers) to something “dirty.” My ex-colleague might, at best, mutter defensively, “Well, it’s like really cool, ya know,” just as the press attaché Nancy Light, in Mondovino, asked to explain what she means when she refers to Robert Mondavi as a “philosopher,” can’t think of anything to say beyond “the philosophy of wine,” and looks brought up short by the mere question.

 

Then there’s the telescope of irony, through which July gazes at the suburban ciphers she assembles on-screen: this overused technique of employing distance as a cover for the filmmaker’s shallowness already feels numbingly familiar from Todd Solondz and his imitators.

 

In his rave review, Roger Ebert soft-pedals the movie. He writes: “Now imagine these two characters, named Christine (Miranda July) and Richard (John Hawkes) as they walk down the street. She suggests that the block they are walking down is their lives. And so now they are halfway down the street and halfway through their lives, and before long they will be at the end. It is impossible to suggest how poetic this scene is; when it’s over, you think, that was a perfect scene, and no other scene can ever be like it.”

 

Thou shalt not take anti-anxiety meds: Scientologist Cruise explains it all for you

(Photo: Paramount)

 

Contrary to Ebert’s starry account, the scene registers as perfect only in the sense of being perfectly dopey. I’ll agree that it’s “impossible” to describe how “poetic” Christine and Richard’s exchange is, because it isn’t poetic at all. Granted, this moment in the film provides a respite from all the talk about shit and blowjobs that comprises the remainder of July’s awful script; this, however, doesn’t make it poetic. Ebert probably knows as much about genuine poetry as Nancy Light does about the rigors of philosophic thought—which is to say, nothing.

 

One of the arresting things Nossiter does in Mondovino, before his film literally and figuratively goes to the dogs, is to show us we’ve become a culture that speaks almost entirely in slogans. Near the end of the movie, the camera brings a handsome Italian man into the frame. He appears to be in his early-to-mid-30s. A vintner who leases space to a critic from Wine Spectator (no conflict of interest there!), the man has piercing pale blue eyes and jet-black hair. Well-dressed and seated in a small café, he has an air of having something intelligent to say. Instead, by means of promoting the wine he makes: “It delivers the Tuscan way of living.” I was devastated that he turns out to be a commercial. A few scenes later, the same fellow gives his nod of approval to the Berlusconi government.

 

The interviewees in Mondovino who do have compelling and heartfelt words to express are, many of them, in their 70s and 80s, and the shadow hovers that they will soon be gone and all we’ll have left are glib sellouts who have no real thoughts to share. If nothing else, Nossiter had the good luck to preserve the courtliness of the Sardinian winemaker Battista Columbu on film. He’s a joy to listen to. The aged Columbu, a retired politician, reminisces about a pre-globalization era when his family’s wine Malvasia di Bosa was only available locally. He speaks of Sardinians giving bottles of it as gifts to friends who came visiting from elsewhere, and there’s a romance to these memories that you can almost palpably savor. – NPT

 

July 17, 2005

 

Movies into Film

© 2005, N.P. Thompson

npt (at) moviesintofilm (dot) com

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