The Encyclopedia of Film Criticism - Olivia Collette

Olivia Collette

Since becoming agnostic, I’ve often said that I preferred it when I believed in a god, because it meant believing in a magical afterlife…When I die, I probably still won’t believe in god, at least not with any certainty. But I will no doubt wish that I did.

Influences: "Roger Ebert was probably the greatest influence, and he inspired me in a couple of ways. Firstly, and I say this in “My Favorite Roger”, he was a terrific writer, and one I turned to often when I was studying film theory. The second thing he made me appreciate was how to be a better reader. Even if I only knew him for 3 short years, I can’t begin to express what a privilege it was to be one of the people in his entourage in those later years.

Another influence is Matt Zoller Seitz, who I started reading after meeting him at Ebertfest 2011. I doubt he realizes this, but I nearly peed myself when he first complimented my writing, and then asked me to contribute to the Grand Budapest Hotel book, which is sort of an appendix to his book The Wes Anderson Collection. I wrote the chapter on music. I especially enjoy his TV recaps, because while most recappers tell you the order of things that happened in an episode, Matt tells you what was really going on. He talks about the layers rather than the events. And then there’s how he does it, which is just so many levels of good. 

Finally, there’s Odie Henderson and Steven Boone. They have very different styles of writing, and they’re both equally captivating. I especially recommend Odie’s Silicon Valley recaps and everything Boone’s written for Capital New York. Every now and then, Odie and Boone write together in a kind of epistolary blog post, which, for me, is an absolute treat. We haven’t necessarily worked together, but we’ve had the pleasure of talking to each other live, and the exchanges are incredible. They shape my writing because as a writer, I strive to have a voice as distinct as theirs. So I guess what I’m really saying is, I’m lucky to have worked with people I also admire greatly."


Proud champion of: Norman Jewison, Night and Fog, Jesus Christ Superstar, Ari Folman, Moonstruck, Tous les matins du monde, Ron Fricke, Celda 211, El laberinto del fauno, A Serious Man, Michael Slovis, Yin shi nan nu, Wandâfuru raifu, Pedro Almodóvar, Pleasantville, Federico Fellini, Suspiria, Volver, ¡Átame!, Denys Arcand, Pepi, Luci, Bom y otras chicas del montón, Brian Froud, Koyaanisqatsi, Persepolis, Wes Anderson, Julie/Julia, Lee Daniels, The NeverEnding Story, The Dark Crystal, Michel Gondry, The Doinel Cycle, Agnès Varda

Contributed to: The McGill News, Caustic Truths, Journal Place Publique, enRoute, eHow, RogerEbert.com, Montreal Gazette, Mondo*Arc, The Spectator Arts Blog, World Film Locations (San Francisco), Sparksheet, Indiewire/Press Play, Urbania, Huffington Post Québec and her writing is collected at oliviacollette.com


Despite a gift for it, Montreal-based Olivia Collette (October 19, 1976-) doesn't consider herself a film critic: "I feel I’m a journalist first, and an art critic second. And I say “art critic” because I’ve written about music, cinema and TV. And I put the emphasis on “journalist” because I’m much more interested in a variety of topics that shape society, not just art; things like linguistics, architecture, urban planning, transportation, politics; stuff that’s not necessarily artsy."

"What made it possible for me to even dabble in criticism was a combination of things: namely writing, studying film theory in university, and studying music before going into film theory. Even when I was studying music, it became clear that I was far more interested in deconstructing an art medium than being the artist. Although there are parts of me that still need those artistic outlets, writing will always be the most fulfilling thing for me."

"I feel that I got started with film essays before getting the chance to review anything. I really like to analyze the shit out of things, so I suppose the first time I did that, and made a significant mark, was when I wrote an essay in university about the visual theme of chess in Jesus Christ Superstar. It wasn’t the first film essay I wrote, but it was the one that made the most waves. My professor really liked the idea, and my cousin, who’s a religious scholar, used my premise to dig into representations of Christ in pop culture. "

"The first time I published any kind of review, it was in a community newspaper called Journal Place Publique, and it was about Yagayah, a play co-written by d’bi young and Naila Belvett. The first time I started to commit to writing about pop culture was on my blog, and it was with this entry, which I followed up with this piece [on devilry in the movies]. And eventually led to this piece [on video games], which continues to be the most popular on my blog: The first time I wrote for Roger Ebert about film was with a piece on the role of architecture in Inception."

Olivia identifying herself as a journalist is the key to understanding her film writing. Her pieces have an honesty, not only about the fundamental form and image in front of her, but about herself and what she brings to every piece of art she encounters. Kent Jones, among others, has frequently called for, to put it simplistically, people to actually write about the movie they're watching, and Olivia is one of the few writers who rarely strays from what can be known about the film, about its reality, and about how it achieves its effect on the viewer. Her prose, candid, funny and relatable, lowers a bridge for readers, offering an easy, rewarding rapport. She thoroughly researches the movies she watches to fully engross herself in the artist's intentions and palette. Her endlessly fascinating look at religion informs her writing on film, in that both approach something unknowable with two feet firmly planted on the ground. She offers the safety of the rational world while examining gigantic, often terrifying subjects, offering her healthily skeptical POV as a way into discussing sacred cows, from religion to sexism to blockbusters. Every subject is treated equally, with the same scrutiny and openness. More concisely, Olivia Collette is fearless. 


On Laurence Anyways: 
The film's biggest strength is dealing with a taboo as if it wasn't. When Laurence starts dressing in women's clothing, she looks less like Jenna Talackova and more like an awkward man in a skirt, because it takes time to get comfortable with who you are. Eventually she returns to pants because a dress doesn't make the lady. Despite her ability for great tenderness, Laurence can also be selfish and rude. She's not an angelic transgender heroine; she's just exceedingly normal.


On A Hijacking:
The bulk of the stress revolves around 12 phone calls between Peter and Omar. Connor is always present to make sure each conversation never gets frantic. The one time things reach Samuel L. Jackson pitch, there are immediate consequences. The film earns Dogme points with handheld cinematography and uncomfortable, sometimes inefficient lighting. But Lindholm wanted to achieve maximum realism. So the boat scenes were filmed on a real ship in the Indian Ocean. A satellite phone was set up on the boat to make phone calls to the actors in Denmark, so echoes and lagging weren't scripted and the reactions were often improvised. Gary Skjoldmose-Porter, who plays Connor, is an actual hostage negotiator. He convinced Lindholm not to create a plasma screen-filled situation room and instead opt for a small conference set-up and sticking red tape on the phone the CEO would use. Other non-actors include 4 of the crewmembers of the MV Rozen, which was hijacked by Somali pirates in 2007. "Violence is expensive," is the simple — and loaded — thing that director Alrick Brown said during Ebertfest 2011, when someone asked him why there was a lack of bloodshed in "Kinyarwanda," a movie about the 1994 Rwandan genocide. That's why all the violence in "A Hijacking" occurs off-screen.


On The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey:
Some people hate "Dune" because it's nothing like the novel, but venerate "The Shining" for the same reason. You can't please everyone when you adapt a book to film, so you're better off hoping you'll please anyone. Even if it's just a handful, it's those few who will be your fiercest defenders against the purists. So let's start with what Peter Jackson's "The Hobbit" isn't: If you read the book, it's not the book you read. It includes plot elements from "The Hobbit," details that weren't fleshed out in "The Lord of the Rings" movies, bits from the "LOTR" appendices, and stuff that was created for the sake of this new trilogy.

We all know why, too. As a standalone story, "The Hobbit" had enough material for just one movie: a Hobbit named Bilbo Baggins is recruited by the wizard Gandalf and 13 dwarves to reclaim the kingdom that was stolen from them by a dragon; along the way, the company fights dangerous trolls and orcs, while Bilbo finds a ring that makes him invisible; it all leads to a final conflict. The End. 

That brevity won't do for such a lucrative franchise. And Hollywood economics dictates this must be a trilogy. Sporadic insertions of the Middle-Earth mythology were the only way to stretch the otherwise succinct saga over three films. Just the same, any film--whether it's adapted from a novel, comic book, TV series or video game--deserves to be reviewed as a separate entity, and on its own merits.

The Innocents

I've been the author of a series over at RogerEbert.com called The Unloved for the last ten months. It's been a great opportunity to kind of figure out what cinematic tendencies most effect me. I've been building a home out of the grammar of some of cinema's most notorious failures. This month's installment, M. Night Shyamalan's The Village, is a film I have over a decade's worth of history with. So I released a version that's all analysis of the elegiac moral tale over at the sight. Below is a version that touches on my time as an extra in the movie and how being close to a film can cloud your judgment of it. It took me a long time before I could really see what a beautiful film this was. It's the one film of his that I still return to, even though I have unending respect for The Sixth Sense and Unbreakable. It's in many ways a prelude to another American masterpiece, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. 

The Unloved - The Village - Director's Cut from Scout Tafoya on Vimeo.

The Encyclopedia of Film Criticism: A.A. Dowd

A.A. Dowd

When school and church fail him, the pictures are always there; the local movie house becomes his sanctuary—a substitute chapel and classroom, where enlightenment and education are transmitted directly from the screen to his seat in the balcony. For Bud (and, by extension, [Terence] Davies), cinema is more than escape. It’s a lens through which to see the world. Dyed-in-the-wool cinephiles, for whom personal and filmic history sometimes entwine, can surely relate.

Contributed to: Film Monthly, In Review Online, Time Out Chicago, The A.V. Club

Noted champion of: Claire Denis, Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Joachim Trier, Wong Kar-Wai, Bruce Baillie, Saul Levine, Béla Tarr, Spike Jonze, John Cassavetes, Jacques Tati, Tsai Ming-liang, the Farrelly brothers.

Influences: "I had a college film criticism course at Michigan State University that introduced me to everyone from Sarris and Kael to Farber and Rosenbaum. It was definitely a formative educational experience, but if I’m being honest, my exposure to criticism reaches back further—to a childhood spent pouring over Roger Ebert collections and those helpful capsule video guides. (Terror On Tape, by James O'Neill, was very useful for a young horror buff.) And I’ve been reading Entertainment Weekly since I was 9-years-old; while I don’t necessary share Owen Gleiberman’s critical sensibilities, I still aspire to his way with words. Few contemporary critics have as fluid and inviting a style."

Andrew Alexander Dowd, Alex to his friends, was born January 7, 1984 in Oxnard, California. He spent most of his childhood in Lansing, Michigan and wrote his earliest reviews ("pithy capsules for new releases, often several weeks after they’d opened") for his high school news paper. At Columbia College Chicago he began studying and writing criticism regularly. His first professional gig was at a website called Film Monthly, but came into his own as a staff critic at In Review Online, under then-editor Sam C. Mac. "I owe a huge debt to Sam C. Mac, who not only believed in my talent before anyone else really did but also gave me a laptop when my computer was stolen. For real." He wrote for the Time Out Chicago until the print edition was put out to pasture, at which point he took over as film editor of The A.V. Club, taking over for Scott Tobias. It's here that he's let his creativity run wild. An auteurist with an accessible style, Dowd's been mapping out film history for readers, one article at a time. His reviews, long and short, act as pocket biographies of the men and women who've brought them to life. His reviews are well-rounded narratives, allowing neophytes an entryway into something as complicated as the career of Pedro Costa or the ins and outs of the Cannes Film Festival, which he covers in his indispensable feature Palme Thursday. His Ebert-esque everyman's unpretentiousness and affability ("I’d much rather watch Die Hard or Beetlejuice or Who Framed Roger Rabbit than the 1988 Palme winner, Pelle The Conqueror.") make him the ideal critic to lead The A.V. Club's film department, which has always backed up its bold, smartass humour with intelligence and an achingly personal relationship with pop culture. He's also without question the current critic I'd recommend to anyone looking to get into film or film criticism.

On Groundhog Day
Two decades on, Groundhog Day feels timeless, partially because its sole backdrop, Punxsutawney, is a town largely untouched by pop-culture trends. But for all the universal points the film has to make about people’s capacity for change, it also works marvelously as a rebuke to the prevailing sarcasm of its era. To that end, who better than Murray, one of the most sardonic voices in comedy, to go through a metaphysical attitude adjustment? The actor slowly peels away Phil’s defense mechanisms, until the ironic distance he puts between himself and the world has shrank away into nothingness. No wonder Murray turned to drama and seriocomic indies a few years later. As a comedian, where could he go from a movie that trotted out all of his best tricks and then denounced them in the name of enlightenment? Like Phil, Murray had to move forward after Groundhog Day.

On The Wolf of Wall Street
At three hours, The Wolf Of Wall Street is Scorsese’s longest movie (barely edging out Casino). It’s also his crassest, his loudest, maybe his funniest—an aggressively broad satire of American ambition, the full meal to which Spring Breakers, Pain & Gain, and The Bling Ring were merely appetizers. Such reckless indulgence provides the director his own excuse to indulge, and Wolf pushes his showboating stylistic tics and love for loutish behavior to the edge of their acceptable limits. But there’s a cracked logic, a genius almost, to the film’s amped-up irreverence. Maybe laughter isn’t just the best medicine, but the only sensible response to this much brazen amorality. From Travis Bickle to Jake La Motta to the Italian and Irish gangsters of his crime epics, Scorsese has always been hooked on bad boys. And Belfort, the founder of shady brokerage firm Stratton Oakmont, may be the baddest of them all. No, he never murders anyone (though he comes close at least once), but in his ruthless consumption—his endless need for more fixes, more women, more everything—he may be the most unscrupulous character Marty’s ever built a movie around. 

On 4 Months, 3 Weeks, And 2 Days
It’s context, ultimately, that lends 4 Months, 3 Weeks, And 2 Days its full, cathartic power. Like most of the films lumped together into the Romanian New Wave, this one tangentially concerns the reign of Ceauşescu, a long-gone tyrant whose influence is still being felt in contemporary Romania. Crucially, Mungiu hasn’t just set his film during the waning years of the leader’s rule, right before he was ousted from office and executed by the people. He’s also made his heroine a university student. Either literally or symbolically, that aligns her with the demonstrators—many of them students—who helped fan the flames of dissent in 1989, when Ceauşescu sealed his own fate by ordering security forces to fire on unarmed civilians. When Marinca turns, in that final look to the camera, is there more than just weariness scrawled across her face? Is that the spark of revolution dancing in her eyes? By looking at the movie through the lens of history, its day from hell becomes the straw that broke the dictator’s back. Improbably, in this gauntlet of misery, a glimmer of hope emerges—and a gripping film becomes a great one.

The Encyclopedia of Film Criticism: Danny Bowes

Danny Bowes

One of the most frustrating stereotypes about film critics is the libel that all they do is tear down filmmakers' work. The reality is that anyone willing to spend the time it takes to be a film critic -- even if just for a year or two -- simply has to be getting something out of the investment.

Contributed to: Premiere, Tor.com, TruTV.com, Hudak on Hollywood, Movie Mezzanine, Yahoo! Movies, IndieWire, The Atlantic, RogerEbert.com, The Dissolve, Salt Lake City Weekly, Film School Rejects, and his personal blog, Movies By Bowes.

Noted Champion of: Space Jail, Mr. Go, Maya Deren, John Ford, F.W. Murnau, François Truffaut, Alain Resnais, the Cannon Group, Kathryn Bigelow, Farah Khan.

Influences: Pauline Kael, Roger Ebert, Howard Waldrop ("less for film criticism per se than a particular attitude toward film that came forth in his fiction"), Scott Tobias "and the other fine folks formerly of The AV Club and now The Dissolve."

New York based Danny Bowes (October 26th, 1978-) makes film and theatre pieces when he isn't writing criticism of many kinds. A constant (and constantly humourous) presence on Twitter, Bowes is deeply connected to the continuing saga of film and film criticism, bringing wit and enthusiasm to the stories behind classic films as well as the state of modern TV and movies. He started writing for Premiere, which led to many other gigs, many of them online, including dedicated himself to reviewing Bollywood films for Rogerebert.com, giving them attention they aren't often afforded elsewhere. He communicates a love for his favourite auteurs that extends to their making project choices that play to their strengths. He lets his personal obsessions and loves drift into his writing because the success of the medium is personal to him. His writing on the state of criticism and his words in tribute of Roger Ebert  aren't just relevant, they're deeply touching. He knows better than most that one must have love for the medium to keep writing criticism because it isn't always a rewarding profession. He has an infectious conversational style, illuminating every aspect of a production with such glee that you can practically see his eyes lighting up as he discusses everything right with Kiss Me Deadly and Buckaroo Banzai. He's willing to go to bat not merely for films or artists he admires, but for the idea of a rational, civil critical conversation, an endangered species in 2014, making him a most vital voice.

On Kiss Me Deadly
That’s the biggest change made by Bezzerides and Aldrich: highlighting the fact that Mike Hammer, as played by Ralph Meeker, is not an exceedingly smart man, and that he has very few qualms about asking those close to him to put themselves at risk for his sake. He takes an unsettling pleasure in violence. But in spite of all this, he has his redeeming qualities. Although not the sharpest tool in the shed, he can nonetheless add two and two together, even if three and three is a bit ambitious. And — condescending as this may sound in 2011, in 1955 this was kind of a big deal — he gets along comfortably and intimately with people who have accents and aren’t white. At a time when most hard-boiled dicks tossed the n-word around like it was punctuation (including, distressingly, my beloved Philip Marlowe in Farewell, My Lovely), Meeker’s Hammer is on a friendly enough basis with a black bartender and lounge singer that they’re the company in which he chooses to mourn a fallen friend. While by no means am I suggesting that we canonize St. Mike Hammer the Racially Tolerant, it’s a humanizing touch that the character needs, and it’s a great improvement over Spillane’s version of the character. And Meeker captures all the tricky nuances quite well.

On Dhoom 3
Movie stars were originally called stars for the bright, glittery aspects of the heavenly bodies in question, but there's another quality that true stars, especially those of Aamir Khan's caliber possess, which is gravitational pull. "Dhoom: 3" doesn't attempt to resist this force in any way, with only the bare minimum of pretense that the "Dhoom" movies are Abhishek Bachchan/Uday Chopra buddy comedies anymore, putting the focus squarely on the story of Sahir Khan (played as a child by Siddharth Nigam and as an adult by Aamir Khan), a circus performer seeking revenge against Anderson (Andrew Bricknell), the cruel banker who ruined his father's life's work for no good reason..... The second half of "Dhoom: 3" features a surprisingly adroit, if not terribly subtle, interrogation into the the morality of operating outside the law for a good cause. The movie stacks the deck a bit by having the banker be such a loathsome (and implicitly racist) bastard, but Aamir Khan and Abhishek Bachchan do a compelling job exploring the various moral and ethical colors involved in the cops-and-robbers game. Khan brings out the best in Bachchan as an actor, with his performance in "Dhoom: 3" finally shorn of the awkwardness and dullness into which his work in the first two movies all too often regressed. This, again, is a testament to the control Khan exerts over the movie: never heavy-handed, but absolute.


On Christopher Nolan
After this Friday's The Dark Knight Rises, director Christopher Nolan will stop making Batman moves—and that's a good thing. That's not because his have been bad films. Quite the opposite. The boldness of Nolan's storytelling, the seriousness and conscientiousness with which he addressed comic books as a form, and the degree to which he interwove comics conventions with cinematic ones, showed the world just how great comic-book movies could be. Without delving into too many spoiler-y particulars, Nolan has concluded his Batman trilogy on a fairly definitive note, and has said all he has to say as a writer and filmmaker about Batman as a character and (even more importantly) as a symbol. This is why even though both Batman Begins and The Dark Knight were enormously successful with audiences and critics, and The Dark Knight Rises is almost certainly poised to continue that trend, it's time for Nolan to tackle a new challenge and for Batman to be re-imagined yet again. Nolan, starting with his second feature, 2000's Memento, has delivered a string of intelligent pop movies that are meticulously constructed, have a wide sweep, and are morally and formally complex. He's said that he considers Stanley Kubrick, Ridley Scott, and Michael Mann to be his influences, and you can see the traits he shares with those directors: a flair for making bleakness engaging rather than ponderous, an interest in haunted, driven protagonists, and particularly in Kubrick's case, a knack for adaptation. Nolan's films deal heavily with memory, perception, and the knotty, amorphous definitions of right and wrong; they're not terribly profound in the way they go about exploring these subjects, but their subjects are worthy ones that aren't tackled all that often in mainstream (increasingly expensive) films.

The Encyclopedia of Film Criticism: James Kang & Critics Round Up

James Kang & Critics Round Up

Noted Champion of: MUBI's Notebook, Reverse Shot, Cinema Scope, LOLA, Senses of Cinema, desistfilm, La Furia Umana.

Influences: "On my approach to aggregation: David Hudson, Tom Spurgeon. 
Formative influences on my taste in film: Roger Ebert, A. O. Scott, Elvis Mitchell. 
Current strongest influences on the way I interpret films: Richard Brody, Jonathan Rosenbaum, Michael Sicinski.
Favorite critics no longer with us: Manny Farber, James Agee, Jay Scott."

Critics Round Up is the brainchild of James Kang (1985-) who is very careful in maintaining his personal privacy, which is why fewer details about him are available. CRU is a vital, incredibly valuable resource for both casual and serious moviegoers. Those who have longed for a more discerning alternative to critic aggregates like Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic, which don't question or interpret their sources, can rest easy that someone has finally made a site that cares about the nature of criticism. Kang trusts critics with reputations and serious cinephiles using the film diary website Letterboxd. 

From the sites statement of intent: Critics Round Up is the first movie review aggregator to select critics and publications based on merit instead of popularity. Merit, on this site, is defined as generally being friendly to arthouse and international cinema and resisting stagnant ways of thinking.

The purpose of CRU in a nutshell: "GOAL #1 To provide an alternative to the aggregated numbers of more popular sites....GOAL #2 To serve as a link archive." And on that score, Kang posts excerpts from and links to every review he includes, as well as news about new releases and the actors and directors orbiting them. Kang has a detailed set of guidelines for CRU which explain how the site works and what makes it different from other aggregators. 


source: email interview

The Encyclopedia of Film Criticism: Calum Marsh

Calum Marsh

Whether it awakens any inner psychic energies is unclear. But it does, I think, offer a way to the sublime.

Contributed to: Sight & Sound, Esquire, The Atlantic, The Village Voice, Film Comment, Maxim Magazine, Cineaste, Little White Lies, Fandor, Hazlit Magazine, Mubi, Slant Magazine, The LA Review of Books, Details, Playboy The Paris Review, Reverse Shot, L Magazine, In Review Online, Film.com.

Noted Champion of: The 'Kim's Video' generation of American Independent Cinema

Though born in Doncaster, England, Calum Marsh (September 24th, 1986-) has spent a lot of his life in Canada. He majored in Film Studies and Philosophy at Carleton University in Ottowa and moved to Toronto in 2012. He wrote about film for many years before turning pro in 2013. On his professional move: "I felt inspired to write criticism after reading Jonathan Rosenbaum's reviews from the Chicago Reader, which he'd been digitizing on his personal website for several years and which for a long I read every day." A free-lancer, his first writing was for In Review Online ("unless you count my brief stint at my college newspaper, The Charlatan: I reviewed [Oliver Stone's] Alexander in 2004") and has since moved onto over a dozen publications. He has little time for expected narrative beats (Fox News called him out for his review of Lone Survivor, in which he bemoaned not only the film's pro-military stance but its reliance on tired, formulaic direction), is unafraid to pick a fight and takes particular glee in standing up for the brave and the bold in independent film. As willing to go to bat for Neveldine/Taylor and John Carpenter as Laz Diaz and Hong Sang-Soo, he loves standing up for the unloved and the undiscovered. In an article on indie actress Kate Lyn Sheil, he pays homage to an entire generation of indie filmmakers including Sophia Takal, Amy Seimetz and Alex Ross Perry, many of whom hung around and worked at Kim's, a landmark New York video store. 

His writing has a swift tempo and twists and turns in a style most redolent of rhythmic gymnastics. You can almost see the words waving like a length of ribbon caught by a strong breeze. 

On Norte, The End of History: 
It's a dark irony of revolutions that those best-educated in their rhetoric are nearly always the least equipped to carry them out; it's rarely in the temperament of the intellectual to take to the streets, however dogmatically he articulates the need to. 

On American Hustle:
Such winking, smirking, spray-tanned pageantry, such bluster, to make a point children understand. So we're all groping toward success with a fake name and a bad perm — but this is merely thesis-as-insulation against the obvious criticism, which is that the filmmaking itself is phony. Comparing this even unfavorably to Scorsese is too high a compliment. This isn't second-rate Goodfellas; it's second-rate The Cooler. This trifle, this trash, is what we're choosing to laud now? 

On Upstream Color:
It's taken nine years for Carruth to follow up on the promise of his byzantine debut, during which time he might have penned a nesting-doll epic so structurally elaborate that it couldn't be parsed without recourse to diagrammatic analysis—a practice in which Carruth's admirers would no doubt happily indulge. 

Influences: Other than Rosenbaum, "I read Ebert with some regularity in college but otherwise felt drawn more to literary and cultural critics -- Martin Amis and John Updike, especially. I subscribed for several years to The New Yorker, which I think probably shaped my style more than anything else. I am a voracious reader of fiction and have a longstanding interest in art history."

Source: Email interview

The Encyclopedia of Film Criticism: Simon Abrams

Simon Abrams

....I knew there was a personality making those movies, and was instantly attracted to it.

Contributed to: Comics Journal, L Magazine, Slant Magazine, The AV Club, Esquire, Rogerebert.com, Press Play, Village Voice, The New York Press, Extended Cut.

Noted champion of: Paolo Sorrentino, Southland Tales, John Boorman, Spike Lee, Paul Verhoeven, David Cronenberg, Johnnie To, Roman Polanski.

Influences: Elvis Mitchell, Harlan Ellison, J. Hoberman.

Queens-born Simon Abrams (January 24th, 1987-) started writing for The Comics Journal before he'd graduated High School. His break-through came when he ran a cover story on Robert Kirkman before The Walking Dead TV show based on his graphic novels had aired. He wrote his first film reviews for Washington Square News and The New York Press before moving onto Slant, L Magazine and many others. Abrams currently writes for Rogerebert.com, Esquire and The Village Voice. He confidently stands up for loud and charismatic voices behind the camera like Paul Verhoeven and Spike Lee. On that score he very recently published an in-depth look at the making of RoboCop for Esquire Magazine and an interview with father and son genre directors John & Peter Hyams for The Village Voice. He doesn't suffer mediocrity gladly and is quick to cut pretenders to horror/cult infamy down to size in singularly playful fashion. That same ruthless and efficient prose is equally as engrossing when standing up for his idea of a modern masterpiece.

On You're Next:
Watching "You're Next" is like eating a tin-foil-wrapped tray of leftovers. It's a hamburger, so you shouldn't expect steak. But the contents of your tray are: a half-eaten, microwave-nuked cheeseburger; leaves of wilting, translucent lettuce; slices of yellowing, sickly tomato; and floppy, soggy french fries. Consuming this product is not entirely unpleasant since it's almost impossible to screw up such a short order...It looks like what you ordered, but it's only satisfying if you settle for much less.

On Drug War:
That ambiguity is what fuels "Drug War": there is no deal with unbreakable rules because every deal is brokered and decided on a whim. To's films are usually about macho, playful contests of wills. "Drug War" is no exception. Cops and the crooks constantly try to one up each other, as in an unsettling scene where Zhang, while undercover, has to prove his false identity by snorting cocaine. Each encounter hinges on characters' tics, like the habitual, mirthless laugh Zhang adopts in order to mimic a crook's mannerisms. In To's movies, everything's a game, and the game in "Drug War" is high-stakes poker where everyone bluffs as much as they can afford to.

source: twitter interview

A Beautiful Legacy

Hello there! I have a piece up over at RogerEbert.com about the Cannes Film Festival and its importance to cinematic evolution. It's a multi-part job and part one went out yesterday and part two just went up a few moments ago (and here's part three). It's my first foray into short form video essays, or factual documentary criticism, and I wager there's room for improvement, but I'd sure appreciate your eyes and ears for their duration. The Cannes FIlm Festival has always fascinated me; the line-up swerving from harmonic to contrapuntal through the years has much to say about the state of film in a given year. If charting cinema's stylistic and technical evolution from the 50s to today, you could do worse than to look at what's caused a stir on the Croisette over the years. I've read Mike D'Angelo's Cannes coverage ravenously since 2009, and indeed it was festival review dispatches that Spring in many different print magazines that really got me hooked on film criticism as an artform and a science. Those fellas were looking to pick a fight, and it was thrilling. I'd sit at Trident books on rainy days between classes and read Film Comment or Cinema Scope. Defenses of Bruno Dumont's retreat from his usual style, before I knew what his usual style was. Furious takedowns of Tarantino and Lars Von Trier for attempting to do the job of the critic in their movies! The guts of the seventh art were out for me to see, and I got a good look at how everything worked before tucking them back in and getting out the thread and needle.

My good friend Sean Van Deuren and I, as well as this site's own Fox Johnson, Noah Aust, Alexandra Maiorino, Alysha Joslyn and Kyle McDonald, watched the bulk of the 2010 competition when we ran Emerson College's Films From The Margin group. The memories of watching Certified Copy, On Tour, Biutiful & Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives and then talking about them, are the most important thing about my time at Emerson College. Those memories combined into a crazy undertaking when I organized the Totally Illegal Film Festival: watch the entire 1968 Cannes Film Festival line-up and give out the prizes that the jury never did. Of course, the end goal was forgotten as I got swept up in the fascinating, frustrating experience of watching two dozen films that the world had all but forgotten about. For the record: Palm d'Or goes to Kuroneko, Grand Prix to The Castle, script goes to The Firemen's Ball, director goes to Miklós Jancsó for not one, but two amazing films, actress Lisa Gastoni for Grazie, Zia, actor, a tie between Albert Finney for Charlie Bubbles and George C. Scott for Petulia and the Jury Prize to The Long Day's Dying (a room of very vocal people were stunned into silenced by it).

And it was all of this, flying around in the attic that is my brain, that helped me create the essays.

It's an incredible honor to have my work run on Roger Ebert's website. The man's influence is incalculable and for most people he was the face of falling in love with movies. He made us all want to be better, more open and articulate movie lovers. Sean used to watch his show as a kid (I confess that my first prolonged exposure came from his cameos on The Critic, a show that defined my childhood) and it was Sean who got me into the writing of Ignatiy Vishnevetsky, who took over on the revamped At The Movies. It's Sean I thought about when this opportunity presented itself, because he is an Ebert Fan, a bigger one than me. And Ebert fans rightly have high standards for their critics, so anything I do under this banner has to be the best work I know how to do. Being a part of the Ebert community for these few short hours has been an incredible feeling, one I'll never forget.

Hearing Voices: Thoughts on To The Wonder

I'm in exactly the same theatre I was in when Tree of Life had its first public screening in the US, the basement of a Landmark. I remember the anticipation then, of everyone, including the ushers, being nervous about what we were all about to see. This was an event and the sold out theatre proved it. A man came out ten minutes before the film started and reminded us we could buy concessions upstairs. No one had ever and no one has yet to do that again before a movie screening. Ned Hinkle used to remind Brattle patrons that they could buy beer, but that was because they'd only just had the bar put in. This was different, the man in front of me was shaking almost imperceptibly, as if his job were on the line and this movie's performance was what was going to make the difference. Two years later To The Wonder is about to start and the theatre is all but empty. 

It's a little earlier in the day this time, and there are more screenings planned later today (shorter runtime, more daily showings) and finally I see a man walk down the aisles. He isn't nervous. There having trouble with the DCP and would we go upstairs to wait for the next screening. Sure. I have a half hour to kill now and I'm running through all the pressnotes I've read in my head. I'm remembering Dan Kasman and Fernando Croce's correspondences about it, their measured praise. And then I remember Darren Hughes; "Where's all the shit?" The film was too clean, too pretty, too itself for Darren, who still didn't hate it. But then, even if you go in with the wrong mind for it, as Stephanie Zacharek did, and find it obnoxiously self-indulgent and embarrassing, you can't hate all of it, right? It then occurs to me, Zacharek is changing publications. So is Scott Tobias. Will this be the last film they review before the move? Like all Malick, it's a road film, so this would be a fitting departure for them, but I won't know that til later. The movie starts and I can't give this another thought.  

It begins with digital. Digital images, no mistaking them. Has he embraced this? A small camera wielded by a character, man-made creation, as opposed to universal creation. But they rarely resurface. The first real shot is perfect: a woman crossing a train's tray table to be literally on the lap of and in the face of the man she has a crush on. Shot in that improbable, incredibly defined, wide angle that Malick and Emmanuel Lubezki mastered for The Tree of Life. These are people. They're in love. They effortlessly reign over the frame, divine to their director. The france stuff is new for Malick. His previous films start with undeniable force and assertion. This is about a boy who changed my life, a man who murders his boss, an American on an island he clearly doesn't belong on, a ship discovering america, a cosmic whisper and the death of a boy. Here, just people, if the most well dressed people in his canon. Clearly just people: their footprints vanish in the mud in Normandy. They soon leave France for America. A mistake. 

Affleck is Gary Cooper. Maybe his best performance. He isn't speaking, and Malick knows if he talks too much then he's Ben Affleck, moviestar, and not a man with problems. His posture is different, haunched, tense and masculine, but it's a perfectly forced masculinity. It's not his, it's borrowed. Affleck gets so much right. He's a real person. He reminds me of someone I know, right down to his trouble with women. First Brad Pitt, now Ben Affleck. In remaking movie stars in the image of people he knew, Malick's finding people I know, too. People, not characters. It's Malick who makes them human, and then Lubezki makes them gods. In Tree of Life, the two men were god, looking at creation and its most insignificant organisms. There, they observed. Here they worship. The people are titans. Affleck as Cooper is a monument. He can't say anything to Kurylenko's face; he's spent years not being able or feeling welcome to articulate feeling like this. Kurylenko is a marvel. She, like Affleck, has never been better and she's a fine addittion to Malick's voiceover artists. Maybe my favourite. I think about Matt Zoller Seitz' essays on Malick, and his talking with Peter Labuza about voiceover. Did he use the word contrapuntal? Or am I imagining that? Does this count? I suppose not as they do compliment each other, the voice and the images. Except... except for the subtitles. When Rachel McAdams and Ben Affleck join the unconscious fray, their words float as well as anything, but Javier Bardem's beautifully lisping Spanish and Kurylenko's otherworldly French have to show up on screen for us to see. Does this interrupt the images. Do they pull you away from the rhythm? I wonder what Matt makes of it? 

Then the film breaks. It's digital, so it doesn't really, but the technology is so new that we don't even have words for when it breaks down. That's a troubling thought and I fear for the future of film, fleetingly. We see Affleck pick Kurylenko up and swing her once, twice, then the all the colors turn a different shade of red and he keeps on swinging. Then the screen goes black. I go to get someone but another patron beats me to the projectionist whose down in the lobby. I think about Mark Kermode and the way he talks about projection. An artform. No, a performance, that's what he calls it. I think about his friend Dave Norris, the last projectionist standing. He surely wouldn't have let this happen. The audience is awfully quiet. This is clearly not the event that Tree of Life was if the audience is ok with the projector shutting off twenty minutes into the film. Or maybe...maybe the film has calmed them. I know it's done as much to me. How could I be mad? I'm watching To The Wonder. It occurs to me that this has everything to do with the voiceover and Bardem's sermons. Choice. Avoiding choice is a sin, he says. I like to think this makes our auteur pro-Abortion, but that's just me bringing that to the film. It'd be easy to make the case but who knows? No, what's clear is the answer to Hughes question. Where's all the shit? Why does no one do anything ugly in Malick films? Because we're ugly, foul things, people, we kill, we conquer and rape and steal and and piss and shit and drink and do hard drugs and hurt the people we love. But he doesn't have to show those things because those urge don't come with a lot of choice. Everyone has to relieve themselves, no different than a horse, the horses that made a mess of Hughes' property. Nothing dynamic in it. No chance of being a better person for it. No discovery. If someone decides to drink themselves to death or be violent, it's the easy choice, like peeing against a tree if you can't find a bathroom or don't feel like walking to one. It's easy to be cruel to whomever, it comes naturally in many cases. I think Morrissey said something similar. 

Malick was raised by parents who split the difference between our worst urges. His dad, or what we gather of him through Pitt in Tree of Life, was a man dangerously consumed with anger. David Cairns hypothesizes that our anger comes from our having had the American Dream to fall short of. We're supposed to succeed and we don't. Because we believe in the Dream, same as we believe in a god whose looking out for us, we get real mad when our great loves look elsewhere. Here's Bardem and Affleck going into slums and seeing the lives of the unfortunate, proof that God isn't looking out for us. We have to do that. God's whatever makes you leave the comfort and security of doubt and gets you out into the world helping those to whom you can make a difference. 'God' is why Affleck remains mute for most of the film. He goes to church, same as Kurylenko, but neither of them seems to get what Bardem discovers. Going to church doesn't mean shit if you don't let it help you be the version of yourself you keep locked up: "an avalanche of tenderness." Movement. Evolution. We have to choose to evolve. Biological, behavioral theology. Finally something contrapuntal. 

Kurylenko says that Malick's one consistent direction on set was that everyone had to keep moving. If you stop, he urges you on. Because the one thing he hates is when people stop, when they refuse to think for themselves, to make choices, to examine our lives and make them better. Affleck makes for a compelling addendum to the male in Malick. A 21st century update of Badlands' Kit or Days of Heaven's Bill, with a fresh sense of willful blindness. Kit and Bill were outlaws, so had no real room to consider the feelings of their women, what they want, let alone need, but they did show them a certain level of tenderness and understanding. The Farmer in Days of Heaven came at the problem from a different angle: his heart was full of love and cared only about Abby. So when things go south he reacts violently. Affleck's too full of hang ups to quite be The Farmer, he won't give himself fully to love. What would the neighbors think? But he's a far cry from the soldiers of The Thin Red Line and The New World, always considering their place in the world, aware that they're insignificant. So there's precedent, but he's an old-fashioned male given a new coat of paint, fully in keeping with how men behave today. More evolution. 

And then leaving it strikes me that the last thing Roger Ebert ever wrote was a review of this film. Which means that there's a chance it was the last movie he ever saw. I have no proof, but I'm comforted by the thought. Here are people making boundless use of their bodies, the landscape, their homes, their minds. Their thoughts and desires are laid bare for us. Roger couldn't speak any longer, but his thoughts were just as available to us, just as rich, and full of love; accepting and appreciative of life's rich details. Bardem's prayer, his interpretation of God seems perfectly in keeping with Roger's attitude toward the end of life. I thought about Roger Ebert hearing the prayer that closes the film. And it becomes more than art. It's an experience, a continuation of a man's life, and maybe the comfort another found at the end of his. It's proof of the power of film, at least to me. Proof that film criticism is part of my religion, the son of film. Or maybe if film is a religious event, then criticism is my bible, recording and interpreting the events that change our lives, like Malick does when he puts biographical info in his dreamy narratives. And just as we hear the voices of his characters in his movies, I hear film critics wherever I go. He's clearly got something there. Watching this film my brain swelled with the different takes I'd encountered, of the words of critics, of possibilities introduced by people who do little else but consider what film means, making it richer. Even if I disagree with a review it make the film richer because it stands in opposition to one reading. We can't and won't all agree, but our disagreements make us better, they help us understand what we prize about works of art. That's why Terence Malick is so important to me and his films so close to my heart. He lays everything on the table so we can do the same in response. He knows we're not perfect, but he loves us anyway and no one makes even our worst impulses beautiful like he does. Maybe we're not God, but we're the closest thing we've got.