Film Criticism

[pianocrash]

I would love that too, but I suspect he'd probably be seen as too iconoclastic for a publication as relatively strait-laced as The New Yorker to consider (and they already cop enough flak over Brody as it is, though I've never quite understood the animosity). Still, it's a sad reflection on the current state of things that someone as consistently interesting as Pinkerton doesn't seem to be able to get a regular gig anywhere much nowadays.

I haven't subscribed to his Substack yet (though I'm kind of abandoning Substack altogether given their ongoing controversy with - *sigh* - Nazis and white supremacists) but I have a vague recollection that when he first launched it, he published a scathing editorial directed at Film Comment for ceasing its print publication, one that brought up a host of other grievances as well. He has written printed material for smaller publishers like Metrograph's publication arm, but I kind of wondered if he had taken himself out of mainstream publications altogether?

PInkerton has flashes of brilliance, but he's his own worst enemy. As for mainstream publications, I can't imagine any editor that's paid a living wage could tolerate him, let alone the readership of anyplace outside of whatever's left of the VICE empire.

And while I've enjoyed some of his commentaries for Kino Lorber et al, his online persona is hard to stomach, but at least you get what you paid for.

[furbicide]

Each to their own; Pinkerton's posts are pretty much the only reason I bother checking Twitter! He rarely misses.

(Here's the piece he appears to have been referring to, by the way: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts ... lm-reviews)

[hearthesilence]

I wish there was something like a film critic's version of The McLaughlin Group with Pinkerton, Glenn Kenny, Amy Taubin, Richard Brody and Jonathan Rosenbaum at their cattiest. I guess you'd have to have a "nice" critic in there as the foil - it would almost play like an SNL parody where they'd politely compliment some audience favorite only to have Rosenbaum boorishly respond with "IT BORED ME!"

[tenia]

I guess it's ironic that some people are seemingly ranting about some homogeneity in critics' darlings and which "filters" might be currently generating these rather than those : there's a homogeneity in what buzzes or doesn't since I stumbled through Twitter this morning on this article, but not at all through Pinkerton's tweet.

An article that has this astounding section : "No matter how well done, the top-rated film of 2023 shouldn’t be a three-hour French documentary chronicling the everyday operations of a gynecological ward in a Parisian hospital. It speaks to a deep poverty of imagination that Our Body is followed on Metacritic’s 2023 top 10 by two more French documentaries. It’s safer, after all, to praise foreign documentaries and meaningless slice-of-life movies than to engage with the culture where it actually is."

Because yeah, it's obviously safer to have as a 2023 top rated movie a 3hr Claire Simon doc about a gynecologic ward, followed by De Humani Corporis Fabrica and then a Fred Wiseman 4h food doc. Totally safe.

And what this article is suggesting then ? To have critics... not ignoring Yellowstone and Sound of Freedom ? They didn't : they just didn't like them.
She Said, Bros, Origin and Nyad ? Those are between 64 and 77 on Metacritic, that's nothing to write about. Atlanta has 92 on MC : Queen Charlotte 76. The Idol has been mixed-reviewed and has a 66 MC score : why should there be champions about it ? "Why are The Fabelmans and The Woman King more highly rated on Rotten Tomatoes than the far more interesting Tar and Banshees of Inisherin?" : on RT, The Fabelmans is 92/8.2, The Woman King 94/7.8, Tar 91/8.3, Banshees 96/8.7.

Maybe it'd be a good start to have one's facts straight, in order first to have a proper impression on things, and then, if it turns out to be plain wrong... not to publically write an article with such mistakes in it...

It's basically a long "why don't people like what I like and dislike what I dislike" article, bundled with "I don't even get my facts right".

[Mr Sausage]

He's also making one of the most tired of polemics, the anti-woke polemic where society is becoming one, big Orwellian safe space or whatever. When he says "It’s safer...to praise foreign documentaries and meaningless slice-of-life movies than to engage with the culture where it actually is.", what he means is that it's safer socially to praise movies with unimpeachable politics than to criticize movies for embracing woke values. He's accusing critics of being virtue-signalling cowards who don't want to be cancelled.

But the cringiest part is how much he genuinely believes that Hollywood writers listen to critics, like movie criticism is having a genuine effect on Hollywood. In an article about how everyone else lacks bravery, he's hesitant to admit that critics have next to no effect on either audiences or executives, and that film criticism is increasingly becoming PR because there is increasingly little space for it elsewhere. Instead he persists in believing that bad criticism, and by extension good criticism, has a genuine effect on the quality of movies, because that would make the endeavor important and worthwhile. He's being idealistic rather than honest.

Too bad. I do have broad sympathies here. Film criticism is more and more marginal, and what film criticism there is, is bland and often caught up in the enthusiasms of the age. This has always been the case for as long as we've had criticism, but it's especially the case now. It'd be nice to have better critics, but even nicer to have better defenders of criticism.

[domino harvey]

I wish there was something like a film critic's version of The McLaughlin Group with Pinkerton, Glenn Kenny, Amy Taubin, Richard Brody and Jonathan Rosenbaum at their cattiest. I guess you'd have to have a "nice" critic in there as the foil - it would almost play like an SNL parody where they'd politely compliment some audience favorite only to have Rosenbaum boorishly respond with "IT BORED ME!"

SCTV already did it

[soundchaser]

I’ve never gotten, from either his Twitter feed or his (occasionally moving, admittedly) work, a sense of enthusiasm about film — or anything, really — from Pinkerton. It’s like he’s inherited the role of critic and begrudgingly has to carry it on for some arcane reason. The “woe is me, the oasis of detached cynicism in this desert of people who *care*” shtick should have been left in the 2010s.

[domino harvey]

This tells you everything you need to know

[soundchaser]

This tells you everything you need to know

Whatever this was appears to have been deleted.

[domino harvey]

This tells you everything you need to know

Whatever this was appears to have been deleted.

[Maltic]

Who is she?

[Mr Sausage]

Who is she?

Dasha Nekrasova aka Sailor Socialism aka the director of The Scary of 61st.

[therewillbeblus]

That friendship makes way too much sense

[Maltic]

Maybe that picture says he was horny one night in 2018

[Mr Sausage]

I don't think I've read anything by Pinkerton. Can anyone recommend a couple things, either good or just characteristic?

[therewillbeblus]

These require more time and effort, but his commentary on KL's The Milky Way is informative and full, if also dry and exhaustive, and his script for the recent post-ironic perverse coming-of-age flick The Sweet East is quite perceptive and bold

[furbicide]

I don't think I've read anything by Pinkerton. Can anyone recommend a couple things, either good or just characteristic?

This piece he wrote on the French post–New Wave was my first introduction to him, and one I’ve come back to a few times over the years: https://web.archive.org/web/20160306013 ... d-new-wave

Otherwise, any given post on his Substack is worth reading (and contra one of the suggestions someone made above, evinces a deep love of cinema, including and sometimes particularly from the margins). One of my favourite recent pieces is on the Clerks Cinematic Universe: https://nickpinkerton.substack.com/p/talk-is-cheap

And this one, on Brazil’s Cinema da Boca do Lixo, is just fascinating: https://nickpinkerton.substack.com/p/fu ... do-triunfo

[hearthesilence]

I wish there was something like a film critic's version of The McLaughlin Group with Pinkerton, Glenn Kenny, Amy Taubin, Richard Brody and Jonathan Rosenbaum at their cattiest. I guess you'd have to have a "nice" critic in there as the foil - it would almost play like an SNL parody where they'd politely compliment some audience favorite only to have Rosenbaum boorishly respond with "IT BORED ME!"

SCTV already did it

Nice! I bet the real thing would've been nastier.

[Walter Kurtz]

Who is she?

Kendall Roy's Girl Friday on Succession Season 3.

[Walter Kurtz]

Can anyone recommend a couple things, either good or just characteristic?

Goodbye, Dragon Inn. Fireflies Press.

[diamonds]

Cinema Scope has published its final issue.

It was the one of the last North American print publications dedicated to film as an art form (with the help of Canadian government funding). Very few left.

Every article in this issue is available to read online.

I began reading Robert Koehler's piece on Killers of the Flower Moon and stopped after an eyebrow-raising line in the second paragraph:

...I rewatched Taxi Driver (1976), which many have been all too willing to slot as Scorsese’s (and writer Paul Schrader’s) early masterwork. What I saw was an overwrought and obvious melodrama held together primarily by nighttime visual poetics and Robert De Niro’s unbridled, hell’s-bells performance. Too often with Scorsese, the moral argument is blunt and crude, limned with simple takes on the running theme of guilt, revealing a certain fear of trusting the audience to draw its own conclusions in the way, for instance, that Abbas Kiarostami rigorously constructed his open-ended narratives. Scorsese has always depended on outside material and/or a screenwriting partner (such as Schrader), unwilling (or unable) to take on the classical auteurist position as sole original writer-director.

It amazes me that this last sentence made it past an editor. Koehler evidently knows nothing about "classical auteurism," which calls into question his knowledge of film history and his credibility as a critic. The implication that it is somehow shameful or indicative of an artistic deficiency for a director to collaborate on their screenplays (or to adapt) is, I would think, an untenable position for anyone thinking seriously about film.

[MichaelB]

Surely a key tenet of "classical auteurism" is that the director didn't write the script but was nonetheless able to imbue the film with a recognisable artistic personality?

[Mr Sausage]

Hitchcock had always depended on outside material and/or a screenwriting partner (such as Hecht), unwilling (or unable) to take on the classical auteurist position as sole original writer-director.

[DeprongMori]

Surely a key tenet of "classical auteurism" is that the director didn't write the script but was nonetheless able to imbue the film with a recognisable artistic personality?

I’ve got to wonder whether Koehler on this basis would consider Stanley Kubrick, who worked from other screenwriters’ adaptations of pre-existing literary works for nearly all of his films, a “classical auteur”. A real head-scratcher, that.

[Red Screamer]

People have just started using “auteurism” as synonymous with great singular genius narratives. It’s destined to be misused forever at this point.