Ten Years of Film Interpretation

In Metaphilm, and in these books . . .

Friday, August 17, 2001

A Movie Critic Repents

It reminded me of the rushed judgment
this job entails: Most of the time you see something just once
before passing judgment on it, and often that judgment must be
passed faster than a spacepod through a timewarp. Opportunities
to reflect and ruminate, processes which are elementary to good
criticism, are rare as white buffalo. Even the opportunity to
think clearly and intently about a movie is constantly threatened
by the intellectual gridlock that typically occurs: Any given
week your head may have anywhere from three to six movies competing
for quick judgment, and at a time of your life—or mine anyway—when remembering your keys is challenge enough.

—Geoff Pevere, "Okay,
I admit it, I went ape too soon," The Toronto Star
(August 17, 2001)

Apocalypse Now Revisited

It isn’t a picture of real war
or the real people there, but a peerless evocation of the war
as filtered through technology, the mass media, and the ruins
of dead mythologies. In Coppola’s ‘Nam, what’s inescapable isn’t
the VC so much as the TV, old movies, show business, and the buzzing
feedback of rock’n’roll. Apocalypse Now isn’t about how
we invaded Vietnam so much as how the war invaded our psyches,
how it permeated pop culture and came to be the sight-and-soundtrack
to a new, bad American dream. In that idyll of apocalypse, defeat
takes on a perfect, preordained inevitability—when you’ve got
nothing left to lose, on some level the war really does become
Disneyland with live ammunition, at least until your ticket’s
punched—and it develops its own downward-spiral momentum and
exhilaration.

—Howard Hampton, "Jungle Boogie,"
Film Comment (May/June 2001)

Wednesday, August 15, 2001

Dumb Films Say More Than You Think

Just as Pink Flamingos was
a better movie about the counterculture than Easy Rider,
Freddy Got Fingered is a better movie about suburban squalor
than American Beauty. Not least because its Americana both
rings truer and is more affectionate. Joe Dirt is a better
movie about native pluck than The Patriot. For that matter,
Spike Lee’s Bamboozled, which is his version of a gross-out
farce, gets deeper into America’s racial pathologies than a dignified
film could. And, oh, yeah: Josie and the Pussycats is a
better movie about media manipulation than The Truman Show,
too. So there.

—Tom Carson, "In Praise of Stoopidity,"
Esquire (August 2001)