January 27, 2012
by Joel Crary
Those of you who visit this site regularly will note that I’ve scaled my movie writing output back quite a bit. The reasons are simple enough. I’ve been travelling a lot recently. I started lending more attention to music. My blog went through a spurt of new content. These factors and more kept me out of theatres for a while. I began going to the movies as a means of catching up, rather than keeping ahead of, or at least up to speed with, audiences. I became more concerned with watching.
Last week I was determined to get back into the swing of review-writing. I went to see “The Artist,” a film I liked very much, one that’s been receiving a lot of attention. As I typically do, I found a spot at a coffee shop after the film was over with, cracked open my laptop, launched a fresh window, and froze. This happens sometimes in the process, usually when I’m trying to think of a good opening. I thought about the film, what it does with the silent-era aesthetic, how we react to it in a modern context. But the words wouldn’t come.
I’ve had this feeling before, especially in the early days, but it’s never especially prevented me from writing. Back then my aims for this blog were more specific. I worked at online criticism for a year – the minimum amount of time a writer had to put in to be considered by the Online Film Critics Society for admission. Members in the OFCS are allowed to submit their work to be posted on Rotten Tomatoes – that’s why you see people like Dustin Putman and Brian Orndorf (both are guys I read) in amongst the Eberts and Maltins.
After the year was up, I found that the OFCS had changed their requirement to a two-year minimum, so I kept at it. It afforded me the opportunity to improve my writing. A few people took notice and a bit of a following started to build. OFCS membership was the goal I wanted to attain above all else. I knew that I could only get so far with this blog; OFCS and Rotten Tomatoes would allow me to reach a wider audience. I am not a journalist; submitting my work to papers seemed out of the question, especially in a profession that’s becoming more and more anemic with each passing year, and most of the sites that approached me about writing for them seemed too fly-by-night or weirdly niche to bother with.
I wanted to work on my own terms. After another year of writing, I applied to the OFCS again. They rejected my application, either on the grounds that my site looked too unprofessional, or that my reviews were too sporadic (though I definitely reached the yearly requirement), or that my writing just plain wasn’t good enough. The latter is the only potential criticism that bothers me. I’ve read a lot of film writing. I’ve seen some of the stuff the OFCS supports. And I know my writing is comparable, if not better.
When I sat down to write a review for “The Artist,” I opened up Rotten Tomatoes and scrolled through the bits and pieces of reviews, the little two-sentence distillations of columns offered up by professional journalists and contributors deemed fit critics by the Online Film Critics Society. Right now “The Artist” has 177 reviews ascribed to it. After all this time, I had no idea how I could add my voice to it, or why I would want to.
Most of you read a review because you want to know if a movie is good or bad. Radio and print journalists covering a movie beat want someone who can speak authoritatively for a segment, so they reach out on Google and grab whatever film critic they can get their hands on. It doesn’t matter who the critic is. The voice is pointless. We go to Rotten Tomatoes, see that 97% of a group of faceless, nameless people thought “The Artist” was decent, so maybe we’ll go and see it. Who the hell cares what Ken Hanke of Asheville, North Carolina’s Mountain Xpress said about it specifically? Or Roger Ebert, for that matter? Most of you are content simply to know which way the thumb is pointing.
Charles Taylor wrote a terrific article on film criticism a few months back that talks about the ongoing battle between traditional print critics and rapscallion bloggers who are diluting the authority of their opinion. The climate is not only changing – it’s changed. I can’t remember the last time I read a film review in a newspaper. Film critics are losing their jobs because opinion is becoming too widespread. Do we really need 177 opinions on “The Artist” expounded into column-length prose? Perhaps not, since most readers are content to skim the hook of these columns before they head out of the house to catch a show.
We do need opinions on “The Artist,” and on all films. But a voice is still important. Any hack with a vocabulary can string together dry observations about why a film works. Taylor makes an interesting point that really good film writing comes out of communicating the pleasure of going to the movies. I strive to do so in my own reviews through anecdote. Film class residue can sometimes rise to the surface, but I know the average reader who stumbles across my blog isn’t really going to care about how I can overlay Christian Metz’s labyrinthine theories onto the latest Farrelly brothers movie.
But maybe I can draw them in by relating a scene to a time in my life, or drive home the effectiveness of a performance or an edit or a song through personal comparison and contrast. Lately I’ve been more attracted to the idea of an open-flow relationship with film writing, in which I save reviews for movies that truly make an impact. Most people don’t understand how the movies work. We watch them because there’s a truth in the experience that we can’t put our finger on. The critic puts his or her finger on it. Or thumb, for that matter. I’d like to be able to point to the movies that really matter to me and explain why.
Maybe that’s where I’ll find a unique place among the thousands of bloggers and critics. While I’ve been losing interest in the effort lately, I continue to enjoy writing about film – I hope that comes across after more than 300 reviews, none of which I’ve been paid a cent for. But there’s a need to refocus and expand my horizons a bit. The recent changes to this blog come out of a couple of years of internal battling. The intent is a more complete picture. A louder voice. Thank you for listening.
