Living in Cambodia and seeing the scarcity of jobs, and the nature of jobs that are available, brings home how utterly, well, silly some of the occupations back home come to seem upon reflection, none being sillier, as the Oscar ceremonies loom closer, than that of a film critic.
Don't get me wrong. Film criticism is a necessary art, helping to shape, confirm and evolve people's critical faculties, but man oh man, it's rarely practiced well, if at all, in the western press. (Come to think of it, isn't that a really awkward sounding phrase -- 'don't get me wrong'? After five years of teaching English, you begin to recognize, quite quickly, those phrases that really seem to make no grammatical sense at all. This is one of those phrases. Try saying it to a Japanese or Cambodian who speaks pretty good English, but is not quite up-to-date on the latest colloquialisms, and marvel at the blank, uncomprehending stare you'll receive. That's the fun part about teaching a foreign language -- you can notice, literally, the moment when comprehension shifts (or bursts) into incomprehension; you see the light suddenly expire from their eyes. I've noticed it too, when speaking to someone in Japanese; as you're listening, it's as if you're brain is counting off all the vocabulary and grammar that you know and comprehend, saying: "Got it...got it...got it...oooh, don't got it. Got it...don't got it..." But I'm getting a little off topic...)
This is the time of year when every film critic, large and small (and Roger Ebert has actually gotten very small, will wonders never cease) trots out their ten-best lists, which are really just an indicator of one person's particular taste.
One thing that particularly ticks me off, about these lists and about the Oscars themselves, is that there rarely, if ever, seems to be any kind of criteria involved in determining what is 'better' than something else.
Think about it. In almost any other kind of contest or competition, you have some kind of rationale or reasoning for why you make the decisons or judgements that you do. If an employer has to choose between two people for a job, he or she is going to do have to be able to articulate why this person was/was not hired at the expense of the other person.
But in choosing somebody for Best Actor or Best Actress, there's no criteria. There's no guide-lines. (And why are the men and the women separated anymore, anyways? I could understand fifty years ago, when the genders were more stratified. But c'mon, it's 2004; there's not a separate category for blacks and whites, fat and thin. Acting's acting, right? Yes, there are better parts available to men, but that doesn't seem enough of a valid excuse.) People pick whoever they want to pick, and we never know why, most of it probably being decided by gut instinct and emotion.
These emotions are what most critics fail to acknowledge, however, as I've talked about previously on this blog. But emotions, and life, real life, are always somehow subordinated when talking about art and its effects on us. The personal is annihilated when it should be put back centre stage.
Let's put it this way.
The reason why movies affect us is because they slam us full-force with an intellectual or emotional wallop. They force us to think, laugh, cry -- whatever. Our reactions are tied into our own situation in life, our reaction to the world around us, our hopes and fears and anxiety about the job interview we have later in the day.
There's a deeper level, though, that a lot of these 'lists' don't acknowledge. They choose a film for its craftsmanship, its message, its embodiment of what cinema can and can't do. But there's more, more, more...
Take Superman III.
Generally regarded as inferior to the first two flicks in the series, while only marginally better the universally derided fourth film. (Which I kind of like, actually, but that's for another blog, the one that'll be about wrongly neglected sequels. I also like Cannoball Run II and Star Trek V: The Final Frontier, so sue me. And, believe it or not, the sequel to American Graffitti titled, unoriginally, More American Graffitti, is not half bad...)
I saw Superman III when I was seven years old. I saw it in the theatre. I saw it on a big, big screen. I saw it again at a drive-in, along with Twlight Zone: The Movie. I remember all of this because Superman III was the coolest, wickedest, most awesome experience a seven year old can have.
In fact, I liked it so much that I bought (or my parents bought, most likely) the novelization of the film, and read it while lounging by the pool at the Aladdin Inn in Daytona Beach, Florida, me with a Pac-Man visor perched on my head, Superman with his hands full, trying to outwit that massive computer he was up against.
(There's a picture of me reading the book, wearing the visor, chilling.)
So what does all this mean?
It means that at one point in time you were a seven-year old, too, and there were movies, books, comics, music and experiences that not only rocked your world but formed your world. They were the best and brightest things in it. And we all grow up (whether we like it or not), and we learn critical standards, and we judge our past by the present, to a large degree, whether it's films we're looking at or our relationships to the people and society around us.
And so if you watch Superman III again, and you are no longer a seven-year old kid who likes to wear a Pac-Man visor, then you will notice things that you didn't notice at that age -- plot holes, bad effects, questionable acting. The inner critic in you will make its voice heard.
I tend to ignore that inner critic.
Superman III still rocks.
The real critics, the ones who get paid, seem to lose sight of all our quirky likes and dislikes, our idiosyncratic reasons for like what we do. They want to leech the joy and irreverance out of our own opinion. They want to pretend that there are, in fact, universal standards of grading and determining excellece.
There isn't. There is you, and a movie screen (and a life, too, if you're lucky) and your own dynamic, weird and individual way of reacting and responding to what unfolds before you. Critics always move in herds; the mainstream critics like the same ten, fifteen movies, and the avant-garde critics tend to like the same ten, fifteen movies. Why is that? Because they're responding to what they think they should be responding to.
If one of them, for once, actually bucked the herd and said that he picked Police Academy IV: Citizens on Patrol as the best movie of the year, not because of its craftsmanship or its thematic relevance to the world today, no, but because it reminded him of when he was a kid and how he wanted to be a cop, and how, as a kid, he used to like goofy physical comedy, and this film blended those two elements just right, in a way that he would have loved (and still does), and, besides that, it was a nice day, a glorious spring afternoon, and the Coke was cold and the buttery popcorn was hot and the air-conditioning was turned up just right, and the speakers amplified that wonderful rousing Police Academy music to just the right decibel, all of this occuring only hours after his kid came home with a report card featuring a B+ in history, a B+ for the first time ever in ANY subject, and that was the capper, right there, the perfect ending to a lovely day and a suitable beginning for an evening of light, ludicrous entertainment that took him back, back to when he was a kid, dreaming of a future that promised a bright blue uniform and shining silver badge, if one of them said that, throwing out their cinematic and cultural pretentions and acknowledging the randomness of movies and life and all their time-bending, nostalgia-inducing processes, I'd eat my words and call it a day.
