Aaron Aradillas, who’s interviewed a number of movie critics here, asked me to join him for a conversation about the Jonathan Demme/Talking Heads movie, Stop Making Sense (1984), inspired in part by Pauline Kael’s wildly enthusiastic review of the film (collected, initially, in her State of the Art collection). Continue reading “Movie + Review Zoomcast: Stop Making Sense”
[Originally appeared in Popped in 1999, then rockcritics.com in 2000]
How Perfectly Goddamn Delightful It All Was: Movies in the 1990s
By Phil Dellio
If it seems premature for a best-films-of-the-90s list, don’t worry, it’s not: I phoned Hollywood and they assured me there would be no good films released in 1999. Continue reading “From the Archives: Movies in the 1990s”
By Phil Dellio
On the second-last day of school this year, I showed my grade six class American Graffiti. Pop music and film already exert some influence on most of my 29 kids, though clearly not as much as television, the Internet, or Digimons. Continue reading “From the Archives: Strange Magic: The Pop-Music Soundtrack From American Graffiti to Sofia Coppola”
By Phil Dellio
I’m writing about Pauline Kael again. Cue Al Pacino in The Godfather Part III (one of Kael’s last reviews before her retirement, one that was perhaps a little too forgiving—I think she would have eviscerated that film in 1977). Continue reading “Pauline Again (Naturally)”
Natural Born Plumbers: John Cazale and the Character Actors of the 1970s
By Phil Dellio
American cinema in the 1970s will always be remembered first and foremost as a legendary decade for directors (the familiar litany of Coppola, Scorsese, Altman, and company) and secondly as a time when a new generation of lead actors superseded the Waynes, Newmans, and McQueens of the ’60s (Nicholson, De Niro, and Pacino preeminent among them). Continue reading “From the Archives: John Cazale and the Character Actors of the 1970s (2001)”
Two For the Road: Reinventing the Double-Bill
By Phil Dellio
Inside every rock critic, there’s supposedly a frustrated musician. Those who can, do, and those who can’t, write about it. This commonly held view is buoyed by the number of critics who made the transition from writing to performing: Patti Smith, Chrissie Hynde, Ira Kaplan, Neil Tennant, etc. Continue reading “From the Archives: Double-Bills”
By Aaron Aradillas
(originally published in rockcritics.com in 2005)
Glenn Kenny is a good sport. I write this because he was more than willing to indulge me in responding to my aggressive rebuttals to some of his reviews. Mr. Kenny’s good-naturedness is just one of the things you’ll discover about him in this dishy, engrossing, and very funny interview. Continue reading “From the Archives: Glenn Kenny (2005)”
Trailer for upcoming movie about Kael.
What She Said: The Art of Pauline Kael is a documentary in the works; see the trailer.
Phil Dellio and I have started up a blog, which focuses on pop music as heard/seen in movies, television, videos, commercials, PowerPoint presentations—anywhere, theoretically, music is aligned with images. Most of the posts thus far are Mad Men-themed lists, but I’m sure we’ll move onward soon enough.
“I soon realized that criticism, be it of movies, music, television, literature or any other form of entertainment, allows you to work through your emotional responses to what you experienced, and by doing so you are bringing into focus the reader’s own emotional responses. It was through critical writing that I was able to see the world more clearly. I chose to be a movie critic instead of a music critic because movies got to me first. As I arrived at this choice, I never really dwelled on the inherent contradiction of being a blind movie critic. (To be completely accurate, I was born blind, but through numerous operations as a child, I now have extremely limited eyesight.) I guess the sight of seeing someone walk into a theater with a white cane in one hand and a movie ticket in the other is a little… odd? The inability to register how others see you can be both a blessing and a burden.”
– Second Sight: How Channel-Surfing, an iPod, and Peggy Sue Got Married Restored a Movie Critic’s Eyesight (IndieWire)
A terrific story by former rockcritics.com contributor, Aaron Aradillas (whose various interviews with movie critics are on deck for the archives migration).
Matt Zoller Seitz mourns the loss and assesses the damage:
What really depresses me about Owen’s firing isn’t just that a fine writer got axed from a magazine that he helped define. It’s that the journalism industry, if you can even call it that anymore, is unwilling or unable to support writers like Owen, or Lisa [Schwarzbaum], or… I was about to list other critics I admire who’ve been fired or bought out in the last decade, but I won’t. It’s too depressing. And it doesn’t get at the bland mystery of what’s happening to the business that nurtured me: an eerie mix of bean counting, soul-rot, and page-click psuedo-science gone mad.
Aaron Aradillas interviewed Owen Gleiberman for rockcritics.com 10 years ago. (Oddly enough, it is next in line to be re-posted here, from the archives, but I won’t get to it until next week.)
“Maybe I’m bad at my job, but I’ve rarely utilized anything from my college Film Theory course while writing a review. I’m sure it doesn’t hurt to have that information floating around in the back of my mind, but I don’t think it’s particularly essential. Maybe I’m wrong? Hell, I probably am, but at least for me, it hasn’t been an essential piece of the puzzle.”
– Joey Magidson, one of several respondents to CriticWire‘s survey question, Should Film Critics Be Filmmakers?
Anyone care to take on Danny Bowes’ assertion here, that “music criticism in particular suffers (and has suffered for a very long time) from an excess of posturing that film criticism (even at its worst) has never had to bear.”
Also: see this relevant compendium of quotes posted right here a few years back.
Because he’s so closely identified with Creem magazine and Detroit on the one hand, and New York City and post-punk on the other, it’s easy to forget that Lester Bangs’s roots lie somewhere else entirely, in the small-ish (current population less than 100,000) town of El Cajon, CA, just outside of San Diego. Raul Sandelin’s feature-length documentary, A Box Full of Rocks: The El Cajon Years of Lester Bangs, addresses this oversight, and except for a few (unnecessary? I couldn’t decide) clips of Bangs waxing eloquent about the state of popular music from the offices of Creem during the mid-70s, the movie never really leaves El Cajon; it’s as much about the city as it is about the writer. Though in truth, maybe what the movie’s really about–in any event, the aspect of the movie that most connected with me–is friendship and community, and it’s quite moving to hear all of Bangs’s old pals speak of him today with such love and affection. Not, to be clear, with mawkish reverence–this isn’t (thank God) The Early Years of Saint Lester–though sometimes with bafflement, as with Jack Butler’s perfect recollection of the time Lester tried to turn him on to free jazz: “What the hell is this? It was totally out of my comfort zone, and it was really atonal and… ” Continue reading “Interview with Raul Sandelin (dir. A Box Full of Rocks)”
RockCritics.com 