Patrick Goldstein, who has been banging the “critics are irrelevant!” drum for awhile, yesterday devoted over 600 bloggy words to shaming one critic in particular for daring to be critical. An excerpt:
It’s an open secret in indie Hollywood that no one wants Manohla Dargis to review their movie, fearing that the outspoken critic will tear their film limb from limb. It’s the ultimate backhanded compliment, since what they really fear is Manohla’s persuasiveness — that she’ll write a review whose combination of vitriolic snarkiness and intellectual heft will actually persuade high-brow moviegoers to drop the film from their must-see list.
Goldstein goes on to say that his thoughts on the Fear of Manohla were sparked by her review of The Reader. Goldstein says it’s not a problem that the review was negative, but unlike her peers, who “clean the knife before they stick it in,” Dargis’ review betrays a “lack of empathy for the challenge of tackling difficult material.” In other words: people like Harvey Weinstein, who take the noble risk of milking Oscar bait out of an Oprah-approved novel about a sexy Nazi cougar, should be given extra points just for doing something a little bit more ambitious than “dumb summer comedy.” It’s almost as if Goldstein is advocating for a kind of affirmative action for art (or, at least, artsy) films: all pictures may be on a level playing field in Manohla’s eyes, but a certain type of picture should be given special consideration for at least trying to be art, even if it fails.
This is the kind of argument I get a lot from angry commenters, when I publish negative reviews of films which star their favorite stars, or otherwise hit some kind of sweet spot that puts the reader on the anti-criticism defensive. “Nice to completely disregard a lot of hard work by a lot of talented people,” wrote “Pete” on my Changeling review. “Sad, really.” When I wrote a long piece on Benjamin Button, “John Sanders” was harsher, slamming me for “criticizing people’s years of hard work in the form of some shitty blog.” As is usually the end game with this kind of thinking, I was then challenged to make my own film. “And hey, If you truly believe in what you’re selling here, and you think you know what makes a film good or bad, perhaps you should attempt to create a better film. I’d love to see it.”
I guess it’s not that surprising that Goldstein’s attack on Manohla would resemble the faux-populist, “Let’s see you do better” line of the over-protective commenter class. But if he’s actually suggesting that critics should allow “empathy” for the architects of blatant awards bait to temper their judgements, then this might be his harshest anti-criticism statement yet.
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SpoutBlog » Karina Longworth