Karina on SpoutBlog

Why has the NY Times published two reviews of Richard Brody’s Jean-Luc Godard bio Everything is Cinema––less than two weeks apart, and two months after the book hit store shelves? Are film critics really so lacking in ways to fill their time that the Times has taken pity and allowed them just publish whatever at their leisure?

I know, I know––too far. I retract. It just seems odd that the paper would give space to two pieces of criticism on the same thing, from two critics whose overall take on the thing seems to be not so far away from a shrug. At least the two reviews seem to enter the text from slightly different angles… Stephanie Zacharek, whose review was published July 13, took Brody to task for taking Godard’s later output too seriously, for giving his avant garde provocations an A for effort without spelling out the implied, “But, you know…a lot of that shit is just plain unwatchable.” This is an argument against a biographer incorporating his own soft spots in his historical argument. Which is fine, but the promotion of Godard’s lesser-seen films doesn’t seem like terribly dangerous, and Brody’s book has bigger problems

Today’s piece, by Jeaninne Basinger (one of my favorite classical Hollywood historians, it must be said), ultimately gives the book a pass as being worth it for “the journey”––pretty much what Brody says of Godard’s post-1970s filmmaking––but she still can’t resist poking fun at the filmmaker called a “gasbag” by Zacharek. “If Mr. Godard were not a genius, he would be a college sophomore,” she says in an aside on his wilfull inscrutability. But rather than focus on Brody’s taste-based mistakes, she concentrates her energy on deflating his most laughable assertion: that Godard “has become almost forgotten.”

In whose universe? The world of commercial cinema or the multiplex was never his territory, yet Madonna was quoted in Vanity Fair in May as claiming that her new iTunes film “was seriously influenced by Godard.” Surely this means there’s still some meaning to his name, even if the quoters might not be sure what it is.

This is a pretty instructive observation: Godard’s actual work may not have become absorbed into pop cultural wall paper to the extent of something like Taxi Driver or Pulp Fiction or any of the other films it inspired, but the idea of Godard lives on as a badge of fashion for intellectual dilettantes. This is probably what Brody’s really getting at, even though he doesn’t articulate it: the idea that anyone thinks they know enough about Godard to get away with casually referencing him is a huge obstacle to his films actually being watched and for a serious conversation abotu them to be revived.

Remember that interview that Variety EIC Peter Bart gave MTV in June, responding to the “boycott” of his publication by a handful of fanboy sites who insisted that the trade had repeatedly failed to properly credit their “scoops”? Variety’s Anne Thompson resurrected the debate and the Bart quote this morning in a blog post pegged to Comic-Con, where a gang of outlets of various sizes––including us––will be fighting to post the same material at the same time. If my post about The Watchman goes up 20 seconds after Cinematical’s, will I get in trouble for not giving them “credit” for “breaking” the story? What’s the netiquette??!!???

She’s mostly looking at the divide between a “legit” outlet like Variety and the independently run sites like Film School Rejects, but I think Anne makes some good points about this stuff not being the black-and-white matter of thievery that some of the sites would like to believe. As far as I’m concerned, this is the key part of her piece:

It’s not always cut-and-dry–sometimes everyone is chasing the same news and a given reporter may not be aware of what has broken online. A reporter isn’t always tracking down where something broke first, just the story itself.

On the one hand, in saying that a Variety reporter tracking a story may not even know that it “broke” online, the implication is that Variety reporters have better things to do than obsessively read every little junket jockey’s blog looking for “scoops” to “steal.” Not something the puffed-up boys of the blogosphere want to hear, perhaps, but maybe not unreasonable.

But the story also points to a difference in approach between the blogger and the journalist. Thompson notes that, in the case of the Collider/300 sequel incident that motivated the boycott, the Variety reporter dug up extra information that made the initial report richer and more valid. This is what bloggers do every day––taking over where one of us left off and taking things further––but when we do it, tracking the bread crumbs back to the start of the meme and being transparent about the trail is part of the process.

At least, it is for good bloggers.