Remember when the San Francisco Chronicle’s Mick LaSalle admitted that he hadn’t seen a bunch of movies that most would consider classic, and then he watched them and dismissed many (including Young Frankenstein and 2001) with lazy capsule “reviews” that, if not published in a major newspaper, would have been indistinguishable from IMDb message board missives?
It’s happened again. Apropos of … absolutely nothing, LA Times “Oscar expert” Tom O’Neill has made an announcement: he doesn’t like F.W. Murnau’s Sunrise!!! Yeah, that Sunrise, the 1927 film that’s considered by many to be the pinacle of achievement of pre-sound cinema. Dismissing the film as the sentimental favorite of “hipsters” and “Oscar Nazis,”––and if such a thing exists, isn’t O’Neill, like, Mein Fuhrer?–– O’Neill then lays down his critical law:
Sunrise is paper-thin, hilariously schmaltzy. All three primary characters are cartoonish clichés and their performances 3-inch slices of honeyed ham…What corn pone! Smothered in Cheez Whiz!
Of course, the hipsters and Oscar Nazi’s weren’t going to take this one lying down. Highlights from the eviscerations of O’Neill, and thoughts on dismissing vs. protecting the canon, after the jump.
Where Filmbrain merely hints at the quality of O’Neill’s writing in a post about the larger issue of “heirarchical bullshit” between bloggers and critics, Glenn Kenny and Stu VanAirsdale are more direct, but both are concerned with O’Neill’s populist appeal. “People actually read this guy,” Stu fumes, decrying O’Neill’s influence on the general public. “So write a letter, start a petition — anything to make him stop.”
Glenn targets his attack on O’Neill’s own faux-populism, citing O’Neill’s baiting of snobs and hipsters as being central to his “critique”:
It doesn’t take much to figure out that O’Neil’s rant isn’t against Sunrise at all, but is rather just a festering hairball built up from God-knows-how-many years of resentment against…yep, all those film snobs, hipsters, and, ugh, Nazis WHO HAVE BEEN TRYING TO FORCE TRIPE LIKE SUNRISE DOWN TOM O’NEIL’S THROAT ALL HIS LIFE AND HE’S NOT GONNA HAVE IT ANYMORE!!!!
I’m sure there are more posts I could highlight, or if there aren’t yet, there will be. Because, you know…this is what we do. One the one hand, it is a little troubling that the film blog cool kids seem to gang up on the nerds every time they express an opinion that goes against the canon. On the other hand, in the case of both LaSalle and O’Neill, the shots fired at said canonical works are of such weak sauce that they not only haven no chance of making anyone look at the films in question differently, but they’re really begging to be mocked. In both cases, what LaSalle an O’Neill are doing doesn’t approach actual criticism; at its deepest, it’s dismissal based on personal taste, without any regard for the historical, critical or commercial context in which the film was made or in which it’s generally seen now.
Of course, it is possible that O’Neill actually knows what he’s doing. His commentary *was* basically intended as a wrap-around for a poll, which has no editorial purpose other than to stimulate discussion (ie: jack up page views). Maybe when a guy like O’Neill posts something like this, he’s sacrificing his own reputation in order to give the rabble something to chew on––thus pumping up page views by increasing links to the LA Times and ensuring comments on the site from the enraged masses who can’t hold themselves back from telling Dumb Tom what a douchebag he is. Hell, every detractor represents at least one page view. Maybe there’s something sort of smart going on there after all.
Well, no, probably not. As Glenn Kenny points out, O’Neill proves his own intellectual depth in comments back to his irate commenters, in which he name drops the number of TV appearances he has lined up over the next week as evidence that his movie opinions are above critique. Proof that Tom O’Neill has employed a quality publicist? Absolutely. Proof that he knows what he’s talking about in regards to Sunrise? No fucking way.
And in response to that, Glenn actually drops two not-too-obscure, but still unidentified movie references into a single couplet of his slam: “Holy shit man, this is Max Fischer’s ‘I wrote a hit play!’ writ way too large. And consider: O’Neil is an adult. Or maybe this is more of ‘So I think my insights into Mr. McLuhan, well, have a great deal of validity.’” An argument made via two easily-identifiable movie quotes? Ladies and gentleman, that is populist criticism.
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