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(02/14/13 5:00am)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>It happens. Which is to say that occasionally, collective critical opinion will fail to give a particular work its due in terms of artistic and future artistic merit. Naturally, for the artist who has remained chained to his canvas, writing desk or music stand for months and often years, mistaken opinion does not occur often enough. He is convinced his work is brilliant, even genius. He quickly critiques his criticism, calls it shoddy or quick or hackneyed or utter crap. But within a year he is generally proven wrong. The work remains unread or unheard and its so-called global significance is proven nonexistent. He must accept that his piece was not genius, accept that his critique was bad sportsmanship and resolve to try harder next time. So it goes.But sometimes it doesn’t. Following the publication of James Joyce’s “Ulysses,” playwright George Bernard Shaw likened the work to a cat rubbing its nose in its own filth. Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony was lampooned for its length. Walt Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass” was meanly deferred as “a mass of stupid filth.” “Moby Dick” became “an ill-compounded mixture of romance and matter-of-fact” (which may not be entirely untrue). Why does this happen? Because the critic is your average Homo sapien. He makes mistakes. Call it myopia or quick reading, or just plain mean-spiritedness. Whatever it is, it fails to see the work as precedent setting and dismisses its innovation as artistic merit taken too far. But humor the critic by putting yourself in his shoes for a moment. Realize that your job isn’t only to assess the work within its historical and cultural context, but to provide your reader with a meaning he can understand. You can’t compromise the integrity of the magazine or journal or newspaper by lauding praises on something that most will consider boring or, in the case of “Ulysses,” pornographic. That angers your editor and, what’s worse, your loyal reader.You’re unsure of your own opinion and you can’t sit with the work and decide because you have a deadline. Maybe you’re hesitant to shoot down a piece you’re still unsure about, but choosing a compromise isn’t an option because your job is to provide staunch opinion. So you go with what you know: you say the work is confusing or boring or stupid and you throw in some clever sentences so that your reader will agree with your opinion. Then you sigh, refill your coffee, decide which of the 100-plus manuscripts deserves reviewing and go through the same process all over again. As described by food critic in the film, “Ratatouille,” “The work of a critic is easy. We risk very little.” This is not true. As soon as the critic has achieved some level of reader agreement he is immediately unsafe, on the firing squad. One false step, one bad opinion where it counts, will destroy his reliability. And because he provides the voice of reason and meaning to the public, his first opinion must be the correct opinion. There can be no going back. He either defends his battles to the death or he melts into obscurity.No one can ever see all the components of a piece of art because to do so would be to foresee wars and bans and fickle readers. Maybe one day we can learn to forgive the critic once we realize the burden that he carries. But whether or not we choose forgiveness once one we’ve achieved empathy remains our own opinion. Unfortunately for the critic, he must never forget that his reader has one too.
(02/07/13 5:00am)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>Boy meets girl. Boy gets girl. Boy loses girl. Boy gets girl again. Boy gets eaten by corpse; corpse meets girl. Corpse gets girl. Corpse loses girl. Corpse gets girl again.This is the formula used by Jonathan Levine for his brain-bespattered romantic zombie comedy. The genre does indeed exist. “Warm Bodies,” a take on the walking dead, trades in the traditional gory shock value for a romance between the groaning hipster, R (Nicholas Hoult) and the tough girl love interest Julie (Teresa Palmer.) Unfortunately, the only thing that moves slower than the shuffling of the monsters is the already-tepid relationship between the two. To Levine’s credit, he jumpstarts his plot right from the get-go. Dispatched from the inevitable last human enclave to get some much-needed medicine, Julie, her boyfriend (a very dry Dave Franco) and various others make their way through the abandoned streets of a presumably once-thriving metropolis. The group is attacked by R and his gang of groaners, mayhem ensues, R gets his first heart-stopping (or starting) look at Julie, and then quickly and conveniently dispatches her boyfriend and eats his brains. So it goes. For reasons unexplained, but useful to the plot, R isn’t your typical zombie. Not only does he possess an ironic interior monologue, he also collects vinyl and is as cute as a button once you look past the rotting eyelids and decaying flesh. This is all very lucky for Julie, to whom R takes a fancy and whisks back to his love abode: an abandoned 747, where he houses her and teaches her the art of zombie love. An hour and a half later and there’s no progression beyond the moans and awkward staring. I don’t think I’d be alone in saying that I found this very comparable to a typical middle school relationship. The two even share a stiff dance with one another, which you may or may not liken to your own Sadie Hawkins experiences.There are some laugh-out-loud moments, like after Julie abandons R for her own people, the broken hearted zombie is consoled by the sage words of his best friend: “bitches, man.” But most of the film’s humor tries too hard to be witty in order to appeal to its teenage or 20-something crowd. What’s left is a lot of dry sentiment, a happy ending and some predictable archetypes: John Malkovich as General Grigio, Julie’s father as the shoot-first-ask-questions-later leader of survivors and the zombies as the horde of sensitive monsters just trying to find their way home.
(02/07/13 5:00am)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>Do we even need the critic?This is perhaps a bit inappropriately termed, considering the wealth of information critics have given us in the past. Anyone doubting this needs only turn to the incredibly influential essay by T.S. Eliot titled “Hamlet and His Flaws.” Eliot might very well have ushered in the era of new criticism — criticism that examines the text for deeper interpretation rather than reading it for its face value. Before Eliot, Hamlet was read in class and students were made to dress out in pantaloons and doublets. We now use snotty terms like “objective correlative” in our essays to show how Hamlet’s central drama is unearned and premature. Frankly, no one besides English majors gives much of a damn about Hamlet or early 20th century critics. What we need instead of the question of if we need the critic is much rather why we still need him and will continue to need him into the future. Film, more than any other genre, has the greatest wealth of criticism to date. Sites such as Rotten Tomatoes have given every viewer an opportunity to show his or her opinion and publish it under the auspices that other people really care about it.Contrary to the maxim that everybody’s a critic, what Rotten Tomatoes gives us is commonwealth opinion — percent thumbs up versus thumbs down ratings — which is all anyone really looks at. When’s the last time you’ve scrolled through what someone’s actually written about the film? Everybody has the opportunity to be a critic, but really everybody’s just a part of that percentage. I have no qualms with people wanting to pretend that their opinion really matters. I can empathize. Hell, all I do is publish myself and fantasize that other people are really reading me. However, the amateur critic needs to realize that the validity of his argument is mostly kaput because he simply doesn’t know what to look for. This is where the big dogs like Anthony Lane or Roger Ebert come into play. What they, particularly Lane, have that the amateur doesn’t is not just an irascible opinion and scathing wit but an ability to see the emotional intent of the film and whether the film and actors are actively working toward it. This sounds needlessly complicated so I’ll break it down using the recent film “Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters:” Hollywood slop that tries too hard to earn its R rating and casts some big-name actors for box office appeal. There’s not too much to this film. Your amateur critic could disagree. He could say that the gore and one awkward scene of nudity lends the film some handy shock value and that the film on the whole is rather witty. Your professional critic could agree that it is the shock the film is hoping for but could also argue that the shock is cheap, and the film’s wit is based on clichéd one-liners and stereotypes. While the amateur would enjoy the headstrong bravado of lead actor Jeremy Renner, the professional would tell you why Renner’s performance is annoying, self-satisfied and disengaging — not as enjoyable as other headstrong bravado-based acting as can be found in films such as the “Die Hard” series. The critic would find meaning and purpose to what the amateur is content to call ‘entertaining’ without really knowing why. Your professional critic really does know why because he or she cares about entertainment and knows what it looks like when it’s done right. Call his or her criticism mean-spirited and worthless if you must, but trust in what they argue. Whether you choose to agree is up to you. Everyone’s entitled to his or her own opinion.
(01/31/13 4:01pm)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>This week we celebrated the 200th anniversary of Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice,” a none-too-auspicious occasion for most people outside the feminist and literary realms. It is a truth universally acknowledged that your true Janeite is as rare as a two-dollar bill. Most people are content with reading about three quarters of the novel, setting it on their bedside table and then letting the impeccable Keira Knightley and the dashing Matthew Macfadyen from Joe Wright’s 2005 film fill them in on the details. Even more rare than your natural Janeite is your male reader: the one who will peruse Austen unironically and maybe even dispose a compliment now and again. Ever since Mark Twain famously lampooned the English “leisure class” matriarch (the “Huckleberry Finn” author is oft quoted as wanting to “dig her up and beat her over the skull with her own shin-bone”), disdain for Austen has been a must for anyone who values his man card. Why? Because every male reader since Mark Twain has been a closeted Janeite, playing the obstinate, headstrong boy so that he can better appreciate the beauty of the coupled Darcy and Elizabeth. We like Austen because she’s a breath of fresh air from all the masculine supercharged books we’re made to act like we enjoy, the bloody mannishness and in-your-face cleverness of Palahniuk and the visceral rape-happy “Millennium” trilogy, among others. I would know because before a dear friend and I exchanged favorite novels, “A Clockwork Orange” for the dreaded “P&P”, I was one of them. I would like to say that as soon as I read the first chapter I was hooked, gaffed and gutted, but this wasn’t the case. I tried to read “Pride and Prejudice” but found it so intensely boring that I set it down and forgot about it for three years. By the time I picked it up again, I had had my first relationship, my first bite of heartache, and enough sense to read up at least to the Netherfield Ball. I became so suddenly incensed that I didn’t set Austen down until I had finished half her collected novels. We may very well be indebted to Austen for giving us the most cleanly built relationships in all of literature. Mutual attraction, good finances, a couple sweet nothings and maybe a ball or two, and you have your marriage. The whole thing is nothing more than a well-handled transaction, which we like because it’s rational and easy to follow. Miss Bennet and Mr. Darcy don’t need this Twilight sloppy love triangle business and certainly no fetishistic whips to make their affections interesting. They’ve managed quite well by themselves these 200 years. This reader wishes them all the best for their next.
(01/24/13 5:00am)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>Following the unexpected success of its debut album “Gorilla Manor” in 2010, the eclectic quartet of indie rockers known as the Local Natives have remained relatively vague up until now about their sophomore album “Hummingbird,” which the band streamed for free via iTunes. I was reading Philip Cosores’ recent article about the band and the genesis of “Hummingbird.” One senses the glory that followed the success of “Gorilla Manor” was not only surprising and humbling, but also utterly ground-shifting. Caving under the pressure of pushing out “Hummingbird,” bassist and founding member Andy Hamm quit the band, a move that guitarist Ryan Hahn said “changed [the] writing process” and allowed the now-quartet to “experiment with different sounds.” But “Hummingbird” can hardly qualify as an experiment, primarily given the fact that its 11 tracks are all so beautifully poised that they avoid the senseless noodling to which so many “experimental” tracks fall prey. It would be wrong to label the confident, emotionally titillating sound of “Hummingbird” as anything other than triumph. Even so, “Hummingbird” isn’t a triumph in the sense of “Gorilla Manor.” Much of the reason the Local Natives’ first album was so wonderful was because it was permitted to indulge in the newness of its own emotions and sounds, regardless of whether or not they worked. The joy was not just in having the music. It was in discovering it. “Hummingbird” is more careful than “Gorilla Manor” in developing it, bypassing most of the meandering, and this is partly why it is so successful. The album’s first track, “You & I,” immediately establishes the plaintive theme of fruitless search “to places we don’t know,” as a repeated lyric laments. Front man Taylor Rice, a melancholic type with sympathetic eyes and a Freddie Mercury mustache, bursts through with strong and confident vocals. “You & I” is the strongest track, but not by much. “Colombia,” a part-dirge, part-anthem in memory of keyboardist’s Kelcey Ayer’s mother, balances the wistful refrain of “You & I” with a new, more powerful couplet: “Am I giving enough / Am I loving enough?” Rice’s voice pleads with vigor each time he sings the line, introducing a new, pained immediacy. Between these two, the conceit expands, vocal depth is added with “Ceilings,” musical weight with the pair “Black Balloons” and “Wooly Mammoth” (akin to fellow indie/alternative superstars Arcade Fire) and a swell of emotional near-gratitude with “Black Spot.” Constipated emotional payoff, whether through the melodies or through the lyrics, is a constant theme of “Hummingbird” and one the listener sees mirrored on the track’s latter half. I can’t neglect to mention the percussive and electronic “Breakers,” which sports a weird music video that looks like it belongs at Sundance. It’s the most fun track here, but it also serves the invaluable purpose of being the midpoint between the five-track emotional swells on either end of the album. Swells, hitting against the “breakers.” Pretty clever, huh?
(01/24/13 2:29am)
courtesy of The Paris Review
(01/24/13 2:27am)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>Last week, the Paris Review posted this wonderful mood index chart for the characters of Les Misérables, or Les Miz. Be impressed when you look at it. Someone has gone to ridiculously unnecessary lengths of trouble to chronicle every happy (blue) and sad (red) occurrence from Victor Hugo’s behemoth of a novel, very ably reducing literature to something resembling scanner frequency readings. Why is this important? For one, it shows just how adept we have become at reducing imposing books into nothing more than fact and mood. If you get Hugo’s basic plot and the attitude of his characters (our lovely mood index chart will tell you that most of them are sad), there’s not much reason to wade through his hundreds and hundreds of pages of detail and French history. Or so most people would have you believe. Unfortunately for Les Miz, it has gone through this sparkchart — cutting more often than any other book (58 film adaptations to date, to say nothing of the TV serials). When it does emerge from the cutting board and onto the big screen (or stage), what viewers get is a cute love triangle, lots of angry young men, and a tidy end to the struggles of this man with a funny French name, all of it packed into a dainty two or so hours. This isn’t the work that Hugo wrote. Les Miz is a revolution across a thousand pages. It’s a saga of man’s undying spirit. It’s two dozen lives that rot and fester until either God or the merciful bullet ends them. And it’s exhausting because 19th-century France had never heard of a line editor. Monsieur Hugo dispenses pages of detail as though he were throwing candy off a parade float. However, simply doing away with those pages of detail, as most translators will, is no way to read Les Misérables. Those pages are what give the novel its difficulty and exhaustion. Without them, the reader would feel like a mere spectator watching the ‘miserable’ toil but doing none of the toiling herself. Hugo’s works are all give-and-take relationships. Reading them should feel like a workout: devote your energies now to exhaustive and often repetitive exercises, and in the end you’ll have grown exponentially, though you may not feel it all at once. How we’ve managed to boil all of this into a pop opera and dreamt dreams I’ll never know.But far be it for me to totally lambast the efforts of Les Miz’s adaptors. The musical by Alain Boubil and Claude-Michel Schönberg continues to mar my iPod’s Top 25 Most Played playlist and Tom Hooper’s recent adaption was nothing short of a masterpiece. Even so, it may be a masterpiece, but not the Les Miz I read. All things considered, a mood index chart may be one of the better ways of condensing Les Miz. For my part, I prefer the words of Hugo himself. Shortly after the book was released in England, the novelist, eager to hear how the novel was being received, telegraphed his publisher a single letter: “?” His response? “!” Why is this important? For one, it shows just how adept we have become at reducing imposing books into nothing more than fact and mood. If you get Hugo’s basic plot and the attitude of his characters (our lovely mood index chart will tell you that most of them are sad), there’s not much reason to wade through his hundreds and hundreds of pages of detail and French history. Or so most people would have you believe. Unfortunately for Les Miz, it has gone through this sparkchart — cutting more often than any other book (58 film adaptations to date, to say nothing of the TV serials). When it does emerge from the cutting board and onto the big screen (or stage), what viewers get is a cute love triangle, lots of angry young men, and a tidy end to the struggles of this man with a funny French name, all of it packed into a dainty two or so hours. This isn’t the work that Hugo wrote. Les Miz is a revolution across a thousand pages. It’s a saga of man’s undying spirit. It’s two dozen lives that rot and fester until either God or the merciful bullet ends them. And it’s exhausting because 19th-century France had never heard of a line editor. Monsieur Hugo dispenses pages of detail as though he were throwing candy off a parade float. However, simply doing away with those pages of detail, as most translators will, is no way to read Les Misérables. Those pages are what give the novel its difficulty and exhaustion. Without them, the reader would feel like a mere spectator watching the ‘miserable’ toil but doing none of the toiling herself. Hugo’s works are all give-and-take relationships. Reading them should feel like a workout: devote your energies now to exhaustive and often repetitive exercises, and in the end you’ll have grown exponentially, though you may not feel it all at once. How we’ve managed to boil all of this into a pop opera and dreamt dreams I’ll never know.But far be it for me to totally lambast the efforts of Les Miz’s adaptors. The musical by Alain Boubil and Claude-Michel Schönberg continues to mar my iPod’s Top 25 Most Played playlist and Tom Hooper’s recent adaption was nothing short of a masterpiece. Even so, it may be a masterpiece, but not the Les Miz I read. All things considered, a mood index chart may be one of the better ways of condensing Les Miz. For my part, I prefer the words of Hugo himself. Shortly after the book was released in England, the novelist, eager to hear how the novel was being received, telegraphed his publisher a single letter: “?” His response? “!”