Day: November 22, 2005

what special editions and gift boxes are you lusting after for the holidays? I go to the criterion collection website and get quite dizzy. of course, if i get any of these items i will receive puzzled looks and questions from my family (what kind of movie is that? that looks dull…etc. etc.) but I want Criterion’s Le Samourai, The Wages of Fear, L’Eclisse, The Leopard and Fassbinder’s “BRD Trilogy” (Marriage of maria Braun, Lola and Veronika Voss). i also lust after the Val Lewton collection coming out. and though I am generally opposed to music box sets and question my need for another version of Blitzkrieg Bop, I am inexorably drawn to “Weird Tales of the Ramones” which includes a DVD and a comic booklet. some of the boxed sets fill me with anger–the laurel and hardy “collection” includes their most painful film Utopia which is only there because it is not under copyright protection while most of their classic silents are totally unavailable; the steve mcqueen collection includes a bore like The Thomas Crown Affair while totally neglecting Hell is for Heroes, the coen brothers collection includes Intolerable Cruelty but not Miller’s Crossing, etc. etc. and when i see the glittering collections for the simpsons, futurama, monty python, ren and stimpy, aqua teen hunger force, the prisoner, etc. i weep with despair at my financially marginal position–all that neatly packaged nostalgia and culture, all those commentaries, all those anecdotes lost to me!!! but who exactly is buying the boxed sets of Diagnosis Murder?

Pondering Frisoli’s comments about movie critics. Presumably an obvious defense for movie critics would be that they cannot take advantage of the conversational nature of a blog. A.O. Scott cannot assume that the average reader of his review this week, read his review of a different movie three months ago. So it is next to impossible to develop an argument, still less to circle back to modify an argument or admit that you wrong the first time around. And of course the whole thing is monological so the movie critic has no particular reason for modifying his/her views. The value of the blog is that it is dialogical, and it has a history of shared understandings (or disagreements) to which we can continually return.

That said, and having got to use the words ‘monological’ and ‘dialogical’ outside of class, it is still hard to understand why most movie critics are so bad. I have a particular dislike of David Denby, who seems to suck the life and enjoyment out of every movie he reviews – a veritable Dementor among movie critics – and simply doesn’t appear to actually like movies. But he is scarcely alone. So, which movie critics do people on this blog read/listen to and what do you think of them? For me it is Denby and Lane at the New Yorker, whoever is reviewing at the New York Times, and David Edelstein. Anyone I should be reading?