Well, darlings, tomorrow marks the one month anniversary of this column, and to celebrate the occasion, I've put together a bit of a grab bag for you. Because there's nothing I find more celebratory than a good argument, this first milestone seemed like as good a time as any to go through my hate mails and answer trackbacks and post a few thoughts and responses. If you're dying for new(er) content, come back next week, when I'll have some thoughts on how the success of V for Vendetta breaks every rule in modern Hollywood.

On to the brawls...

Andre Soares was kind enough to link to my last column, in which I connected a few tidbits from SXSW to the ever-evolving relationship between consumers and critics, over at the Alternative Film Guide. But, taking exceptions with a few points, he went on to file what looks a lot like a counter-argument. The thing is, I think Soares and I actually agree on most every aspect of the issue. Soares starts off by pointing out that Hollywood makes the lion's share of its profits off of a consumer roughly 30 years younger than the average critic: "film critics can't be expected to represent the tastes of a film audience composed mostly of teenagers and very young adults -- unless, of course, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Nation were to hire fourteen-year-olds to write film reviews." That's a valid point, but it's also just a little fatalistic -- he's essentially saying that any hope for a connection between the people who write about movies and the people who pay to see them is doomed.

This may or may not be a correct statement, but regardless, I don't think it stands in opposition to my contention that, slowly but surely, "mainstream print critics find themselves standing outside of the zeitgeist, watching film culture pass them by." I think Soares refines both my argument and his when he writes, "Ultimately, film marketing -- not film culture -- may be what's leaving film critics behind." Nor do I disagree with his contention that "box-office success should not be held as an absolute social barometer or, for that matter, as an indicator of the development of film culture." Still, my initial point was not, as Soares suggests later in his post, that critics should be easier on "trash like Meet the Fockers and The 40-Year-Old Virgin" in the interest of bridging the gap between them and the average consumer.

If you're surprised that Soares threw in that latter title as an exemplar of trash, well, if he's making the argument I think he's making, it actually makes a lot more sense than the obviously noxious Fockers. Judd Apatow's film was perhaps 2005's only real example of box office and critical synergy -- or, at the very least, its returns on both ends certainly exceeded estimates. Soares, who in his post salutes Pauline Kael for her pan of The Sound of Music (which allegedly got the critic fired from McCalls), seems to be espousing the (widely held) opinion that it's a critic's job to stand in opposition from the mainstream. Which is fine, but to hold Kael up on those terms doesn't hold water -- she was, after all, the greatest middlebrow of the 20th century. Or, as Louis Menand put it in his NY Review of Books writeup of her For Keeps, Kael's challenge when taking the film critic job at the New Yorker...

"...required disarming both phobias in the sensibility The New Yorker had so successfully identified: the fear of too low, and the fear of too high. It meant overcoming the intelligent person's resistance to the pulpiness, the corniness, and the general moral and aesthetic schmaltz of Hollywood movies, but without refining those things away by some type of critical alchemy. The New Yorker's readers did not want an invitation to slum, but they didn't want to be told that appreciating movies was something that called for a command of "the grammar of film," either."

And I'm certainly not suggesting that we all start passing out slum-for-free cards, either. My real point was less about the specific films that critics kick, but the way they (well, we) go about it. From where I stand (from which, I'm sure, the view looks quite different than it does for Soares), it seems like all media cultures are moving towards a more participatory place. As far as film criticism goes, I think we're seeing that the days in which a critic (and Kael was perhaps the guiltiest of this of anyone, ever) could just pass down a declaration from up high are over. From where I stand, it seems clear that reviews have to be considered as the jumping off point to a conversation. Now, I do also think that there's a certain kind of denial of the mainstream amongst some critics that's, in some cases, rather appalling -- but that's meat for another column, on another day.

Going back a couple of weeks: I enjoy Culture Snob quite a bit, so it was something of an honor to have him call me out on my first column installment, on the critical fracas that broke out shortly before the Oscars, when it became apparent that Crash really had a chance.

"What the hell is happening with the delayed polarization that Crash has engendered?" the Snob writes. "Obviously, people and critics who are foaming in loathing today dismissed the movie upon its theatrical release. It was only at the end of the year, when middlebrow, Middle West critics proclaimed it to be the shit, that some uppity folks got upset. In essence, those snobs got pissed because people liked the film and found it meaningful. So they berated them for their taste under the guise of attacking the movie. (I’m sure they resented the success of Forrest Gump, too.) This strategy is a loser, akin to telling somebody that it’s wrong wrong wrong! to like vanilla ice cream." He goes on to accuse me of lambasting the film for having "the audacity to not change the world." To my contention that I had "lived in Los Angeles for almost 20 years, and I never saw any brand of racial conflict that a bad film could resolve," the Snob retorts, "Well, I’ve spent nearly all my life in the Midwest, and I’ve yet to see any film of any quality that can “resolve” any real-world conflict, let alone one that’s been with us for millennia."

Essentially, Culture Snob is saying that I hated Crash because of its socio-political impotence, and I think that's a slight misreading of my original point. I don't hate Crash because it's, ultimately, unable to solve the problems it describes -- although I don't think that would necessarily be an invalid basis for critique -- but I certainly bristle at its self importance. And it's hard to believe anyone could watch the film and *not* get the impression that Paul Haggis had some kind of social action in mind. Just as it's impossible to watch Good Night, and Good Luck without feeling George Clooney's liberal hardon bursting through the screen, Haggis' apparent compulsion to "make a difference" bleeds through Crash's every frame. But ultimately, I think the best reason to hate Crash is that it's just really, really bad.

And with that, I vow to never write about that film ever again.

To close on a totally unrelated note, here is my favorite piece of film-related writing from this week:

"A story about chance and the filmmaker's apparently limitless appetite for twee, Look Both Ways recalls any number of other stories filled with people who invariably discover that there are other people just like them. Hooray. Ms. Watt's contribution to this irksome subgenre, a staple of the modern film festival, is bits of animation that she intersperses with the live-action proceedings, an effect that brings to mind patches of spackling on an unfinished wall."

--Manohla Dargis, on Sarah Watt's unbearably quirky festival-hopping must-miss, Look Both Ways, in the New York Times