a.o. scott Tagged Articles at Cinematical

(Full disclosure: current Cinematical Managing Editor Scott Weinberg and Cinematical co-founder Karina Longworth, now editor of Spout.com, make brief appearances in this film.)

Some documentaries demand to be seen on the big screen; others are best discovered while channel surfing. Gerald Peary's For the Love of Movies: The Story of American Film Criticism falls into the latter category.

On the film's official site, Peary declares his doc to be "an unapologetic defense of a profession under siege." It's filled with talking head interviews with critics whose bylines are more familiar than their faces: A.O. Scott, J. Hoberman, Lisa Schwarzbaum, Owen Gleiberman, Kenneth Turan, and many others. It's a treat to see the best-known film critic on the planet, Roger Ebert, give a never-before-seen interview. The sound bites are distinctive, the insider's perspective is refreshing, the historical overview is welcome, and the overall impression is positive.

Here's the sticking point: For the Love of Movies features an academic approach to the subject. Unless you have a great interest in film criticism, it feels like you're watching a term paper. Peary is both a long-time film studies professor at Suffolk University and a film critic for The Boston Phoenix, an alternative weekly, and is obviously not the first film critic to direct a movie.

Jean-Luc Godard and Francois Truffaut were critics before they made movies; so were fellow French New Wave directors Claude Chabrol, Eric Rohmer, and Jacques Rivette. The difference is that they were younger men in rebellion; Peary is an older man more interested in defending his longtime colleagues from charges that film criticism is no longer relevant or needed.

The seemingly unkillable Norman Mailer is dead of renal failure. He was 84. As well they should do, most obituaries are noting Mailer's nigh-Nobel worthy body of work--his supreme novel of World War II, for instance, The Naked and the Dead, filmed in a heavily bowdlerized version by Raoul Walsh. Mailer's less known work as an actor and director needs to be memorialized separately. As a larger than life personality, given to public brawls, with his noble battered oversized profile worthy of any senator or any prize-fighter, Mailer was made for cinema. Milos Forman used that big silhouette of Mailer's to play the architect Stanford White in Ragtime. Paralyzingly boring avant garde director Matthew Barney co-starred Mailer as Harry Houdini in Cremaster 2. (1999). The TV film version of Mailer's famous bio of murderer Gary Gilmore, The Executioner's Song made Tommy Lee Jones a star. So Barney, last seen on screen filleting Bjork with Japanese whale-flensing knives, seems to have hired Mailer as an allusion to Gilmore's belief that he was a descendant of the famed magician.

Some of the longer obits mention the kind of Mailer misbehavior that broke out, whenever there was a camera near. Most infamous is Mailer's chomping on Rip Torn's ear on the set of his 1970 film Maidstone, after Torn came at him with a hammer. Here's the footage of that famous bout, complete with swanky French subtitles. We're hearing less about Wild 90, where Mailer got into the face of a Doberman Pinscher and outbarked him. I think he was the first actor to have done this, but it's something you see frequently on screen today, whenever some actor wants to show that he's tougher than a dog. Pauline Kael later summed up by saying that on film Mailer "tried to will a work of art into existence, without going through the steps of making it."

Less seen, even, than Mailer's directoral efforts is the 1979 Hegedus/Pennybaker Town Bloody Hall, a documentary version of Mailer's stark bollocky crazy book-lengh essay Prisoner of Sex, in which Mailer clashes antlers with a tag-team of feminist all-stars, including Germaine Greer, Village Voice poet Jill Johnston, Betty Friedan and Susan Sontag. Also obscure is the English version of Mailer's An American Dream, risibly AKA'd as See You in Hell Darling with Stuart Whitman, Janet Leigh and Aug 1966 Playmate of the Month Susan Denberg as Ruta the German maid. Some of these films were shown at The Mistress and the Muse: The Films of Norman Mailer, which played at Lincoln Center in NYC this summer; here's Michael Chaiken's interview with Mailer about his films. And perhaps A.O. Scott's positive review of the retrospective gave the old self-promoter some pleasure.

A couple of weeks ago, A.O. Scott and Manohla Dargis of the Times wrote a couple of pieces on the relationship between movies and the Internet. Manohla's was the featherweight of the two, humorously recounting her struggles to find a movie download site to her liking. Scott's was more substantial, positing a time in the near future when movie fanatics will have access to a "virtual cinematheque" where "before too long the entire surviving history of movies will be open for browsing and sampling at the click of a mouse for a few PayPal dollars." I think it's an entirely logical premise. If in 1978, when I was born, you would have said to someone that the movies released that year could one day be played by inserting a little round disc into a home computer, the person you were talking to would have looked at you like you were crazy. Then they would have asked "What's this 'home computer' thing you refer to, by the way?" So if we can travel that far in 28 years, you're telling me that in the next 28 years, Paramount and Fox can't figure out a way to get their library of films from the 30s and 40s onto the Web, which will likely be by then a more important avenue of distribution than the video store? That's flatly absurd.

I've been reading some counterpoints to the argument on the Web, and I've yet to find a credible argument against the "virtual cinemateque." One of them, by film historian Kristin Thompson, is downright illogical. Thompson misuses Scott's phrase 'surviving history of movies' to set up a strawman argument, claiming that when Scott speaks of movies, he's including teaching films, porn, ads and, I guess, home movies as well. What planet is she on? He's clearly talking about movie-movies -- the kind of movies that he or I or any other reasonable film fan might be interested in downloading. As for the more substantial argument -- that the studios have no financial incentive in digitizing even an obscure movie-movie from the 1930s -- to that I say, what was the financial incentive in putting the 1947 film Black Narcissus on DVD, which I bought last week? Was Universal Pictures being besieged on a weekly basis by fans of director Michael Powell, demanding an end to the injustice of not having Black Narcissus on DVD? I think not. It seems like we've been over this ground many times. If I wanted, I'm sure I could go to the New York Public Library and microfiche an article from the early 80s explaining why all the movies we grew up with won't ever be transferred to home video.