Week of May 18, 2006, Issue #552
FILM
The Moviegoer
Paul Matwychuk / moviegoer@vueweekly.com
Daily newspaper critics (and I guess I should throw the ones who write for weeklies in there as well) don’t have the clout they used to. As recently as 20 years ago, the review in the daily paper was just about the only professional opinion many people heard on any given movie.But the internet has had a dramatic, democratizing effect on people’s relationship to film critics. Not only do hundreds of competing opinions now circulate about every film that comes out, but people have also become increasingly uninterested in hearing a so-called “professional” opinion about them. People already know if they want to see a particular movie, and nothing the critic says is likely to persuade them any differently.
I don’t think this is necessarily a bad development. Hey, most newspaper critics don’t deserve to be listened to. (Anyone who cares enough about movies to attend Metro Cinema, for instance, probably knows enough to ignore Bill Rankin’s reviews in the Journal of the films screening there.)
I’m definitely not pining for a bygone age when readers obediently followed the recommendations of their local movie critic—if indeed they ever did. What I am suggesting is that the tone of movie criticism needs to change. That old, authoritative style that newspaper critics still cling to—so impersonal, so obsessed with the false authority of star ratings, so committed to indiscriminately reviewing every goddamned movie that comes out every single week, no matter how disposable—just doesn’t jibe with the way people watch and respond to movies anymore.
What kind of writing will crop up to replace it? I’m not sure, but I hope it looks a lot like the criticism being done by a pair of internet bloggers named DK Holm and Dennis Cozzalio, who are quietly turning into two of the best regular movie critics in North America. (Holm does the “Nocturnal Admissions” column for Kevin Smith’s Movie Poop Shoot website, while Cozzalio runs a blog called Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule.)
Holm and Cozzalio traffic in a new brand of movie criticism that I like to think of as “humble criticism.” They write in the first person, but their tone is more confessional than egotistical. In his discussion of Punch-Drunk Love, for instance, Holm is almost shockingly candid as he describes the similarities between Adam Sandler’s character and himself. “Like Barry,” he says, “I am afraid of bullies ... I don’t cry all the time, like Barry, but I want to. Like Barry, I have an older sibling who had a disastrous impact on my life and destroyed my ability to have normal relations with women. Unlike Barry, I’ve never had a fox like Emily Watson get a crush on me from a distance and chase me down.”
Cozzalio seems to be a happier person than Holm (he has a wife, a daughter and a fun job writing DVD subtitles for 20th Century Fox), but his writing style shows a similar humility and a willingness to explain how his reactions to movies are shaped by his own life experiences. His approach is that of an intelligent person who has seen a lot of movies and who’s formed articulate, original notions about all of them, but who knows that his cinematic education is still far from over and, unlike most bloggers, is genuinely respectful of other people’s opinions.
Free from the constraints of a daily paper, Holm and Cozzalio write about the movies that interest them (Holm loves TV series, Criterion Collection classics, teen comedies and cult fantasy/horror/sci-fi; Cozzalio likes the great ’70s directors and drive-in cheese) at the length that pleases them. Their writing is engaged, imaginative and deeply personal in a way that reflects the charged intimacy of filmgoing better than any newspaper critic around.
Pauline Kael, the legendary film critic for The New Yorker, once said, “I’m frequently asked why I don’t write my memoirs. I think I have.” As film critics, Holm and Cozzalio are shaping up to be excellent memoirists. V