The vocation of the critic

June 19, 2008 By Gene Veith

Some thoughts about the controversy over movie reviews that we discussed yesterday, occasioned by the Christianity Today critic giving “Sex & the City” three stars. . .(This blog seems to have become THE place to talk about this, with even one of the parties to the controversy, Ted Slater of Focus on the Family weighing in, as well as other movie critics. I really appreciate that, Mr. Slater and the rest of you, for your stimulating discussion.) But here are some of my principles for reviewing:

(1) A review is not an advertisement or an endorsement but an analysis. Just condemning or just praising a movie or other work of art is not enough. A good review should yield understanding, not just of the work but of what the work is about.

(2) The word “good” has different senses. It can be used in a moral sense (“helping the flood victims was a good deed”) or an aesthetic sense (“that movie had good acting”). A movie can be good aesthetically and bad morally. Or, to bring the other absolutes into the discussion, a work of art that is true and good may not be beautiful; or one that is beautiful and good may not be true; or any of the other possible combinations. Part of the critic’s job is to sort all of that out.

(3) Not everyone should watch every movie, and thanks to the vocation of the movie critic, they don’t have to. Recall the principle that what is lawful for one vocation may not be lawful for someone without that vocation (e.g., soldiers, police officers, and executioners are called to do what civilians may not). Just as physicians must deal with repulsive diseases, critics may sometimes have to deal with repulsive movies. Not that even critics may fall into sin. If watching a movie is an occasion for sin, the critic should stay away, but experienced professionals usually get pretty detached, like a physician operating on a naked body. But if you can’t be detached, this may not be your calling.

(4) In the case at issue, Mr. Slater reviewed the review in a way that was overly inflammatory. Even if the critic is going to condemn something, there is a right and an effective way to go about it. The purpose of every vocation, as we have discussed, is to love and service to the neighbor, so a sense of compassion can make negative criticism sink in more. And, again, the goal of a review should be to increase understanding, both of truth (as the Focus review does, rightly, in condemning sin) and the work being discussed. While still attacking the review for minimizing the movie’s sexual immorality, the Focus on the Family critic could have zeroed in on what the review both discusses and exemplifies: the plight of single Christians–such as the reviewer herself who raises these issues–who get so little support from the church and are thrown back to the resources of the world, such as “Sex & the City.”

(5) The original review could also have given us more analysis, which might have defused some of the controversy. We are told that the movie has the characters wrestling with relationships. Tell us more about the content of those struggles. What, I think, emerges (based on snippets of the TV series that I have seen) is that what these young women really want is MARRIAGE, and yet their promiscuity undermines that quest. They treat men like they treat their shoes, as consumer accessories for their own gratification, and yet they want much more. What they yearn for is, in fact, God’s design. With that kind of specific analysis, the reviewer could fully engage the movie–praising its artistic qualities, taking it seriously by arguing with it, and leaving the reader with understanding, not just of the movie, but of issues of truth, goodness, and beauty.

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Christians reviewing movies

June 18, 2008 By Gene Veith

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Hey, thanks for carrying the blog yesterday. You alerted me to lots of interesting things, some of which I might blog about. For example, thanks to Tickletext for this:

Is anyone following the mini-controversy over Christianity Today’s 3-star review of the Sex and the City film? Basically, a writer for CT Movies gave the film a qualified, moderately positive review. On the basis of that review, some outraged Christians questioned CT’s commitment to scripture, and CT published a response accordingly. Ted Slater of Focus on the Family then accused CT of “relishing sexual perversity” and endorsing pornography, and called for the magazine to “repent.” Many of the comments on his blog post echoed his sentiments. Others have responded critically to Slater.

CT’s review

CT’s editorial response

Ted Slater’s condemnation
A response to Slater which includes links to other responses

There are interesting questions here. Does a positive review amount to a promotion, as Slater says? In Areopagitica, John Milton says that truth and falsehood grow up entwined together in this fallen world, and we Christians must work to discern the true and the false. When engaging works of culture, is it possible to praise what is good without reveling in what is bad, or must Christians throw out discernment altogether? Furthermore, when another Christian praises what we regard with spiritual or moral dubiety, what should our attitude be?

I want to weigh in on this, as a long time movie reviewer for WORLD, but I’d like to hear what you have to say first.

UPDATE: See the take in Patrol Magazine.

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Review the Beowulf Movie

November 16, 2007 By Gene Veith

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I hope some of you see the Beowulf movie this weekend and post a comment about how it was.

A critic I really like, Stephen Hunter, has a good take on how the animation/real-life combo prevents any real acting or human emotions from happening. The same people who made this movie made “Polar Express,” which utterly creeped me out. Our faithful reader and commenter tODD usefully explained why, pointing us to this article about the “uncanny.”

Animation does make possible, though, effects of fantasy that are impossible to realistic drama. C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien hated attempts to portray fantasy tales on stage, because in their realism they just could not pull it off, and phony special effects made it even worse. They didn’t think much of movies, either, though Lewis made an exception, interestingly enough, for the pioneering fantasy animation of Disney’s “Snow White.”

Mr. Hunter, for all of his good analysis, utterly misunderstands Beowulf’s times and the work’s literary structure. He obviously hadn’t read Tolkien’s definitive critical essay, “Beowulf: The Monster and the Critics,” as evident when he says this:

When the original was assembled (written? collected? sung? chanted?) around the embers back in the good ol’ 700s or so, no theory of psychology existed, so there was no storytellers’ need to conjure coherent behavior patterns or fully realized plots. Man was so powerless and all nature seemed arbitrary, so stories could be arbitrary, none more so than the epic poem of the Anglo-Saxon peoples (even if it told of Scandinavian adventures): The great warrior Beowulf fights and kills first Grendel, then Grendel’s ma; 50 years later he fights a dragon.

Unacceptably episodic today. No arc. No growth. Where’s the reveal? What’s the back story? Thus, Gaiman and Avary root the thing in family dysfunction, and the two monsters, plus the fire breather, are the manifestations of alpha-male pathologies for which many innocent people pay in blood, even if the alpha male is the only one on the planet capable of dealing with the terror he himself has unleashed.

Episodic? As Tolkien points out, each encounter shows the Monsters getting stronger and Beowulf getting weaker, intensifying the heroism, in the Germanic sense of courage in the face of doom. We also see the progression of the hero as a young warrior in the prime of life, learning by experience, until at the final confrontation is he is an old warrior near death, still fighting dragons for his people when he is 80 years old, until a new generation rises to take his place. And we could go on. The unity of the tale is far richer than what we postmoderns could come up with in our “theories of psychology.” And those times were in tune with much deeper forces than we are.

My worry is that the filmmakers, though they seem faithful to the original plot, may also be oblivious to what it means. Still, Hunter lauds the fight scenes to the sky. And, in what I didn’t realize, many theaters are showing it in 3-D! Only with cool glasses! So, at the very least, it should be great fun. But I can’t see it this weekend, so I need you to tell me.

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Life as Unrelated Fragments Edited Together

January 22, 2020 By Gene Veith

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The movie 1917 is being hailed as one of the best war movies of all time. Nominated for a Best Picture Oscar, the film follows two young soldiers during World War I as they try to get a message through to front line troops warning them of an ambush.

Among its distinctive features, the movie appears as if it were photographed in one continuous shot. The effect is to immerse the audience into the story, following the two soldiers through all of the shooting and explosions, seeing what they see and being with them every step of the way. This technique, a cinematic version of the classical dramatic unities, has the effect of extreme realism and narrative intensity. Alfred Hitchcock shot his philosophical suspense thriller Rope using this method, as have a few other directors, such as Alejandro Inarritu in Birdman. In reality, the director of 1917 Sam Mendes (as well as Hitchcock and Inarritu) did use multiple shots, but they worked them together so that the viewer never notices them.

To have a single shot that appears to last for two hours is a stark contrast with most of today’s movies–especially other action movies–which tend to feature rapid-fire editing, with extremely short shots edited together to create the effect of frenetic action.

I came across a refreshingly honest movie critic who, while praising 1917, admitted that he no longer had the attention span for a movie like that. During the long shot, his attention kept jumping elsewhere–to the decorative lights in the theater, to hushed conversations in the audience, to people coming in late, and to other distractions. His head started hurting.

He realized that he had becoming conditioned to short-cut movie editing. More seriously, he had been conditioned by the internet, his phone, and the multi-tasking and multi-stimulations that make up most of our days, to the point that his whole life was fragmented into short, unrelated experiences. His whole life, he concluded, was edited.

From Tim Molloy at MovieMaker, Watching 1917 in 2020, When Our Lives Are More Edited Than Ever:

It was hard for me to sit and watch a single, unbroken shot. I’m 44. I grew up on fast-cut videos on MTV, and now I spend hours every day on a phone that flashes tweets and text messages and calendar invites. No one forced this on me. As with any addiction, I started off liking these things, but then ended up needing them to function, and now derive no pleasure from them whatsoever.

Movies are my usual distraction from these distractions. There’s almost no other time when I spend two waking hours disconnected from my phone. I should go for my hikes, I know.

It isn’t lost on me how pathetic it is that my main distraction from my tiny screen is a bigger screen. But with 1917, I was filled with unease, because the big screen wasn’t distracting enough. . . .

Iñárritu told Variety in 2014 that he wanted Birdman to appear as one long, continuous sequence because “we live our lives with no editing.”

But that’s only kind of true. We edit constantly now, using a phone screen as our de facto field of vision. We cut from the great Hitchcock biography we’re reading on Kindle to the Wikipedia page for someone casually mentioned in the book to Twitter—since we’ve left Kindle, now, anyway, time for a break—to the trailer for Black Widow, which someone just tweeted, back to Wikipedia to try to understand who David Harbour is playing, until our friend texts us an article about an acquaintance who seems to be doing well, to Zillow, to try to figure out how much that friend’s new house is worth. Okay: Maybe you’ve bailed out on the “we” at this point. . . .

I think 1917 will be divisive, because even in the half-decade since Birdman, our lives have become more edited. More than ever, we choose who we read and what we watch. We aren’t subject to the whims of three television networks and our local theater owner and newspaper publisher.

Dedicating our eyes to one thing, for two hours, requires a surrender we’re no longer accustomed to making.

What does this fragmented-editing sensibility do to thinking? To reading? To relationships? To mental stability? To politics? To one’s spiritual life?

I would suggest that watching movies like 1917, reading long books, and taking on long-term tasks that demand focused attention (wood-working, making models, writing, raising children) can help cure this malady. If we can handle things like that.

Image by Dyversions from Pixabay

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The Sacramone mystery solved

August 26, 2011 By Gene Veith

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The Lutheran blogosphere has been in a state of disturbance since the disappearance of Anthony Sacramone. When you go to his blog site, Strange Herring, a window comes up that says that it is available by invitation only. Since no one has an invitation, that has provoked outrage and hurt feelings, with an inchoate fear that Mr. Sacramone has been murdered. (Sorry, I’ve been reading Swedish mysteries.) So it comes as something of a scoop for this blog that Mr. Sacramone in a comment came out of his self-imposed exile and explained himself. In case you missed it, here is what he had to say:

Herr Veith:
The attention you have shown my online wares over the years is both undeserved…and much appreciated. As for Strange Herring, as you have noted, my enthusiasm waxes and wanes for it, as I question its value, even entertainment value, over the long haul. I have also mulled the possibility of re-jiggering it, making it more focused, perhaps strictly on film. In any event, I found myself inundated with some editing work and just didn’t want to think about it anymore, so I took it offline, which I now recognize was a mistake, as it seems to have offended some who thought I had made it for members only, when in fact not even I go on it (LARS! IT WAS NOTHING PERSONAL!). Also, I have been informed that FIRST THINGS is looking for a more “moderate tone,” and since I don’t do moderate, I have probably blogged my last over there. So, as soon as I can figure out how best to peddle my limited talents, I promise to reemerge.

So the message about the blog being by invitation only is just a quirk of the software, nothing personal! So thank you, Mr. Sacramone, and we understand. Take all the time you need, but just realize that you have lots of fans and you have an obligation to the public good.

Do what you please, of course, but I implore you in your new re-jiggering to BRING BACK LUTHER AT THE MOVIES, at least sometimes, at least as a special guest. Your portrayal of him as if he came back to live today as a movie critic, as unlikely as that might seem, just nails the personality, the earthy spirituality, and the gusto of the great man. That is a literary achievement of great note.

UPDATE: Oh, man. Strange Herring is back, and Mr. Sacramone is on another roll. He says some kind things about us here, so thanks for that, but there is much more good stuff. I’m glad we shamed him so effectively.

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The vocation of vacation

July 5, 2008 By Gene Veith

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Friends, we’re en route to Oklahoma, where much of the time we will be at beautiful Lake Tenkiller, far away from the internet and probably even cell phone coverage. So I’ll be taking a break from blogging, though I’ll be back a week from Monday. We’ve had a big jump in readership, with the “vocation of the movie critic” bringing us lots of new readers. For you, don’t lose your new habit of checking in with this blog. Explore the archives, which store many fine discussions that you will still enjoy. I’ve left you a few topics to keep you busy. Do monitor the “Testimony of an Atheist” post, which is featuring some deep, honest, and insightful discussions. I will really be incommunicado out at the lake, so if anything happens in the world that I should know about, tell me about it in a comment here. God’s blessings until we meet again!

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