If a critic were to argue a film is a good film explicitly because it is (for example) a gay positive film, and makes absolutely no other note of how it communicates those elements with some kind of quality or clarity, that would definitely be an extremely bad critic. And while I wouldn't say that never happens, I honestly don't think that is something that happens very often.
I don't, either, but I also wouldn't expect it to. I would expect it to influence the review in subtle, unstated ways, which is worse. "I liked this film because it leads towards X social goal" is at least transparent and each person can decide for themselves if they care about that as part of the criticism. The problem is when you get this ersatz criticism where it's just sort of folded in with cinematography or whatever or treated as just another totally normal filmic criticism consideration, as opposed to something the writer just cares about personally.
I think we should be able to agree that "just comes out and admits it has nothing to do with the quality of the film" is an implausible standard. If what we're talking about exists, it's not generally going to take that form, and doesn't have to in order to be a problem/reasonable to be annoyed by.
At most I think these elements may predispose some members of an audience into liking a film, maybe even more than it 'deserves'. Or that they might believed that its perceived social good merits them a little nudge into loftier critical territory. And while those elements may be defined fairly as a bias, I don't think they are anymore of a bias than someone preferring a fast paced film over a slowly paced film, or a beautifully shot film over a amateurishly shot film, or one genre over another. Our biases always factor heavily into making a list of favorite or best films. It is completely unavoidable (the only factor that I think sort of reduces the idea of personal bias is to lean heavily on the notion of a films broader influence on the art form....but then we are just replacing our own biases with a general consensus biases of what has resonated with audiences and other artists the most....so its still a bias that is going to be affected by our politics and our social mores)
I'm not sure if I agree. A bias
within the medium of filmmaking strikes me as completely different than a bias outside of it. Hence my example: "I think romcoms are inherently insipid" might be a reasonable critical posture, but "I disliked this romcom because my personal relationship failures soured me on the entire idea of romance" obviously isn't. Both are a "bias," but one is about film and one is about the specific person, and therefore one is potentially useful to others and the other is just journaling in public.
Ultimately, it's how a critic communicates their response to a film that matters. And even in situations where the politics or the themes of the movie may factor heavily into how they rank them on a list like this, as long as they can illustrate why those elements make the films matter, and how those elements were done better in these films than another films, they have done their job (whether I think most critics are actually doing their job is another matter, which is yet another resentment I have towards everything that has happened in this thread, because I never want to be arguing on behalf modern critics who do not deserve me going to bat for them....they are uniformly terrible)
Yes, and per the above, I would never expect any of these things to manifest in such a clumsy, obvious way, and they don't have to for the problem in question to exist and be worth noticing.
I'm sure you've noticed the
inverse of this, where someone gives a surprisingly critical review to a film and you strongly suspect it's because they didn't like whatever progressive message it has. And you were probably right to suspect that even though the writers of such things are usually cagey enough not to just come out and say it. If they're even aware that that's what's happening.
And I will add to this, if we are really concerned with shitty 'social good' movies getting added to these kinds of lists under false pretenses (which I'll repeat, we shouldn't be), the solution to this is for their to be more of them. The reason shitty ones are rising to the top of the class is because certain audience members are so hungry for ANY type of representation, they might fall in love with the most pandering hunk of bullshit on earth just in order to have a film to fall in love with. The more gay (or black or trans or female or whatever) themed films you have, the more you force people to have critical distinctions between which of them are actually good and which can be immediately forgotten.
I agree with all this, and I think it's starting to happen. There was a little flare-up over
Bros, a gay romantic comedy heralded as a landmark in the genre, which most critics seem to think was pretty bad, and whose creator (Billy Eichner, who I've found sporadically hilarious, for the record) clumsily tried to suggest was down to some anti-gay bias. He didn't get very far. And of course we then get think pieces, one of which insightfully said something very much like what you just did: that it was actually a really good sign that someone could make a movie like that and have it evaluated primarily as a movie first.
Because it seems you are aware you have better things in life to be worried about. Which is the healthy way to live life.
Agreed. As broken as the world is, if someone finds themselves mad all the time, they simply have the wrong posture towards it. But I'm not going to fall into the trap of thinking people being too angry or fixated on something means it isn't there. If I did, I wouldn't think anything was real, because there's always someone too angry about every problem, and fixating on those people and their overreactions is a very clever way for smart people to dismiss real concerns.
But is that is what is happening here? These threads continually devolve into posters simply not believing other people can love these movies.
I think there's an important distinction here: it is manifestly ridiculous to look at a film on one of these lists and say "I can't believe anyone loves this." It's obviously way less ridiculous to say "a very large number of these films espouse a socially progressive viewpoint, I can't believe all of them are on here on the merits." It's kind of a paradox: you can't reasonably and stringently object to any one film, necessarily, as unloveable, but you can say the tilt in aggregate is implausible.
This angle makes a genuine conversation about film (or, really, anything) an impossibility. They've decided anything I or anyone else says in regards to that films quality is based on some kind of collective dishonesty. Which allows them to bat away any defense of it as essentially being a lie (just look at the Sight and Sound, Jeanne Dielman conversation a few months back.....I and many others went out of our way to explain why we loved that film, but none of this was ever responded to, all we got was more conspiracy laden nonsense about how no one can really like it, and we were just towing some SJW line for championing it).
I dunno, I gave a response that I thought was pretty substantive and attempted to seriously explain why someone might have an objection to it for reasons that were purely about cinematic appreciation. And that reply, too, was based largely around the
implications of putting out these lists, and the implied contract critics have with everyone else when they rank or rate things.
I think part of the problem here is that the people criticizing these lists are given the unfair and unrealistic task of singling out things that they're observing in general. Or the task of articulating implications that we all probably understood were there, but are suddenly treated as imagined because they're not legalistically spelled out.
We also can't entirely separate our personal experiences, or the kind of day we are having, from our experience with a film. So in some ways, it is a bit of a lie to completely remove these elements from the conversation.
I agree we can't entirely separate our personal experiences, but I'd argue it's the job of a critic to, on some level, attempt it. And in the same way "art is subjective!" is a lousy defense for a poorly-considered or lazy opinion, "criticism is necessarily personal sometimes!" is a lousy defense for unmoored and idiosyncratic criticism.
Now, the example you give is a fairly egregious example of this, and shouldn't be tolerated in a professional critic. But there is also plenty of grey area here and what a critic can do when life may be clouding their critical sensibilities. Pauline Kael wrote a fairly famous review of Shoeshine that is a decent example of this. Explains she saw the movie after a vicious fight with her boyfriend at the time and by the time she left the film was sobbing hysterically. Mentions how her boyfriend walked off and watched the same film that night and also found himself leaving the movie in tears. And while she makes attempts to explain what about the film moved her, she also insinuates that she can't be entirely certain how much of her tears were spilled because of the film and how much were because of what had just happened to her relationship. She is zoning in on that space where life and art intermingle and how they can't ever fully be separated. And maybe this is the exact spot where the alchemic magic of art really sparkles. She is talking about film as if it is that river you can only step in once. Our experiences with film change, even if they fundamentally remain exactly the same. The movie experience is about that moment in our lives of watching that movie. It's never really just about the movie.
I think that's a great example of why Pauline Kael was a tremendous critic: she had the self-awareness to recognize that possibility, and the humility to articulate it, rather than the arrogance to just put her reaction out there as if it were valid and relevant to others just because she'd had it.
Yes. And there are lots of bad lists from critics who we should hope should know better. But I still have trouble understanding why, even with that empty 'official' stamp, why a terrible list matters that much. Like, I get that it's depressing to see when they are particularly bad, and I get particularly distressed when I think of some critics getting a paycheck for their shit opinions and their shit explanations, but there are always going to be bad takes. Bad lists. Bad reviews. How we respond to them is what matters. Finding a critical way to show our dissent. Not evoke cabals and conspiracy theories to explain how the rest of the world might not agree with us.
I dunno, I have a natural disinclination to audit other people's attention. It falls into "whataboutism" so easily. At some extremes we have to ask the question, but the first thing I'm asking myself is if there's anything to what they're saying. Sometimes they're just taking a bad-but-not-awful thing and unloading on it because they see it as emblematic of a lot of other stuff, or they see it as the camel's nose under the tent, or what have you. And I can't confidently say any of that is unreasonable.
I do think there is a meaningful, material difference between bad opinions about film and bad opinions about how to value film. About how we evaluate art in total. I know you understand this because you've had many forceful arguments about that exact topic, albeit from another angle.
I agree in general that caring about bad takes and bad lists is a poor use of one's time for the most part, though. But then you could argue 90% of this site is built on people caring way too much about someone else's opinion. Anyway, it's the imprimatur stuff that's really the issue here. It's an established publication putting out a press release declaring such-and-such that obviously lands different.
And if any of this was gobbledee gook, my apologies. I had to write this quickly before tending to some life shit and had no time to look it over, which is usually essential when it comes to the word vomit I generally spew in these conversations.
Nope, it was perfectly coherent, and a pleasure as always to read and consider.
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No politics at all! (Maybe except for favoritism of cute Asian girls but I wouldn't consider that racist!)
