As newsprint-based dailies and weeklies get the squeeze in terms of word count and content, one increasingly has to look to the World Wide Web for no-holds barred criticism. If FilmFreakCentral.net film critic Walter Chaw feels uncomfortable with the "Web critic" label, it might be because the medium throws amateurs and professionals onto the same playing field, and studios and publicists fail to distinguish between the wheat and the chaff.
But when you find an online critic with writing chops as strong as Chaw's, you don’t want to keep him to yourself. Where many Internet-based reviewers mimic the acerbic aspects of Pauline Kael, Chaw takes his caustic, occasionally hostile wit so far that one sometimes wonders if the Paulettes might ask him to tone it down a little. Barbed language aside, though, Chaw's approach owes less to the obvious film critic models than to satirist, science fiction author and cultural pundit Harlan Ellison, who famously said, “Not everyone is entitled to an opinion.
They are only entitled to an informed opinion.” Praising Martin Scorsese’s William Blake’s “idea of gods created in the breast of man [being] transmuted into the cult of personality and the patina of nostalgia for the titans of the silver screen’s golden age. This is a shrine to individualism and a critique of the dreadful cost of individuality.
” In his review of Harmony Korine’s second film, Chaw said that Puccini's 'O Mio Babino Caro' aria from 'Gianni Schicci,' a plaintive appeal for the acceptance of a lover, finds itself scattered throughout 'julien donkey-boy' to further underscore these themes of alienation, sexuality, and a frustrated desire for familial harmony.” Chaw clearly expects his readership to keep up or get out of the way. He shows an affinity for art house fare, singing the praises of Claire Denis’s astonishing and frequently misunderstood masterpiece "Trouble Every Day' as “the most insightful film about sex and gender that has perhaps ever been made.
” But he’s equally quick to assault the pretentiousness of Sundance favorites like "Primer," writing, “I suspect that a lot of people are afraid to admit they don't understand what's happening in the film, which talks too much in too stultifying a fashion, obscuring its heart of glass with blizzards of expositive candy.” He is frequently accused, at least by those who write in to FilmFreakCentral.net, of being an elitist and a snob.
But those readers might be surprised learn how many mainstream Hollywood films Chaw has championed over the years. He has given four-star reviews to "V For Vendetta," "King Kong," and "Spider-Man 2," which he said “takes chances with its story that lesser films would not, affirming, along with 'Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban,' that big-budgets don’t just by the fact of them quash unique, distinctive, ambitious voices.” Chaw rages against the Hollywood machine's depictions of class, gender and race, puncturing political correctness, but assailing films that still think it’s okay to use xenophobic or chauvinistic stereotypes.
His jihad against dumbed-down content is so wide-ranging that I’ve occasionally wondered if he needed to take a break. He's incinerated movies that were paper-thin in the first place: 'Bringing Down the House,' 'The Dukes of Hazzard,' 'Bulletproof Monk,' 'xXx: State of the Union,' 'Last Holiday.' Maybe he justifies his vitriol on the grounds that he watches this junk so we don’t have to.
Jeremiah Kipp: Where did you grow up? Walter Chaw: I was born and raised in Wheat Ridge, Colorado, where I went to school with the children of Denver Broncos and Coors. They called it “White Rich”, my high school.
I was one of three Asians in the building, I think, [during] my three years there. I like to say that I didn’t even know that I was Asian until freshman year of college. I went to lots of neighborhood six-plexes as I was growing up, and a couple of art houses that I never went to until I moved to Boulder in my late teens.
JK: What were some of your formative movie-going experiences? WC: I saw "Star Wars" when I was three before I could speak English (it’s better that way, perhaps) and spent the next 10 years playing with action figures and wrapping tubes. My wife remarked once how interesting she found it that men of my generation all knew how to breathe like Darth Vader instantly.
I saw "Dragonslayer" when I was eight and spent a goodly portion of it hiding underneath the seat in front of me—didn’t stop me from seeing it three times that summer. Also, I sat through three consecutive screenings of "Back to the Future" with a pal of mine by telling the ushers that we’d missed the opening and would leave after a few minutes. The film that decided me on this path, though, was a screening of "The Conversation" for a college critical theory course.
..It was the first film that competed with poetry, literature and music in my mind as a testament to the soul.
JK: When did you get started as a film critic, and was this helped by the rise of Internet film criticism? WC: About seven years ago now, I guess, occasioned by a massive heart attack that my father happened to survive. It caused me to reassess the path I was taking into owning a corporation and working something like 80 hours a week.
I didn’t want to end up in my early fifties with a spotty relationship with my family, terrible stress, terrible health, wondering how it was that I squandered all the important things in my life in the pursuit of some hazy idea about financial/material comfort—though, ironically, being really poor and a freelance columnist puts you right back into that straitjacket in a lot of ways. I will say that the decision probably saved my marriage, though. It wouldn’t have happened as quickly without the Internet, for sure.
I’m not a good hoop-jumper. Query letters and résumés give me migraines, [though I’m] probably just lazy or mentally ill. The Internet allowed me to essentially just write--to post/publish in free public forums, and to eventually get picked up to do a few pieces in cult analog journals before [editor] Bill Chambers asked me to go to work for FilmFreakCentral.
net “full time”. WC: This is true—or, at least, not paid in the traditional manner. I’ve parlayed my visibility through the Web sites into teaching assignments, public speaking opportunities, festival panels, and now books collecting the reviews published annually.
But from the start, Bill had a strong philosophy about pop-up ads and so on, so that even before the Internet ad bubble popped, we weren’t exactly cash cows in terms of selling bandwidth for sponsors. It does keep us honest though, in that I don’t know if I’d be as moral if I were banking [Roger] Ebert’s, or even a living, wage. JK: Has the public perception of Internet critics changed since you’ve started?
WC: I don’t believe that it’s changed at all. People who know about it as its own entity either embrace the freedom of discourse online or scorn the same. The great thing about the Internet is that everyone has a voice.
The terrible thing is that everyone has a voice—ditto film’s digital revolution—so we tend to get lumped in with the Ain’t It Cool News-type gossip/blog sites rather than the “legit” online sources like Salon or Slate. Feast or famine. JK: You’ve had some big issues with the way films are screened for critics.
Can you describe your essential gripes with the system, and recommendations for changing it? I’m in a small market here in Denver—lots of stuff never makes it this far within months of their East/West releases, if ever. We don’t have private screening rooms and there are a goodly percentage of major releases that sport private, daytime showings only for “major daily” writers.
Internet guys are shut out completely. I’m not certain—and here’s the complexity—that I’d even argue with that ban in 99% of the cases. Of course, I don’t think that I deserve to be lumped into that ghetto.
[But] it still burns, and it gets worse as time goes on. It’s harder, not easier, sitting in a public/filled screening, rubbing elbows with the entitlement freeloaders, the pass-rats, the other Internet guys who work out of their basement without editors or taste, and the rude. [It’s harder] knowing that there was a better way to see this film just a few days earlier with just one or two other critics in the auditorium.
I had a falling out last year with the Denver Film Society over a festival screening of "Brokeback Mountain" that Focus Features allegedly shut all “Internet” critics out of. Less than a week later, of course, Focus sent all of us in the Online Film Critics Society a DVD screener. So my big issue with the screening process is it’s undemocratic and essentially corrupted with an eye towards manipulating the absolute best result somehow for the studio.
I don’t know what the truth was in that festival screening, but I do know a few of the yahoos who did get the invitation, one of whom can’t spell and has never crafted an elegant sentence, and boy if that didn’t sting. The only recommendation I have is that national publicity read the reviews that we, collectively, produce. If my work doesn’t stand up to that of my “major daily” peers, then it doesn’t.
But if it does—and taking into consideration that our “circulation” is more than three times the circulation of both Denver major daily papers combined—then treat me accordingly. Of course, there are some films that are only screened with the public to confuse or influence, I guess positively, the critical response. I don’t see how kids kicking your chair, answering cell phones, narrating to one another, and generally acting like asses can influence you positively, but there you have it.
JK: Do Internet critics have any influence whatsoever, or are they just mosquitoes dive-bombing Hollywood's white elephant? WC: We’re all just mosquitoes dive-bombing Hollywood, man. Unless you’re Ebert, and then you can manipulate the middlebrow as their most-beloved enabler and mouthpiece and then go on to influence the Oscars.
The function of film criticism seems now more than ever—if you’re genuine about what you do—to just be on the record when the wind changes and we move away again (if we ever do) from all this consumer reportage of bankable product. I’m not concerned about anything other than putting on paper what my reaction is to a film within the context of my personal experience and prejudices: strengths and shortcomings. Pauline Kael was asked once why she didn’t write an autobiography, and she pointed back on all of her reviews and said that she already had.
I believe in that. Good film criticism, any good criticism, is 1% savvy, 99% auto-psychoanalysis. I don’t like Kael, by the way.
I think she was a brilliant writer, but a mean person, a borderline personality, and a shaky critic. She did have a way of articulating ephemera like performance and fashion, though. But ultimately, I’m not certain her bully tactics and popularization of film criticism did anybody any favors.
JK: Are you in the Andrew Sarris camp? I think auteurism is a grand place to begin a discussion of a film and I think that Sarris’s great contribution to the conversation is that permission to stratify directors—but ultimately, like Kael’s “gut fuck” philosophy, it’s strict ideology applied to a slippery beast. I’d much rather take the bits from each that are useful for my own deconstructive instincts, and use them as sharpening stones, if you will, for my instrument.
That’s a pompous way of saying that I’m a product of my experience and the things that I pick up along the way, from [Sigfried] Kracauer and [Lotte] Eisner to [Manny] Farber to Sarris to Ebert and Kael. They just feed into the mess of my own critical shortfalls, convictions, and contradictions. JK: Can you name some movies that in retrospect you feel you were wrong about?
If there’s any auto-psychoanalysis involved, as you said earlier, one has to admit we look back on earlier decisions and learn from them, including learning from our mistakes. WC: Spike Lee’s "The 25th Hour." I was ambivalent about it, disregarded what admiration I felt about it at the time, and underestimated the power of the auteur presence in that piece.
Looking back on it as I have a few times since then, I can almost not think of a Lee film that I respect more. "Summer of Sam" has, likewise, risen in my rearview. I was wrong about my effusive praise for "In the Bedroom" as well.
I went so far as to name it the best of a year that also saw "The Royal Tenenbaums" and "Mulholland Drive," so yeah—pretty far off on that one. I was a sucker for the melodrama and a sucker, too, for Marisa Tomei’s amazing facility with weeping. Looking at it now, I still admire Tom Wilkinson and Sissy Spacek (and Tomei’s) performances, but the whole thing feels a little…well, a little Canadian to me now.
JK: What are your thoughts on organizations of Internet critics like the Online Film Critics Society [OFCS]? WC: Well, I think that they’re problematic when they have no desire to limit membership or establish bedrock standards so as to make themselves unimpeachable as an institution. You don’t invite someone to the New York Film Critics Circle just because they live there.
You shouldn’t invite someone to the OFCS just because they can’t find an analog outlet for their writing. Essentially, you become useless when the perception—even amongst your membership—is that you’re bloated by non-professionals [who don’t have] a lot to add to the conversation. Too much liberal panty-twisting is to blame—this idea that no one is qualified to judge critical standards.
It’s the kind of soft thinking that’s killed liberal arts in American colleges and, more, the kind that makes me very suspicious of the value of their film criticism. If you’re not sure you’re qualified to say what’s good, you’re probably writing equivocal pap that’s wasting all of our time. JK: Broadening the discussion, what is the state of film criticism today?
WC: It’s bankrupt and in bed with the industry for the most part. I think a lot of us are bought and sold. When Sony invented a film critic to create blurbs for their films, I wasn’t so much dismayed as I was thinking that there are a lot of people I’ve met in the flesh in this business who were also invented as film critics by the studios.
Did you ever hear the story about journalists personally invited to Skywalker Ranch pre-Episode One and offered a list of blurbs (pre-screening) that they would like their names associated with in the publicity materials? WC: I just saw a thing for the new animated "The Wild" the other day with yahoos calling it the best animated film of the year—and I know that until last week, there wasn’t even a print cut of it. And, more, it’s the goddamn fourth month of a year that’s going to have a new Pixar film.
I don’t care if these idiots bleed when they’re cut, you can’t tell me that they’re not studio, test-tube inventions. JK: Are there any critics out there you feel are taking passionate, provocative or contemplative looks at cinema? Who are the critics you read regularly?
WC: I read Jonathan Rosenbaum because he’s brilliant, if sliding into obscurity most times now, Armond White, J Hoberman, Michael Atkinson—I like a lot of The Onion AV Club though more in the past than now—all of them because they take a sociological prism to film that will make their work on the medium endure...
I used to read Godfrey Cheshire when he was at the New York Press, and I’m glad to have found him again. I avoid Ebert because it’s heartbreaking after a while to see the kind of apologist and glad-hander he’s become, who likes 75% of everything he sees. JK: For a while, you were struggling with the idea of continuing to run interviews with filmmakers and actors on FilmFreakCentral.
net. What was the source of your frustration, and what made you decide to continue the interview process? WC: I was contemplating throwing in the towel for good at that moment, all aspects of it, so dropping interviews, [which] I did for a couple of months, seemed a good partial measure.
I was just sick of feeling grateful for getting interviews. It’s some kind of personality defect or something, this need for recognition or acceptance or respect in this business that’s so niggardly in regards to any and all positive feedback. But I came to a point where I started to wonder why the only interviews we were ever getting offered were from one guy out here who represents a studio where the publicity reps actually read our work.
Doesn’t take a lot of digging to figure out which studio that is. But even after we did these massive pieces on David Cronenberg and John Sayles and so on and so on, we were still just getting offered, like, first-time documentary filmmakers stumping for mediocre works. Requesting guys like Charlie Kaufman or Wes Anderson [above] or even Steven Soderbergh was just out of the question.
We wouldn’t even get the courtesy of a “no” from the decision-makers. Fact is, though, that if you fight the machine, the machine wins—so we’re back to doing interviews, though I’ve been a lot more selective about who I try to chase down. JK: You are very active on the blog for FilmFreakCentral.
net. What are the advantages of having a blog? WC: My editor offered the blog in large part to give all of us a vent for our frustrations.
At least that’s certainly the direction that I take in my writing there. I did do free-form reviews of "The Last Detail" and "Swimming to Cambodia" there, too, and hope to do more with a few of my favorites into the future. But as a means to blow off a little steam, it’s rejuvenated me a lot this year.
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