Structure and Cosmetics: An Introduction
Just a few years ago, I was part of an all-volunteer staff at one of Chicago’s last great video rental stores. It was called Odd Obsession Video. Film lovers volunteered their own time to rent out movies to other film lovers. People rented DVDs, Blu-Rays and occasionally VHS tapes in person. An actual person donated their free time to help patrons pick something out that wouldn’t waste their own free time. The library of around 20,00 titles included offerings from 40 different countries. Countless films and videos available for rent at Odd Obsession were bootlegged copies of things that didn’t exist on DVD, along with hundreds of other bizarre and obscure videos.
I loved being there, surrounded by all that cinema. Each title was a director’s entire personal universe created for the camera. How much history. How much culture. How young and beautiful everyone looked back then. The added weight of all that empathy, laughter, horror, pathos and every other form of emotional resonance - all those little universes packed to the rafters like a kind of living library of other people’s conscious memories. Gripping stories. A director’s transportive thoughts. The smile of a matinee idol. Music you couldn’t get out of your head. Sex and violence. A million Proustian Madeleines lived there. I somehow never felt alone minding the store on slow nights, even during the summer when it seemed few people would have felt like staying in and watching a movie. I’d have some weird, wild thing blaring away on the TV hanging from the ceiling and in the middle of winter, some curious auto-didact would come in right before I’d closed to stock up on flicks for hunkering down during the impending snow pile up. I’d made that person’s week and I loved it.
Part of the video collection at the now closed Odd Obsession Video
Some patrons were exploring specific echelons of American film history. Others had become hooked on foreign films after discovering filmmakers like Bergman, Fellini, Kurosawa, Fassbinder and others previously unknown to them. There were video fanatics that came for the concert films, experimental shorts, animations and other hard-to-see items. There were film students who had papers to write. Even the huge selection of 70’s adult films and camp offerings brought in a brand of benign, nostalgic pervert film buff that I couldn’t bring myself to hate. There seemed to be a shared sense of both community and film history within the store, like a kind of cultural town square. I deeply envied someone’s first time experiencing a Chantal Akerman film. Or Abbas Kiarostami. Or Edward Yang. Long discussions about the Shaw Brothers back catalogue, the overrated filmography of Tarantino, the trends and changes in the kinds of new films being released all continued into the night. It was a communal meeting place, with cinema functioning as a kind of jumping off point for other forms of cultural interaction.
Stills from Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (dir:Chantal Akerman, 1975)
Close Up (dir: Abbas Kiarostami, 1990)
A Brighter Summer Day (dir: Edward Yang, 1991)
If there was one consistent conversational thread between both volunteer and patron, it centered on the meagre offerings of most in-home streaming services. People who watched a lot of films did not see the medium as an emotional distraction or as a means of unwinding mentally from a long day, but as a vibrant and still exciting artistic language. To many customers, popular streaming services were, at best, an unspecified and inconvenient way of discovering film and at worst, a sea of mediocrity and look-alikes assembled from off-the-shelf spare parts. One wades through a small and limited catalogue of offerings that favors only the present era or the very recent past. Very little in the way of foreign offerings beyond the limits of the same dull canons routinely defined by the same institutional outlets (academia, mainstream press). Virtually nothing on those services in terms of experimental or short films, which apparently are not even regarded as worthy of mention. Nothing indicative of any kind of home video scene. If someone wanted to watch My Char-Broiled Burger With Brewer, where could they find it?
The 2000 Jim Sikora film is a 41-minute documentary featuring musicians Jack Brewer (Saccharine Trust) and Mike Watt (Minutemen, the Stooges) discussing the glory years of punk and its decline. What recourse do the curious have for finding it?
Of course, this can seem like an elitist appraisal when one considers that services like Netflix are literally the only option for the very many cinema lovers living in developing countries or rural areas. In a resource-poor nation, Netflix might be the only platform for viewing films that don’t fall into Hollywood blockbuster or romcom categories. In many African or South American nations, there is very often (maybe) only one moviehouse in town showing the usual tentpole offerings and lots of niche Christian-values fare. The DVD rental places closed down years ago and overseas embassies and cultural institutions no longer have budgets to support film festivals or screenings of quality films, mainstream or otherwise. And independent/foreign language films can’t be streamed legally because of the territory restrictions they impose on subscriptions in those areas. Talk about a cultural desert. An American cinephile may lament at not being able to view Roma on a big screen, but this seems paltry compared to a citizen of Namibia who without Netflix would have had to travel to another country entirely to even see it at all.
Roma (dir: Alfonso Cuaron, 2018)
Yet despite this important contextual perspective, the truly curious in culturally and economically wealthier areas have fewer and fewer options in this increasingly monopolized market. And with those fewer avenues are fewer opportunities and means for critical analysis and discussion to enter the scene and foster appreciation, skepticism and curiosity about movies and how they work on us. The viewer is essentially rudderless within the waterway of programming algorithms. If Martin Scorsese’s objection to the collective deeming of filmed TV and movie offerings inhumanely as “content” rings as out of touch with our rapidly evolving relationship to media, one must consider the lack of education and dialectic about film taking place within that relationship. In this context, the choices you scroll past on those services - endlessly, it seems - begin to look obtuse and indistinguishable from one another. Just like a matrix of shopworn structures onto which new cosmetic touches give the appearance of fresh filmic surfaces. Film as strictly a matter of Structure-plus-Cosmetics. With algorithms that call the shots being the show business equivalent of not being able to get a human being on the phone when you call to address an issue. Now it’s applied to what films we’re permitted to see.
This brings us to the other common grievance for streaming sites - lack of curation. Curation can become the human bridge between the audience and a given block of films and shows (I refuse to use a derisive and diminutive term like “content”). It’s the only way to navigate waters that are now being programmed by algorithms. A human voice must be the link between the box and the viewer. This is where the role of a critic enters. Not as some elite, all-knowing authority but as a mediator between platforms and people, between images and their implications and between spectators across terrestrial and cultural divides.
I don’t trust box office numbers as a means of gauging the accomplishments of a movie. Such a mentality implies that everything that gets made (assuming it gets released) has an equal chance of financial and critical success. In fact, obscene amounts of money are spent on publicity campaigns and the saturation of markets with advertising to such a degree that many big studio productions are virtually set up to succeed or at least make back their costs, while independent and offshore productions may not even be reviewed, or worse, are reviewed apathetically. Promotional journalism then impersonates actual criticism in the form of any number of publications both in print and on the internet dedicated entirely to buttressing those ad campaigns. This is not film criticism. It’s a corporation’s manufacture of consensus. The mentality of many major studios is the same as that of major theater chains, right down to the complete misreading of the audience. This too is evolving. Parasite showed just how many people will go see a subtitled South Korean film, even when South Korean films rarely get theatrically released in this country.
Parasite (dir: Bong Joon-ho, 2019)
That’s why I tend to distrust sites like Rotten Tomatoes and their smatterings of these largely unchallenging or uninteresting voices. There’s very little independent thought to be found in the work of a number of trade and mainstream film reviewers. They’re mostly in the business of promotion and what they do chips away at the legitimacy of film criticism as an extension of actual journalism. It’s my view that there are just as many ill-informed staffers at major publications as there are in the world of DIY film blogs and other independent publications on and offline, with maybe better structural quality of writing being the biggest discernible difference. Similarly, the world of academia with its anti-art biases has a great deal to answer as far as how it teaches film.
It is my hope that you’ll discover essays and reviews here about film and film-related subjects you’d not previously been aware of. There are countless other sites of all kinds featuring reviews of a new Star Wars or Marvel entry. While I won’t hide my elder-millennial proclivities with respect to the kind of movie entertainments I grew up with, I also won’t hide inside those films I grew up with (“My childhood!”) as some kind of measurement or standard against which to evaluate new releases when I do. I usually avoid reviewing or writing about those sorts of new movies anyway because they don’t interest me. As movies go, they’re mostly ongoing investment opportunities for media conglomerates in the form of disposable mall products. Their worth is determined solely by the impersonal character deemed necessary to maximize their selling power; heavily focus-group tested so as not to put off potential customers, and scrubbed of any aesthetic ambiguity for the same reason. They’re basically made to be forgotten the moment they’re over.
Needless to say, my opinions as a film writer are not those that privilege today’s Hollywood very often (though I try to acknowledge when there are teachable and fascinating exceptions). They spend way too much money, they’ve lost large sections of their audience, whom they regard with a deep, deep contempt. It takes many, many screenwriters producing eight or nine drafts of something to come up with a script that’s no better than the first one. Nor will the offerings you’ll find here be strictly limited to esoterica. I do write about commonly seen films; Pieces here about Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Movie, Home Alone, Wayne’s World, Willie Wonka will be among the first to be posted. But I’d like to think I’m offering a fresh take on those movies - one that could perhaps be provocative or revealing.
This, to me, is the role of a critic: a person who carries on a dialogue between the cinema and the spectators. This person’s opinions and ideas are neither the first or last word on a cinematic subject, but rather a kind of intermediary whose rewards are measured by the range and depth of questions asked as opposed to those answered. The best critics and reviews as I see it are the ones who ask questions rather than arrive at answers. That said, I’m less inclined to take many Tomatometer critics seriously because I seldom feel they’re very attentive to anything more than what is currently available, commercial and fashionable. Film is above all, a language and the dialogue about it is ongoing. I’m illustrating this because it’s important to ask ourselves what is meant by “film criticism” or for that matter, by “film” or “movie” in the context of a cultural landscape being rapidly and constantly altered by technology and evolving political attitudes. It’s all in a constant state of flux, which should not be a lament for some golden age of cinema. If anything, it makes the climate for exploring, discovering and rethinking film a more bracing and energizing one.
At the time of this writing (August 2021), it’s easier than it has ever been to see a movie. Insofar as streaming sites like Netflix and Hulu now appear to be the dominant means by which people watch movies, they’ve become ubiquitous. But their catalogues are xenophobic by way of omission and seem fairly ignorant of the idea that a viewer would want to watch anything too far removed from the familiarities of one’s home country, era, culture or preferred aesthetic. There’s a fascinating chapter in Projections 2 (Faber & Faber, 1993) in which filmmakers like John Boorman and Monty Hellman et al - are asked what’s referred to as “The Burning Question”: “What kinds of movies do you think might emerge in the next millennium?”
Paul Schrader’s response is perhaps the most interesting:
“Storytellers should not be particularly concerned about the death of motion pictures as they have evolved to this point. Movies have been a useful twentieth-century tool; when they are no longer useful, they will fade from view, replaced by their technological offspring. It’s not the storyteller’s job to defend an art form. The storyteller’s job is to revamp humankind’s tales using new technologies, telling and retelling old truths and moral conflicts. Don’t cry for cinema.”
Then he very presciently adds that the coming decades, “will be decades of confusion and exploration. Filmmakers will be forced to choose: refine your dying art or stumble like awkward children into new forms.”
As much as we might hate to admit it, the evolution of film as an art form has been driven by technology as much as it has by ideas. Schrader’s quote reads like he’s okay with letting cinema die. It can go gracefully into the night as part of a logical progression of storytelling forms for the noble purpose of interpreting the human experience. It has a natural life cycle as something that’s born, grows old and dies and this is a good thing.
Flying in the face of that rather bleak assessment are the preponderance of streaming sites in recent years aimed at cinephiles and the cinematically curious: MUBI or Kanopy, for which all you need to set up an account is a library card. The subscription service, Fandor recently celebrated its tenth year of operation and is now streamable through devices like Roku and has a channel accessible through Amazon Prime. New and exciting DVD and Blu-Ray releases also illuminate the riches of world cinema. The era of buying a video disc - an actual bit of physical media that you can watch anytime - is not over just because of the diminished disc selection at Best Buy. Previously unavailable films and collections of films (entire film histories in some cases) from companies like Arrow, Masters of Cinema, Eureka!, Shout Factory and Vinegar Syndrome keep confounding previously held appraisals of the landscape. At the time of this writing for example, The Criterion Channel offers, among other things, a sample of the films of Lois Weber, one of cinema’s first auteurs. Her remarkable trailblazing career, completely unknown to many, offers a richer understanding of early silent American cinema as a time when women were fundamentally involved in almost every aspect of filmmaking. Cari Beauchamp’s indispensable book, Without Lying Down: Frances Marion and the Powerful Women of Early Hollywood, extensively details an entire echelon of purposefully ignored cinema that is just now beginning to receive the recognition it deserves thanks to these services.
trailblazing director, actress, producer and screenwriter, Lois Weber - perhaps cinema’s earliest auteur
Simultaneously, independent movie houses along with production and releasing companies here and in the UK have shown ingenuity in reaching their audiences in the wake of the Coronavirus pandemic. When open theaters and big festivals are not an option in the short term, cinema as a community experience has begun to thrive even where watching films in a venue as part of a community cinema was not possible. Cinema For All, an organization that supports the 1500 volunteer-led cinemas in the UK, charted a group in the northwest region of Leigh where they’ve been doing something they call “orange bags of cinema sunshine”. These are curated packages of DVDs from members of the Leigh Film Society that include a Fruit & Nut bar. Other community cinemas earlier this year have been doing clothing drives and seed swaps (I had to look up what that was). There’s been a pretty substantial upswing in community cinemas in general in recent years leading up to the pandemic and younger people are setting them up. Rooftops, beer gardens, public halls - you can seat people cabaret-style within these settings. Venues pop up like little secret Narnias. The biggest battle will be letting people know it exists.
The ones under the most threat are the multiplexes. It’s a lot harder for them to just go back to what they were before the pandemic. They’re basically popcorn-selling venues that happen to show movies. They’re not community spaces that can serve as jumping off points. Some multiplex chains are even programmed with the assistance of algorithms. Their design and product is too impersonal to allow for the kind of atmosphere that makes people feel like part of a community. There’s no reason why most movie houses shouldn’t be able to adapt to a place where they can do that. A multiplex is all many people in rural communities have, so the benefits would be deep and genuine. I hope the failure of major chains doesn’t lead to the total collapse of the experience of going out to the movies. Studios and multiplexes need to be more open to taking risks. They need to rethink their approach, if only for the sake of their own survival. It’s not like they can’t afford to do it. They have more screens. Eighteen screens at an AMC and would it kill them to show one foreign feature if it meant one fewer screen on which to see Spider Man 28?
So I’ll be writing here about current releases that may still be in theatres and about older titles and classics that should be available for streaming SOMEWHERE. I won’t chase hype. I won’t pour over franchise entries. I won’t engage in empty promotion or sensationalized takedowns. There is too much not being written about to waste time putting Trolls: World Tour on blast. Such items are adrift on cultural tides, existing only so that they may exist. I’m also not interested in what a film means in terms of the high-profile careers or personal lives of its stars. Star power has been markedly declining as a factor in getting people to see a movie for years now and the Oscars bore me to death. I want to see the whole film scene, both stateside and abroad, start to recover from the pandemic and reform and ossify in a way that was maybe smarter than it was before. Hopefully, the industry can adapt to a place where cinemagoing and streaming can coexist.
I also have no regard for spoilerthink; under the pretense of the possibility of spoiling a plot, it becomes impossible to discuss film in a serious way. A movie isn’t about its subject but how it’s about it. While I won’t divulge, say, who the killer is or who dies at the end, I have to admit that if the revealing of bits of information like that is enough to “ruin” a whole movie, it’s likely something I wouldn’t find interesting enough to bother writing about in the first place. In other cases, it’ll be necessary to divulge major plot developments to illustrate or explore a point with any depth or meaning. Any kind of adolescent willful ignorance about a film’s content suffocates film criticism, which is one thing studio bureaucrats bank on. I try to proceed with caution in judging people who think this way too harshly or hastily but if the idea of spoilers bothers you, maybe stop reading a piece wherever I recommend it. There are too many arbitrary red-flags and double-standards to be suggested by what constitutes “spoiling” a film for me to get into here. But if one wishes to have this kind of juvenile relationship with this art form, perhaps don’t read any critical writing at all. Or watch any trailers. If a kind of purity or innocence about what you take in means that much to you, then don’t even see the movie at all. And forever may you live in the giddy anticipation of being taken to a movie by your parents back when your life was much less complicated than it is now.
I would promise there won't be any snobbery here but such a promise would require a number of examinations regarding the loaded assumptions about exactly what snobbery is. I know people who will only go to see tentpole studio films. Marvel. Star Wars. Avatar. Tarantino. Maybe a few things around Oscar time, provided they have the word “American” as the first word of the title (Gangster, Beauty, Sniper, Hustle).
Those more shameless entries that are made to receive awards. Those viewers won’t watch something too dated and seem to be anemic to black and white and subtitles. Anything too far away from mainstream film grammar is not something certain people will consider. It’s “Artsy-Fartsy” stuff not for wasting one's time with - as if taking in something derivative and empty makes one a more pure and real American consumer. If we define snobbery as a sense of superiority in matters of taste, who exactly is the snob here? If consuming slow or long or “boring” art-house films is a pastime that’s looked at as the taking of bitter pills or the equivalent of eating one’s cultural vegetables, what about those of us who consider tentpole blockbusters and Oscar bids to be those same obligatory cultural vegetables?
You’re on this journey with me, the Flickering Knight (a name I only came up with out of need for an obligatory hook). There is so much to discover. I just know what I know and I am always learning, with my own experience as an actor, filmmaker, writer, performer, programmer and consumer of about seven to ten films a week since I was fifteen to guide me. Film has always been my life. I soldier on, because I love doing this. I would never claim any authority beyond those credentials. Where will the archaic present lead us? No art form has evolved more dizzyingly quickly - technologically, socially, culturally and politically. It should evolve for the better, in its characteristically breakaway fashion.
But as screenwriter William Goldman put it: “Nobody Knows Anything.”
