Lost In Translation

Yuppie Chronicles

Slate has a review of Whit Stillman's third installment of his "yuppie" chronicles, The Last Days of Disco:

Despite his reputation as a chronicler of WASP decline, and regardless of his engagement with issues of class and capital and labor, Stillman's real subject is society—small s and small scale: the dynamics of partygoing groups, the obligations of friendship, the "ferocious pairing off" (to use Charlotte's expression) that is the aim of courtship. These are universal. It's the style and tone that are eccentrically and unrepentantly uhb. It's one of the highest compliments you can pay a filmmaker to say that the characters he laughs with and at would be among the keenest admirers of his sensibility.

This weeks also saw the release of thirtysomething created by Edward Zwick and Marshall Herskovitz (who go on to make the equally exquisite teen drama My So-Called Life) and I agree with the author's conclusion, also over at Slate, since I wasn't even twentysomehting when it aired:

You know who loves to wallow in endless introspection and dwell on the teensy stumbling blocks of life? Adolescents. Which is, I now realize, why I adored the show when I watched it as a teenager. In retrospect, it makes perfect sense that Zwick and Herskovitz followed upthirtysomething with My So-Called Life. Here was another TV show about self-indulgent whiners, this time set in their natural habitat: high school.

 

A Tale Of Two Comics

There's a very literate and analytical essay about Jerry Seinfeld and underground comic Rick Shapiro in Slate. He uses a Dickens metaphor of the two characters from A Tale of Two Cities (yet another Dickens novel I have yet to read-perhaps this wil provide insipiration). The author Ron Rosenbaum mentioned that he is the subjec tof a new book by the intriguing author Adrian Nicole Blanc (author of the moving Random Family that I reviewed a while back):

I asked her why this snarling, foul-mouthed, misogynist, misanthropic, venomously sleazy, Ratso Rizzo-type engaged her interest. Here's what she wrote back:

His work implicates you. I doubt you can leave his show unaffected. His rendering of his dynamic and intricate experience of the world will make you laugh, but it requires you, blessedly, to think deeply and feel. As to my idea of a book about standup comedy—contemporary American masculinity—he's grappling dearly with all it means and can mean.

I think the key thing here is "he implicates you." Because for some—not me, of course—he touches a nerve by suggesting there's some of him in you. That horrifying recognition is why you laugh and why it's scary. Adrian's words suggest that it's possible to see Rick Shapiro's stage persona as a character he's playing, knowingly trying to implicate us by acting out our rage against the Seinfeldian hive. That, for instance, he's not misogynist, but about misogyny. He raises some of the questions that Sarah Silverman and Sacha Baron Cohen do in their work, but without any of the knowing winks that in one way or another let them off the hook. He plays on that knife edge of uncertainty: Is this him, can any human go so low, so entertainingly, or is he putting some of it on?

Grading Art

The AV Club's Steve Hyden has an interesting blog post about grade evaluations of albums and films:

As a reader, I understand putting grades on reviews. As much as I adore my own prose, I know most people will scan it in about two seconds and consult the grade as a quick answer to the important question: “Should I pay for this or not?” But as a writer and lover of reading criticism, I hate grades. They reduce all the thought you put into trying to figure out what something is trying to do and how well it achieves it into another glib, meaningless way to keep score. Now that sites like Metacritic and Rotten Tomatoes—which I often look at and enjoy in a lot of ways—have taken those meaningless scores from every major publication and compiled them into big, monster scores, critical consensus has been quantified like box office returns. Somehow the actual stuff being reviewed gets lost in the shuffle.

At the risk of sounding like one of those high-falutin’ pantywaists, it’s the ideas in a review and the discussion they generate that matter, not some arbitrary letter or number score you pluck out of thin air. I love Robert Christgau’s pithy reviews from his Consumer Guides, but it’s the insights and one-liners I remember, not the grades. Which is why I get frustrated when readers fixate on the score in our reviews—come on, is this really all we have to talk about? If you think The A.V. Club is off-base with a review, state your case, don’t just express your utter shock—shock!—that so-called intelligent people could dare think an obvious C-minus movie is actually worthy of a B-minus. Otherwise you and your comments clearly deserve an F.

What do you guys think—am I wrong? I admit I’m guilty of perpetrating my own pet peeve at times, so my glass house is less than secure here. Do you guys read reviews, or do you tend to scan and glance at the grade? And what do these grades mean to you, anyway?

I do find criticism very useful it helps me weed out films, books, and albums that I might not like. However, I agree that it is often a good descriptive review that can push me in the direction of a particular piece of art. For example, long article on books and/or authors in Harpers have inspired me to read diverse writers like short story writer Deborah Eisenberg and memoirist/journalist Phillip Caputo (I’m currently reading his memoir about Vietnam, A Rumor of War). I’ve found book reviews in Salon, as well as reviews by Nick Hornby to be extremely helpful and inspiring for books. So, for books, it is exclusively the ideas in the reviews rather than scores that attract me.

However, for films and music, sites like Metacritic, Pitchfork, and Rotten Tomatoes can give me an overall idea if I’ll like a film or an album, but I usually read a review by one of the featured professional critics via a link to the original article. Some of the film critics I find useful are Andrew O’Hehir (Salon’s Beyond the Multiplex column writer), Heather Havrilesky (Salon’s I Like To Watch columnist), David Denby and Anthony Lane (The New Yorker), Roger Ebert (The Chicago Sun-Times), everyone at the Onion AV Club, various writers from The New York Times. I can’t really say that there’s any one music critic or site that I rely on, but I’ve gotten some inspiration from Slate, Salon, and The AV Club in general.

Now Or Later?

Nathin Rabin, critic for the AV CLub, has finally seen Casino Royale and asks this:

So here’s my question for you, dear reader. As civilians, do you like to experience the hot new thing as soon as it comes out or do you like to wait until the buzz and hype has died down and things can be viewed with a little more distance and detachment? In other words will you be rushing to see Superbad this weekend or are you willing to wait for it on DVD?

He also refers to the pleasures of watching Freaks and Geeks on DVD and suggests that it might be better to get all the episodes in context since they aired erratically. Generally, I'd prefer to see a movie getting all the hype, but I am somewhat insulated since I live in Japan and it often takes longer for entertainment to arrive (if it it gets distributed here at all). Thus you don't have people quoting Napleon Dynamite everyday at work. In addition, I think some films like Casino Royale, the Bourne films, Children of Men, etc...beg to be seen onthe big screen for the full cinematic expereince. As for TV I am a fan of watching the DVDs at my liesure over waiting week to week for episodes to air (this is how I saw most of the following series: The Sopranos, Six Feet Under, Curb Your Enthusiasm, The Wire, Arrested Development, Entourage, Freaks and Geeks, The Larry Sanders Show).