19 January 2000

Drawing this line is a constant drama. When I feel like writing "Only an idiot would like Movie X," I think about it long and hard, and I don't think I've ever written those words in this column. Why? Because those words are idiotic in any context other than one of me and a friend or two around a dinner table. I keep on having this fight with certain people, but the idea that any art form can be judged objectively as a whole is simply idiotic. I can tell you how I feel and why. I can explain and discuss specifics of a film from lighting to acting to shot selection to music to length. But why some people love every film ever made is beyond any set of rational standards. And while I can't let the subjective taste of others cloud my personal taste or the set of rules I bring to my criticism, I have to respect the rights of others to have those tastes.

There is not anything my mother will like about any John Waters films. My sister and I love most of Waters' films. And it's not just rebellion. It's not stupidity. And it's not brainwashing. It's a choice.

A friend recently told me that I couldn't count The Phantom Menace as a work of art. Well firstly, any argument that any film is not, regardless of quality, a work coming from an artistic effort, is an argument of supreme arrogance. Do any of you really think that the actors in Sgt. Kabukiman NYPD weren't making an effort, whether one of parody or seriousness, to create some form of art? If you do, you are probably judging the outcome, not the effort.

If I have the right to judge art, so do you. I may know more about film, or less, than you. And various parts of society will judge my opinion to be more or less valuable than yours. So be it. My responsibility as a critic is to the work. Not to you. Not even to myself. My responsibility is to express my opinion, clearly and loudly. If you agree with all I write, great. If you know that you'll hate a movie because I love it, also great. If it's blurry, I've failed.

Which brings us back to Kevin Smith. I couldn't be more pleased by his attitude towards the opinions of others and, even more so, to the throng of obsessive fans that his movies have engendered. But maintaining that opinion through the storms of criticism and media fury is difficult indeed. Smith once tried to cancel an interview with another roughcut staffer because of my Dogma review. He wasn't quite as flexible then. So I hope this attitude remains. I will say that Kevin did a KABC interview with me and Pennacchio, and he must of known that I was the jerk who ripped his directing skills in reviewing Dogma, never attacking and never commenting. He was a pro and a terrific interview.

It took me a long time to decide to take responsibility for actually being a critic. The responsibility is overwhelming sometimes. I don't know, unless you write me, how many people I send to the movies I praise to how many I keep from the stuff I hate. But that's not even the responsibility I speak of. I look at the passions of others and reduce a year or years of work into a few hundred words, part of which is spent by me trying to be clever. When I get one kooky letter attacking me and the column, I linger on it for hours, sometimes days. It's personal. And since this is a personality column, it's personal the same way a movie is for a director or other creative talent. Only I get to start fresh every day, six days a week, 52 weeks a year (give or take a Martin Luther King Jr. Day). A personal sense of redemption is always close at hand.

It's too easy to forget that Kevin Smith is a person. It's too easy to forget that Paul Thomas Anderson agonized over every choice he made for Magnolia. And it's easy to forget that Next Friday may well outgross both Dogma and Magnolia.

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder... and those of us who behold for a living must always keep that in mind. I only wish it were a line I'd written, but "Be kind."

READER OF THE DAY: I'm in Chicago, so a letter from Bri From Chi: " I am mildly curious about American Psycho. After hearing it is thus-far slapped with an NC-17 rating (and not for it's potentially disgusting violence but for a three-way sex scene) which Lion's Gate will surely appeal, I'm wondering how the violence is being portrayed. After being neither an enemy nor a great fan of the book, I remember it offering only a somewhat sickeningly vicarious thrill through all those passages of mutilation and dismemberment and little else. If the violence isn't enough to raise the ire of the MPAA, what exactly did they bother to film? And as a Leonardo bail-out, I am always interested to see a film knowing that someone of greater notoriety was intended to play the lead. I've sort of ridden the fence on Christian Bale since his debut in Empire of the Sun - he's never bothered me in any particular role, but he seems plagued with being an actor who I can almost immediately mentally replace with a finer casting choice.

I am also curious how you will respond to this year's festival in general. Most critics seem to have their hatred for it escalate each year, as the pickings seem to grow slimmer (or at least the awareness of the lack of quality pictures grows more apparent with each birthday Mr. Redford's pet project celebrates). Hope you are able to enjoy at least some of it."

E ME: I'm sure I'll have fun. In the meantime, answer me this...is it more fun to be extreme? Seriously. Is it more fun to shred or lust rather than just feel something is okay but flawed?