Hey cool. Looks like I just sold a copy of Kaleidotrope to somebody I don’t know!
For those of you have yet to lay your money down, there’s still time to do so. I’ll be mailing out copies of the first issue in October.
Month: August 2006
So earlier today, I posted a news link to Whedonesque — yeah, I know, big geek — about director Richard Kelly’s new film Southland Tales and how it was apparently being edited against Kelly’s will, and was in fact going to be cut by the distributor by a full hour before release. It turns out now that this so-called news was in fact quite old and had been taken out of context. Kelly is still very much involved in the editing process, and he’s very pleased so far with the results. He’s looking forward to the release of his film.
What I found most interesting — and this is something I also posted at Whedonesque — was the divide in the responses I saw, both there and elsewhere online.
“Oh that’s horrible!” some people would say. “The artist’s vision is sacrosanct. There must be no editing he doesn’t approve!”
“Well maybe,” answered back the others. “But his earlier film was a whole lot better because of the edits he was forced to make. The director’s cut is just not as good a film.”
I haven’t seen the director’s cut of Donnie Darko — only the theatrical release — and I really don’t know a whole lot more than the very basics about Kelly’s new movie. But I do think it opens up an interesting can of worms for discussion: should an artist’s vision be compromised if it makes the art better?
And yeah, I know “better” is a pretty loaded term, but I’m genuinely to hear what people think.
Yesterday’s cool is tomorrow’s kitsch: CBGB’s is moving to Las Vegas.
I’m sure it will be right at home near Circus Circus and Spamalot.
We — and I mean that “we” inclusively, critic and fan — don’t help matters either with our grades and rankings, which sometimes encourage us to overrate movies that we admire but don’t love, and to underrate the kinds of movies that people rent at the video store on a Friday night, or watch over and over again on TBS. I’m not saying that it’s wrong to try to elevate the good and shine a harsh light on the bad, but there should be a little more wriggle room for movies that are bad in some ways but good in others — even if that “good” is just the way they can dominate popular culture for a few weeks, a la Pirates Of The Caribbean. If you decide that the fun of sharing in the zeitgeist isn’t worth it because a movie’s just too shitty, that’s cool; but it’s important to recognize that some movies really do have their primary value as phenomena.
If the summer movie season teaches us anything, year after year, it’s that if movies can be novels, and essays, and art installations, and reportage, and scrapbooks, and pulp trash, then they can also be a kind of cultural comfort food, as familiar (and as annoying to some people) as a trip home to see the folks. It’s a quality of movies that’s hard to qualify — and may be critically useless, because it doesn’t allow for a lot of debate — but it’s there, it’s significant, and there should be a way to acknowledge it without automatically elevating every piece of pop crap to the level of good pop, let alone to the level of a masterpiece. Maybe the key is to funnel the objective through the subjective: to own up to what sucks about a movie and then explain why, ultimately, it might not matter.