Now streaming on: The mind reels at the thought of trying to review "Predestination. " That is the most disturbing implication of an expression like "a superb Hollywood movie" or the comparisons of one filmmaker or film with another in every one of the preceding quotations. For Canby, however, films cozily exist more or less in their own hermetic network of relationships with other films. We Need a Little Christmas. A Christmas to Treasure. The prospect of what will be done by the next generation of film critics writing as professionals with standardized methods for established institutions, is daunting. Film remake that tries to prove all unmarried men are created equal crossword. Canby has boasted that copy editors keep their hands off his stuff, and so thoroughly does he appear to have everyone around him buffaloed, that one wonders if anyone at all reads his copy before it is printed in "the newspaper of record. "
Corliss's favorite rhetorical tactic is what in my college days used to be called the strategy of the "Overwhelming Equivocation. " Mr. Allen doesn't make "nouveau films" (among other things his films are usually too comic to be chilly in the manner of the nouveau roman), but most of his narratives, starting with Take the Money and Run, employ the kind of cinematic freedom–freedom to jump around in time and place and point of view–that originally inspired the authors of the nouveau romans. For some, as bad as it sounds. It doesn't work, but along the way he does develop a protective instinct toward a foreigner who is often required to wear dark glasses. Barbie and the Secret Door: A little girl almost takes over a nation. Refine the search results by specifying the number of letters. His recent treatment of Woody Allen's Hannah and Her Sisters was typical. Kael's astonishment at "Richard Pryor–Live in Concert" ("When we watch this film, we can't account for Pryor's gift, and everything he does seems to be for the first time") is typical of her delight and wonder at the power of any performance–any such assembly of gestures, postures, and stances by director, actor, or technician–to move her. Film remake that tries to prove all unmarried. Barbie and the Three Musketeers: A girl doesn't like a man's sexist beliefs but ends up falling for him anyway. The Bad Guys: A little piggie tries to reform The Big Bad Wolf. A trumpet gets broken and a roast chicken beat up.
Alternatively, playboy billionaire dresses in black and beats up psychotic homeless man. "The New Movie" is simply whatever Canby needs it to be at the moment, a stick of incense he can burn whenever his favorite reductive formulations– this movie is "about, " "says, " or "tells us"–predictably fail him for the umpteenth time. The Bourne Legacy: Amnesiac guy's actions get a lot of people killed. We found 20 possible solutions for this clue. We add many new clues on a daily basis. Film remake that tries to prove all unmarried men. Still, Canby doesn't quite take any of the serious films he views seriously enough to become passionate or earnest about them. '' Bullet Train: Guy picks up some luggage during a foreign trip. 'Twas the Night Before Christmas. Barbie: A Fashion Fairytale: An actress gets fired by her jerk director but her spirits are lifted when she runs away to Europe. A deeper paradox of Kauffman's standards is that a too demanding criterion of cinematic responsibility and "realism" can, oddly enough, become another more subtle form of cinematic aestheticism. Etched art: ENGRAVING. She takes him to court.
Sex with unmarried women invariably leads to death. Canby's critical beliefs and practices are inseparable from the general tone he takes in his reviewing. Simon refuses to allow a film's style to bring into existence a reality at odds with his sternly pragmatic one, Hatch apparently never even asks that a film have anything at all to do with his experience of life. Perhaps he thinks his reviews are imitating the fragmented "New Movie" he is forever heralding and never defining. First, there has been the decline of the studios as committed promoters of their own work; even B-pictures were once part of a larger package of films assured of being given some minimal level of promotion and support no matter how they fared in their initial weeks. You know how it's going to end, but there's still the excitement of the variations included in this particular performance of a familiar piece. Realism is after all only another style; and the quest for the well-made screen-play and the well-acted role, like the Pre-Raphaelites' artistic quest for innocence, can itself become an insidious kind of artsiness. NASA scientist Geoffrey who won a Hugo for his short story "Falling Onto Mars": LANDIS. Canby gets full credit for critical judiciousness, and for a sense of historical or generic context, even as he archly and ironically avoids the bother of having to stake his judgment on anything particular at all. They are but an admission of Canby's unwillingness (or inability) to sustain a coherent, continued analysis for even the length of his column.
One is tempted to accuse him as he accuses the director of "Scum": "This is just another use of a genre that movie makers love because it is an easy one in which to make vaguely anti-authoritarian gestures without straining very hard for originality or for fine moral discriminations. Technicians and TV administrators are yelling commands about haste at her all the time. Brave: A Scotsgirl learns the importance of tapestry and ursines. Within the rhetorical and psychological world of his criticism, such eruptions of emotion, such deep intimacies of response, would be bad form. His charming and chatty style, his anecdotally autobiographical approach, and above all his thoroughly humane view of films, define both the special sensitivities of his criticism and its ultimate shortcomings. Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance): Actor tries to prove he's more than just his Star-Making Role. Babe: Naive kid attempts to be something he's not and impresses a few different species. While other reviewers are busy tidying up the experience of a film into neat metaphorical, psychological, or sociological patterns–a prelude, invariably, to an argument in favor of, or against, the streamlined experience which they've concocted–Kael's prose echo-chamber of comparisons, allusions, and metaphors is engaged instead in opening up new, free-floating possibilities of response and reaction. Let the opening paragraph of her review of "Honeysuckle Rose" stand for all; the metaphors are almost a literal exercise in anatomy: In "Honeysuckle Rose" Dyan Cannon is a curvy cartoon–a sex kitten become a full blown tigress. Below: A submarine is sad because its captain died, so it wants to go back to be with him. To be vulnerable to mockery a writer must have at least a strain of conviction in him. That "money-grubbing, bull-necked capitalist" muttering "Danger be damned, " while "billions go down the drain, " never lived in our world, not for a minute. The Big Lebowski: Dude gets his rug peed on, and then has to fight a bunch of nihilists.
JD-to-be's exam: LSAT. Canby's techniques of intellectual hedging or equivocation are many. What matters in "Marienbad" is the pure, untranslatable, sensuous immediacy of its images.... Again, Ingmar Bergman may have meant the tank rumbling down the empty street in "The Silence" as a phallic symbol. While Kael and all too many other critics read like people who live in order to go to the movies, Kauffmann never allows up to forget that he goes to the movies in order to live. The Big Country: Reasonable man attempts to rationally settle land dispute and gets branded a coward for his trouble. What Kael's highbrow critics miss when they call her allusions or metaphors unscholarly or sloppy is that there is more relevant film history and scholarship in three or four of her flashy references than in a dozen film journal footnotes. Canby represents the clubman as critic. Admittedly, the four or five films a reviewer might see during a typical week are not among the most astonishing achievements of the human spirit; but that there are interesting moments in the most ordinary of films, and that occasionally quite extraordinary films get released, are things that a reader would never guess from Schickel's wan, discouraging prose.
Sale indicator: RED TAG. In the brief installments of his daily film reviews and Sunday "Film View" columns, Canby's writing seems so innocuous and cryptic that it is hard to form any distinct impression of it at all.