Monthly Archives: August 2017

Everyone's a Critic, Reflections

Curation

Is curation a form of criticism, or are the two disciplines closely related?

  • Historically, both curation and criticism were professions that required formal training and knowledge
  • Today, you don’t need to possess a particular expertise to be a curator, but it helps
  • Today, you don’t need to be able to think critically about your subject to be a curator, but it helps
  • Ultimately, your success or failure as a curator or critic depends on your ability to find and connect with an audience

The more I think about curatorship, and especially its most liberal definition (i.e. curation = selection), the more I recognise how pervasive it is in my life.

I curate my social media feeds every day, tailoring them by following or unfollowing other profiles that suit my interests, and hiding content I don’t care to see.

On a regular basis I read articles with titles like “The ten best milkshakes in Melbourne”, which is a form of curation — though these articles are surely paid for and influenced by Big Milkshake.

When I want to dive into a new genre of music, I often do so by reading the curated “Ultimate Box Set” guides on RateYourMusic.

Last week I presented an episode of The Graveyard Shift on RRR — the playlist, which took me forever to put together, is definitely an exercise in curation.

Even the cultural criticism websites I read every day perform a type of curation, by choosing which films/albums to cover. By choosing to review a particular piece of media, the website is essentially saying “this is something worth discussing”, which in itself is an act of curation.

Having said all that, curation requires less of an intellectual rigour than criticism does — at least, less than the form of criticism that I’m interested in. The idea of a future as a “curator” fills me with disgust, but luckily no one really cares what I think and so there is no danger of too many people listening to my recommendations.

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Everyone's a Critic, Reflections

Yossi Klein, creative description

Yossi Klein, publisher of Bread Wine & Thou, came and spoke with us in class on Monday. I was surprised (and slightly amazed) that Yossi spent the whole three hours with us chatting about his creative practice, his personal history, his thoughts on writing and publishing, print vs online, the value of writing courses, etc. It was an inspiring and creatively satisfying session, and has given me a bit of a boost. I’ve always thought that I can write but I have nothing to say; Yossi was fantastically reassuring and told us that everyone has a little bit of the storyteller in them, it’s a way of seeing the world that you can develop and exercise over time.

Today we worked through a creative writing/description exercise where we were given a paragraph of boring, unimaginative text and tasked with re-writing one sentence to be more descriptive. I’ve always struggled with description exercises, but today’s was actually quite rewarding — I think a major part of it was that we could choose the sentence that we wanted to re-write, so that gave us the opportunity to pick a sentence that spoke to us or that we thought we could improve most.

As I’ve been realising over the last few weeks, the more I write, the more I want to write. And the better I write. And the better I want to write. I hope we have time to do some more writing exercises, because they’re immensely helpful and it’s also great fun to listen to other people read their work. I thought everyone in the class, even though their results were very different, really nailed the exercise.

My sentence was: “At work I went to my desk and there was a note to go and see the boss.”

Here’s my re-written version (it’s a first draft but I think I feel comfortable enough to share it here):

I steered my car into the basement car park, hoping that the grimy walls and dim lighting would provide adequate cover for an advance towards the elevator. Locking my car with the key instead of the fob to avoid the betrayal of a loud sharp beep, I snuck swiftly and stealthily towards the doors, but before I could complete my silent approach I heard the unmistakeable click clack of high-heels on asphalt. Diving around a corner, I hoped that in my fright I hadn’t drawn unnecessary attention to myself. The clicks stayed in perfect regularity with the clacks, and I knew I was golden. Craning my neck to identify the owner of the heels, I decided it was safer to wait in the safety of my makeshift cocoon as the woman entered the elevator and ascended away.

Suddenly I realised that although I was behind a pylon I was still helplessly exposed on three sides, a sitting duck waiting for a boss or co-worker to wander past and find me. I stayed perfectly still and silent, praying that the elevator would return quickly. After what felt like an eternity I heard the sweet, low rumble as it returned to its default position in the basement, and with a ding it opened, inviting me into its welcoming embrace. I rushed forward and dived in, mashing the close door button with the furious stab of my finger, and the doors slowly, steadily creaked closed. It was as if the elevator had no idea the hurry I was in. Safely ensconced, I let out a heaving sigh. Mission accomplished.

Then, with a sinking feeling I realised that the real battle was ahead of me. The office floor. No-mans land. I had to throw caution to the wind and just go for it.

Ducking, weaving, diving, and sneaking from cubicle wall to cubicle wall through the open plan office like a pantomime jailbreak in a silent movie, I couldn’t believe that no one had noticed me. Allowing myself a silent moment to curse whoever it was that decided offices work better with cubicles than closing doors, I made a final triumphant leap into the three-square-metre space that had been assigned to me those years ago. I slumped into my chair, allowing my bag to drop heavily at my feet. I chuckled, triumphant in victory. I had done it.

My eyes fell onto my keyboard, and the crumpled piece of lined note paper perched delicately on top of it. I don’t remember leaving that there yesterday.

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Everyone's a Critic, Thoughts

Person to Person / My Friend Dahmer

PERSON TO PERSON ★★★½

Dustin Guy Defa’s breezy second feature follows a group of characters all navigating an inflection point in their lives during the course of one autumn day in New York City.

Claire (Abbi Jacobson), on her first day as a journalist for a pulpy tabloid, shadows the morally ambiguous and unlucky-in-love Phil (Michael Cera) as he investigates a death. Across town, vinyl record collector Bene (Bene Coopersmith) is given a lead on a rare and valuable copy of Charlie Parker’s Bird Blows the Blues, but soon discovers that the seller may not have been entirely truthful in his description of the item. Ray (George Sample III) is trying to piece back together the relationship he ruined by posting naked pictures of his girlfriend online in a depressive haze. Wendy (Tavi Gevinson), skeptical of her best friend’s new boyfriend, questions not only her own sexuality but her place in the world.

Though events are incited by a death, nothing quite that dramatic occurs during the course of the film — unless you count a low-speed bicycle chase as dramatic. Each of these characters — and other faces drifting in and out of each storyline — must decide how they define themselves and what’s important in their lives: does Claire have the moral constitution to risk failure and confront a grieving widow in the pursuit of a story? Is Wendy ready to shake her tendency for critical self-evaluation and just experience life? Can Ray sufficiently humiliate himself to convince his girlfriend of his contrition? Does Bene’s shirt make him seem too fancy?

These New York stories are nothing new, nor do they have much grand to say, but they exude an effortless charm as each quirky personality meanders in and out of the film. The vignettes are uneven — non-actor Coopersmith shines in the film’s best storyline; Gevinson’s too-cool attitude gives Wendy’s verbose dialogue an air of inauthenticity — but taken as a collection, Person to Person proves there’s life in the talky American indie yet.

MY FRIEND DAHMER ★★

Based on the graphic novel by John Backderf, who was friends with Jeffrey Dahmer in the late 1970s, My Friend Dahmer dramatises the notorious killer’s senior year in high school — when he was just a shy, if disturbed, kid.

Following events from the moment Backderf and his clique, hoping to have a few laughs at his expense, befriend Dahmer and encourage his offbeat behaviour, in some ways the film seems unsure of its own tone. There’s more than enough animal cruelty and psychosexual fantasy to satisfy the horror and serial killer buffs, but the flared costumes and colourful production design make That 70s Show seem subtle, and Anne Heche, playing Jeffrey’s mentally unstable mother, seems like something straight out of a Kristen Wiig sketch on SNL.

The decision to concentrate on Dahmer’s adolescence — when he is first exploring his cruel and unusual fascinations with death and anatomy, but before he commits his first murder — is a strange one. Portraying Dahmer as an awkward, somewhat socially frustrated teenager (expressed through Ross Lynch’s stooped, wooden performance), the film edges toward humanising a serial killer and offers up a number of factors that could have contributed to the monster Dahmer would eventually become: humiliating schoolyard hazing, family breakdown, a manic-depressive mother, alcoholism. But it seems less interested in any kind of in-depth character study and more taken by a prurient fascination with the disturbed childhood of a man who would admit to raping and killing 17 men and boys.

If Backderf — and, by extension, Meyers — weren’t trying to humanise Dahmer with an empathetic portrayal, the obvious question is: what’s the point of telling a story about Jeffrey Dahmer and concentrating on what is surely the least interesting part of his life?

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Everyone's a Critic, Reflections

Critics Q&A, pitching, building a portfolio

Today we were lucky to have two practicing, internationally published film critics here for the MIFF Critics Campus — Simran Hans and Philippa Hawker — spend an hour with us answering our questions and telling us about their lives as freelance film critics. Talking to creative professionals about their work can sometimes be maddening (because, by the nature of the work, it is often hard for a writer to be self-aware enough to understand their own process), but Simran and Philippa were fantastically open with us about the life of a critic, their techniques for overcoming writer’s block, how to pitch, what they use Twitter for, and much more. I really got a lot out of this session and am so glad that we were given the opportunity to talk to these two writers.

I found particularly valuable their advice for pitching:

  • Cold pitching is difficult but often necessary
  • Find a contact (any contact) for the publication you’re hoping to pitch to
  • KEEP IT SHORT — if you don’t know them, introduce yourself in a short paragraph (and link to three relevant examples of your work)
  • Don’t waste your pitch by being too general (“I want to write for you”) — have a particular story in mind
  • Pitch a story, not an idea — have an angle and keep it specific
  • Include specs if helpful (e.g. word count, suggested title, short summary, etc.)
  • Follow up if you don’t hear within a week
  • If you are successful, your reply email is a good time to bring up payment (“What is the deadline and fee?”)

In fact, participating in this Q&A has given me a new enthusiasm for trying to freelance myself. I’ve dipped my toe in the fraught waters of freelancing before — most recently in March’s Studio Ghibli edition of Bright Wall/Dark Room — but I’ve never had the dedication to actually give it a proper go. I know a few people who are freelance writers, and intellectually I know that the only thing stopping me from being regularly paid to write myself is that I haven’t pursued it strongly enough, so perhaps today’s session was the kick in the bum I need to actually do it.

First step: I’m resurrecting The Essential, a website of film/music criticism I co-founded in 2013 and which has languished for the better part of two years. Hopefully having somewhere to put my writing will encourage me to write more often, which will then help me build up a portfolio to use when pitching. The first piece I’ve published is an expanded version of my Call Me By Your Name review I posted here earlier in the week.

It feels surprisingly good to be using The Essential’s ancient, terrible, impossible-to-use CMS again!

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Everyone's a Critic, Thoughts

The Work / Call Me By Your Name

I love Melbourne in winter, when the air is so cold it stings your eyes and the Melbourne International Film Festival takes over the city centre.

The best thing I can do for my creative practice is to write as often as possible, so in that spirit I’ve decided to start jotting down capsule reviews for some of the things I see at MIFF this year. I’m not going to place limits on myself, so I may write about films I loved, films I hated, films I anticipated, films that surprised me… whatever piques my interest and presents something I think worth talking about. And I may not keep it up past this first entry, so we’ll see how I go.

THE WORK ★★★★½

Twice a year, New Folsom Prison allows members of the public to enter its walls to participate in a four-day group therapy session with inmates facilitated by former prisoners and counsellors. Prisoners begin the four-day intensive with a pact to leave prison rules and gang politics at the door, and the outsider participants find themselves thrust into the world’s most intense psychotherapy session, where white, black, Asian and Native American gang members down their arms and lay bare their most intimate insecurities and anxieties to one another, hoping to find some kind of remedy for the failures, betrayals and mistakes that landed them in prison.

The Work promises a “rare look inside the cinder-block walls” of a prison, but once the outsiders start divulging their own stories it slowly becomes clear that what the film actually offers is a deep dive into the darkest recesses of the human mind — and a slow realisation that the blackest of those recesses might not belong to any of the prisoners.

A genuinely bracing work of up-close filmmaking, The Work will hit you square in the chest and send a shiver down your spine — and make you think about how precariously balanced the line between functioning member of society and lifelong criminal really is.

CALL ME BY YOUR NAME ★★★★½

“Is it better to speak or die?”

This question lies at the heart and soul of Luca Guadagnino’s Call Me By Your Name, a sumptuous and beautiful romance story set in the summer of 1983. Elio (Timothée Chalamet) is enjoying another quiet summer in northern Italy as any 17-year-old son of rich Americans would do: lounging by the pool, eating apricots, reading, playing piano and cavorting with the local girls. Oliver (Armie Hammer), a statuesque doctoral student hired by Elio’s father to assist him in his research, arrives to their estate and suddenly awakens in Elio a budding lust that he struggles to understand, much less act upon.

As the sunny days meander by, the two men dance around one another, slowly and tentatively giving in to the desire that dare not speak its name. Theirs is an attraction that at first confuses Elio and, given the era, poses questions of acceptance and decorum. Is it better to speak or die? Speak and risk everything, or don’t speak and condemn yourself to a life without anything worth risking.

Their lust is expressed not through sex (at least, not on screen) but through fleeting moments of tenderness spent in secret on the banks of a crystal clear river, or hidden in the forgotten rooms of the sprawling estate. Call Me By Your Name is overflowing with sensuality, and Guadagnino’s wandering frame contrasts the quiet stillness of the landscape with the raging desire lurking just beneath the surface of his two leads.

The director’s choice to shoot on a single, unchanged lens — placing the camera between the characters in intimate moments, never giving too much context  — resists allowing the two men to truly give themselves to one another, and delicately balances the viewer at the explosive centre of their sexual tension. Call Me By Your Name is, if nothing else, surely one of the sexiest films to come out of Italy since the days of Fellini.

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Assessments, Everyone's a Critic

In profile: Wesley Morris

“When [the critic] sits down to compose his criticism, his artist ceases to be a friend, and becomes mere raw material for his work of art.”
H.L. Mencken, Footnote on Criticism

For Wesley Morris, a film is never just a film. Whether high, low or middle-brow, each is a message in the great cultural conversation humankind has been having with itself since the first oral storytellers began swapping tales thousands of years ago. Once completed and released into cinemas a film does not suddenly become a static artefact, settled in its interpretation; for Morris it remains something to be actively probed, understood, recontextualised and used as a prompt for further discussion and artistic exploration.

Morris, 42, first became a film critic when he began writing reviews for the The Yale Daily News as an undergraduate student. After graduating with a literature degree, his career took him to San Francisco and then to Boston, where he worked the weekly film beat for 11 years and, in 2012, was recognised with a Pulitzer Prize for Criticism — only the fifth film critic to be so honoured.

After a stint as a staff writer for the ill-fated online sports and pop culture publication Grantland, Morris joined The New York Times as a “critic-at-large”. Panoramic in his cultural expertise, his criticism ties together not just cinema but music, literature, television, news media, sports, technology and politics, with his by-line appearing across a range of subject matter and in a variety of formats, from The New York Times Magazine to the podcast Still Processing, which he co-hosts with reporter Jenna Wortham. He takes an interdisciplinary approach to art: when dissecting a film, it is perhaps not helpful to restrict one’s points of reference only to cinema, and it is by drawing connections between different forms of media that Morris’s most incisive ideas take hold.

His language is precise and uncomplicated, and though he interrogates his subjects with extensive use of reference and comparison, his writing is always accessible. Reading a Wesley Morris film review is in some ways like meeting up with a particularly worldly and articulate friend for a cocktail following a screening — and wondering where on earth they learned to connect references as diverse as His Girl Friday, Alien and the New Testament in their reading of the latest superhero blockbuster.

At its foundation, Morris’s criticism sits atop the idea that in all art, politics are inherent and inescapable. As a writer on film he makes no distinction between the explicitly and the unintentionally political; even a film that at first blush seems innocuous and ignorable, like Ted 2 — which for most viewers was a minor entry in the already minor career of Seth MacFarlane — for Morris conceals a cruel and antiquated attack on black sexuality.

It is on race and sexuality that Morris speaks with the most authority, which is to say he’s had plenty to write about over the past decade. Recalling his experiences growing up the son of an impoverished single mother in Philadelphia, and writing now as a gay black man in a time when certain subcultures have weaponised white, hetereonormative privilege, Morris writes with the clarity of Ta-Nehisi Coates and the directness of Dan Savage to achieve a seemingly impossible task: placing his reader inside the lived experience of someone with whom they might otherwise share nothing, and dissecting culture to reveal meanings that reader might never be able to understand on their own.

Whether writing on a film as serious as 12 Years a Slave or as ludicrous as Let’s Be Cops, Morris uses pop culture as a prism through which to explore the fractured state of identity in America, and the ways in which differences between people are presented and explored — or ignored — on our screens. He understands that every decision made in the making of a film — its subject matter, setting, the diversity of its cast, the costumes of its female characters, the subjects of its jokes — raises questions of responsibility. To make a film in the 21st century with a shaky grasp of identity, or to ignore it altogether, is, to Morris, a crime.

“That’s what writing about race and popular culture is for me: it’s crime reporting,” he told Longform’s Aaron Lammer in 2014.

“It’s not me looking for an agenda when I go to the movies … but I feel a moral responsibility to report a crime being committed. That’s what I’m forced to do over and over again.”

In an era punctuated by the regular and repeated killing of people of colour by government institutions, and with an escalating culture war being fought in the media every day, the role of cultural crime reporter is an increasingly vital one. And it’s a role that no one is more qualified for than Wesley Morris.

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Everyone's a Critic, Reflections

City of Gold, critical comparison

On Monday we watched City of Gold (2015), a documentary about the work of L.A. Times food critic Jonathan Gold — though it is as much about the City of the title as it is about the Gold.

As a documentary it is relatively unremarkable — shots of talking heads and laptop keyboards are the order of the day — but for a food-related documentary there is surprisingly little food porn. Instead, the filmmakers use Gold’s words to describe most of the food mentioned in the film, which serves as both an interesting filmmaking technique and a beautiful exhibition of Gold’s writing.

I wasn’t familiar with Gold’s work before watching the film, but now that I am I really appreciate his experiential writing style. He doesn’t just describe the food he eats, he paints a full picture of the context and culture in which the food is experienced, because going to a restaurant excites many more senses than just taste. Particularly in a large and multicultural city like Los Angeles, going to a restaurant is a little like visiting another country and experiencing its culture — or, at least, how that culture mixes and interacts with America — and Gold attempts to usher his readers through that experience on the page.

At one stage of the film Gold refers to himself as not so much a food critic as a “chronicler of Los Angeles”, which I think is an apt description and something that any food critic should aspire to be for their city.

I was particularly surprised to learn that Gold visits a restaurant four or five times before reviewing it — and, he says, up to 17 times if he’s unfamiliar with the cuisine being served. This fact really blew my mind, because I would assume most film/theatre critics only watch something once before they write their review. I wonder what effect it would have on film criticism if it was common practice for critics to watch a film five times before reviewing it?

In Wednesday’s class we read five different reviews of Edward Scissorhands (1990), which ran the gamut from simple plot summary to sophisticated critical analysis. It was fascinating to read critics with such different styles discuss a single film, because seeing them all side by side helped us identify differences in tone, style and language. Of the five we read, I most preferred to read the critics like Paul Harris and Adrian Martin, who had depth and critical rigour in their analysis but didn’t get too far into academic or pointlessly florid language.

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