Category Archives: Everyone’s a Critic

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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Everyone's a Critic, Thoughts

W2 exercise: referentiality and Baby Driver

Last week we pitched a 300-word critical review, to be written over the weekend and then workshopped in class. This is mine.

No film exists in a vacuum. All but the most experimental filmmakers weave a fabric of archetypes, narrative patterns and cultural touchstones into something that is — hopefully — new. The internet has opened up entire worlds of art for young practitioners to draw from in their own work, from vintage rock albums and arcane literature to obscure films that previous generations of artists could have enjoyed only rarely at repertory cinemas. As a result, we live in a time where there is no single dominant vector of influence, and never before has mass culture been so vast and varied in its sources of inspiration.

Baby Driver director Edgar Wright has made a career of invoking pop cultural history in his work, from Spaced’s litany of direct visual references to cinema history, to Scott Pilgrim vs The World aping the aesthetic of video games, to the “Three Flavours” trilogy’s collage of zombie/cop/sci-fi tropes. It’s as if Wright is attempting to personify Quentin Tarantino’s famous quip that “when people ask me if I went to film school I tell them no, I went to films.”

With Baby Driver, Wright has distilled referentiality into an art form of its own, where any deeper symbolic meaning is cast aside in favour of allusions, references, cameos and easter eggs. For audiences, the experience is a two-hour long game of spot-the-reference as much as it is anything else, and in this way the film is tailor-made for a generation of viewers raised with the history of human culture mere clicks away.

Wright is careful to ensure that the film is a high-octane thrill ride no matter how familiar the viewer is with the history of cinema, but there is a strange pleasure to be found in recognising the main character, Baby (Ansel Elgort), as a sort of millennial echo of Ryan O’Neal’s character from The Driver (whose director, Walter Hill, has a voice cameo in Baby Driver), or noting that the construction of scenes in which Doc (Kevin Spacey) briefs his criminal underlings on the plans for their next job, are reminiscent of another heist-gone-wrong film: Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs.

By under-serving deeper meaning and symbolism, Baby Driver opens itself up to the accusations that it is all sound and fury signifying nothing. But when the sound and fury is this enjoyable, does it matter?

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Everyone's a Critic, Reflections

Reviews vs criticism, constructive feedback

What’s the difference between review and criticism? To me it’s one of those “I’ll know it when I see it” things, where I recognise that there is a clear difference between a review and a piece of criticism, but the boundaries between the two can often be quite blurry and hard to identify.

Reviews:

  • Are generally less in-depth
  • Function as a consumer guide
  • Should describe the text
  • Have a responsibility not to spoil the text (assuming the reader is not familiar with the work being reviewed)
  • Are more prescriptive in terms of content/structure

Criticism:

  • Can be more in-depth
  • Is less prescriptive in terms of content/structure (i.e. criticism could be a personal essay, thematic response to the text, draw from a wider context, etc.)
  • Does not necessarily need to describe the text
  • Can assume the reader is familiar with the text

To illustrate this difference, this week we read two different critical responses to Tricky’s album Maxinquaye: one a short 300-word review in Rolling Stone, and one a much larger retrospective exploration of its themes and cultural impact by Mark Fisher. Reading two different critical evaluations of the same work was incredibly interesting, and I think everyone in the class got much more out of Fisher’s writing than the Rolling Stone review, which jibes with my own personal experience with longform criticism. With the space to really dive into a work and respond to its themes and preoccupations without needing to necessarily describe and evaluate it, readers can gain a much deeper and more considered understanding of a work of art. It also allows criticism to function as an art form itself.

On Wednesday we paired up in class to discuss a 300-word review of our own, and to give/receive feedback on our writing. Strangely, this is one of the only times in my life that I was actually really happy with a piece of my writing after the first draft. I wrote about Baby Driver and referentiality in Edgar Wright’s work, and my points seemed to flow out of my head in a very natural way as I was writing it, which has never happened to me before. I think it might be because I had very well-defined constraints, so by necessity I had to focus on just the one most important point I wanted to explore, and didn’t get bogged down in wondering how to begin and which points to make.

When it came time to receive feedback from a classmate I was worried that this might backfire on me, like perhaps although my writing came easily and made sense to me in the moment I was writing it, someone coming to it with fresh eyes would have no idea what I was rambling about.

I was paired with Katrina, who wrote a really great piece on the Mad Men series finale and how it ties together the threads that the show had been exploring over its eight seasons (namely, Don Draper’s discovery of his true self and the impact this has on those closest to him). Her thesis was very clearly expressed and the piece was well constructed, so the majority of my feedback was about relatively minor things like providing more context and keeping an eye on things like tenses, word choice and the passive voice. Kat’s feedback on my piece was really valuable — she pointed out a few areas where I’d left points implied rather than actually expressed, and had some good ideas for areas to expand, so I definitely think the article will be improved once I make those changes.

Receiving constructive criticism and feedback can be pretty daunting, but the way the critique session was framed in a positive way meant that it actually felt very collegiate and respectful. I’m really happy with how positively I responded to well-defined constraints, so that might be a trick I continue to try to impose on myself in the future. I’ve also had good experiences working with editors in the past, so I’m looking forward to having more of these critiquing sessions in the future. And of course most importantly, I’m going to try my best to keep writing as often as I possibly can.

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