{"id":695,"date":"2013-06-07T10:12:00","date_gmt":"2013-06-07T17:12:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/2013\/06\/peter-rainers-movie-criticism.html"},"modified":"2013-06-07T10:12:00","modified_gmt":"2013-06-07T17:12:00","slug":"peter-rainers-movie-criticism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/2013\/06\/peter-rainers-movie-criticism.html","title":{"rendered":"Peter Rainer’s Movie Criticism"},"content":{"rendered":"

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IT\u2019S almost impossible to find a word that can be changed in Peter Rainer\u2019s film criticism, or a way to express an idea better than he already has. That\u2019s a lesson I learned the hard way, during the year I served as Peter\u2019s editor. It makes his work a pleasure \u2013 sometimes a revelation \u2013 to read. I can\u2019t recall many critics who you really feel thinking<\/i> on the page quite as well as Peter does; the ideas and critical themes unfold in the same way great storytelling does.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
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Here at The Misread City, we\u2019re quite excited by the release of Rainer on Film<\/a>: Thirty Years of Film Writing in a Turbulent and Transformative Era<\/i>. The collection includes plenty of film reviews \u2013 from Night of the Hunter<\/i> to L.A. Confidential<\/i> to Blue Velvet<\/i>, as well as longer essays on cultural\/aesthetic issues, pieces on actors and directors (Bergman, Robert Altman), and sections on documentaries, literary or theatrical adaptations, and the movies of Steven Spielberg. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n
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In the book\u2019s introduction, Peter talks about falling for film as a kid watching the same picture over and over on the TV show Million Dollar Movie<\/i>, and his youthful attraction for critics Pauline Kael and James Agee.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
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Peter loves film as deeply as anyone I know, but he doesn\u2019t keep his disappointment to himself when he\u2019s let down by a filmmaker he admires. \u201cGus Van Sant\u2019s Good Will Hunting<\/i> is like an adolescent\u2019s fantasy of being tougher and smarter and more misunderstood than anybody else,\u201d he writes. \u201cIt\u2019s also touchy-feely with a vengeance.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
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Peter has served as film critic for the Los Angeles Times and New York magazine. He wrote for me at New Times LA in the late \u201890s (that work made him a Pulitzer finalist); he currently writes for the Christian Science Monitor.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
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This is my Q+A with Peter, who appears at Book Soup on Monday June 10 and at Vroman\u2019s on Wednesday June 19.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
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Did coming of age as a cinephile in the \u201870s \u2013 writing for your college paper and programming a campus film society, then writing your first professional review of <\/i>Chinatown \u2013 spoil you for the decades that came after?<\/p>\n

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I feel spoiled to some extent by the way in which I came up as a critic. I was film critic for my college newspaper, the Brandeis \u201cJustice,\u201d which was a great laboratory for putting my ideas into print and then hashing out the blowback from my students and teachers. There was a great immediacy about the whole process. In some ways, it\u2019s a microcosm of the ideal situation for a critic \u2013 having as an audience a smart, contentious, captive audience of true believers. <\/p>\n

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What I didn\u2019t realize at the time is that the movies that were coming out then, the early mid-\u201870s, represented a golden age. This isn\u2019t nostalgia. Week after week I found myself reviewing \u201cThe Godfather,\u201d \u201cCabaret,\u201d \u201cMcCabe and Mrs. Miller,\u201d \u201cMean Streets,\u201d \u201cStraw Dogs,\u201d \u201cA Clockwork Orange,\u201d \u201cThe Last Picture Show,\u201d \u201cThe Sorrow and the Pity,\u201d \u201cSounder,\u201d you name it. I used to joke that back then even the bad movies were good. (Now *that\u2019s* nostalgia).<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
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One of the main qualities that distinguishes your criticism, I think, is<\/i><\/div>\n
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your talent at \u201cseeing through\u201d a film, to spot its invisible claims and pretensions, to look squarely at what it is selling us — whether a mainstream Hollywood movie or independent art film. Where does this impulse come from, and how the hell does it work? I\u2019m not sure I know a critic in any genre who does this so insightfully and accessibly. <\/p>\n

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I love \u201clooking through\u201d a movie because there is often so much more going in a film, politically, psychologically, morally, aesthetically, than simply what is being presented to us. This is my natural disposition. I don\u2019t like feeling conned when I go to a movie. I\u2019m a natural skeptic who, of course, is also open to being gulled on a regular basis. I guess this makes me a magician\u2019s ideal audience, and the best movie artists are indeed magicians. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n
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Movies reflect the society in which they were made \u2013 this is a concept that runs throughout my criticism. I didn\u2019t realize to what extent this was true of my writing until I began collecting my pieces. It\u2019s kind of like packing up your library when you move. You begin to see patterns in the books you buy that you may not have been consciously aware of. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n
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Pauline Kael said that the critic was the only thing that stood between the audience and the marketplace. These days we have a more sophisticated style of marketing, and perhaps a less sophisticated brand of taste: Blockbusters, sequels, an amplification of special effects that makes the corporate \u201880s look nuanced, and a Hollywood system increasingly geared to violence- and sensation-loving teenage boys. (In some ways it \u2018s a parody of the kind of cinema Kael called for.) What\u2019s the role of the critic in this 21st century funhouse?<\/p>\n

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The role of the critic in the 21st<\/sup> century funhouse, assuming there is a role anymore, is the same as it\u2019s ever been \u2013 to write as well as you can on movies worth writing about. The increasingly overmuscled marketing juggernauts and the pile-on of pronouncements on movies from every quarter, digital or otherwise, makes life difficult for a critic who wants to be heard above the din and say something worthy of more than a tweet.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
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Is there a type of film \u2013 a genre, a certain budget — that has become almost impossible to make, or at least to distribute with any hope of finding an audience? What are we missing?<\/p>\n

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Small-scale, handcrafted dramas, especially featuring people over 40, are difficult to finance in Hollywood nowadays. Television has become much more of an arena for the sort of serious, extended domestic dramas that used to be standard in Hollywood, before the franchise mentality took hold and the budgets went blooey. The life of a TV critic is in some respects more challenging these days than the life of a movie critic. But then again, I am writing this here in the summer movie doldrums!<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
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It\u2019s easy to doubt, lament, and lose faith in the movies. Who are a few of the filmmakers, from past or present, who restore your love of the medium?<\/p>\n

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There are wonderful directors working now and doing good work against considerable odds: I loved Paul Thomas Anderson\u2019s \u201cThe Master,\u201d a real risk-taker, and shot in wide screen; I think Drake Doremus (\u201cLike Crazy\u201d) is quite talented, Jeff Nichols (\u201dMud\u201d), Deborah Granik (\u201cWinter\u2019s Bone\u201d). Richard Linklater is extraordinarily versatile, maybe the best of his generation. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n
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There are way too many directors I admire from the past, so just a brief stab here \u2013 the humanists: Satyajit Ray, Vittorio De Sica, Charlie Chaplin, Yasujiro Ozu, Jean Renoir. It doesn\u2019t get any better than their best.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
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<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

IT\u2019S almost impossible to find a word that can be changed in Peter Rainer\u2019s film criticism, or a way to express an idea better than he already has. That\u2019s a lesson I learned the hard way, during the year I served as Peter\u2019s editor. It makes his work a pleasure \u2013 sometimes a revelation \u2013 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[79,76,27,30],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-695","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-critics","7":"category-film","8":"category-journalism","9":"category-los-angeles","10":"entry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/695","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=695"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/695\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=695"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=695"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=695"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}