I've been too busy trying to reduce my debt the Christian way (no, I'm kidding -- too busy working and writing) to post here as often as I'd like, and now... wham! the holidays. But will try to keep this fresh every few days...
Interesting articles in the new issue of The Independent Film and Video Monthly. I was particularly interested in the interview with social critic Stanley Crouch. What's really fascinating is his interest in Quentin Tarantino and his critiques of Spike Lee (in which you get the sense it's more a feeling of disappointment with Lee than it is a distaste).
[They smartly only let you read half of the article online but I have the hard copy in front of me. (But you should subscribe because they're a great organization and it's a good little magazine.)]
On Spike Lee: "I think he's still developing. See, his movies never really make money, but it's not because they're too good to make money, as some people would say. I just thiknk that even when he makes a good movie he tends to do something in it that's kind of silly, that can confuse the power of the movie. He has put himself in a category where the critical establishment views him as 'the angry black filmmaker.' So the reviewers aren't really very sympathetic to anything unless it fits into the ideology in those books he used to come out with for every film. Often times the ideas in [those books] would be simple-mnded and rhetorical, or reductionist in a way that didn't allow his films to get the air they probably needed - the air of other people looking at them."
On QT: "Tarantino does this kind of amazing thing. In a certain way, he seems to always be writing Julius Caesar, Othello and Richard III over and over - [in both the plays and his films] there are extremely powerful bad guys who drive the story and who you find yourself both repulsed and intruigued by, primarily because they can surprise you. For instance, if you take the Ordell character in Jackie Brown, which is one of Samuel Jackson's greatest performances, you never knew what he was going to do or how he was going to react to something. Even though he establishes himself in a certain way in the opening of the movie, [it still] doesn't prepare you for the murderer he turns out to be shortly thereafter, nor does it prepare you for his meeting with Jackie Brown in which she kind of intimidates him with her plan. The viewer is hit with all these surprises within his personality. I think that's what Tarantino's gift is -- he can take these [characters] in Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, Jackie Brown and Kill Bill, and surprise the viewer."
And in response to being asked what he'd like to see more of in film that's not already being done, Crouch said:
"The most rebellious thing one can do today is to affirm the higher qualities of human nature, to actually show somebody exhibit virtue or honor or courage or loyalty. That's hard to do. It would be interesting if we could get stories that actually took people through this amazingly varied country that we have, in realistic ways. ... People can be in the same ethnic group and be extraordinarily different, which, in terms of Caucasians, we've been told throughout history. If we could get that same...depiction of everyone, I think we move forward."
I know what he's saying, although I feel like he's missed a lot of independent films over the past few years -- as well as an increasing, steady if slow awareness of other cultures, Asian, Latino, especially, and a willingness to see films about them. Whether all these films are doing their jobs as far as depicting a diversity of their own subcultures is up for debate. But his jist seems on-target, and it does seem films more often than not are taking the easy way out -- showing human nature as a rigid, easily categorized and ultimately, usually, dishonorable.
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