By Ray Pride Pride@moviecitynews.com
Live free or indie: NH's Lars Trodson challenges NY's Tony Scott
A. O. Scott‘s recent paean to the death of “howler” movies gets a gauntlet thrown down by Lars Trodson in New Hampshire’s Seacoast Online: “A.O. Scott and his peers may feel they see representative regional cinema at the big film festivals. But the idea that the best of the best of these independent films will eventually surface at these festivals, by the way, isn’t always true… This is a difficult and tricky point to make[, but] the idea of film festivals is to celebrate the best, not the worst, so the filmmaker who is wildly off base in his first few tries but has ambition and talent isn’t really going to get seen…. Can the film critic of the New York Times get out of the office and go to film festivals such as the New Hampshire Film Expo? … He should… How many more reviews can you squeeze out of a product that you have no real interest in any more, A.O. Scott?
“This was certainly an implicit message in your “Howlers” essay about the status of Hollywood and in other reviews you write. In your review of Casanova, you wrote: “So I sighed and sank down in my seat, preparing for a long, perfumed ride to Prestigeville.” About the latest Jennifer Aniston movie, you write: “I suppose Rumor Has It could be worse, though at the moment I’m at a loss to say just how.” You sound tired, tired, tired…. Getting out to the heartland of movie-making is certainly not as glamorous as watching films in New York City. You’ll have to sit in dingy auditoriums, suffer through too many conversations with young filmmakers… stay at a hotel that’s uncomfortable and take part in conversations that are howlers in their own right… In the process, you will see some films that, in all their glory, in all their howling glory, may revive your interest in the state of film-making today. Because there will be a moment, maybe just one, but it will be there nonetheless, inside the “train wreck, the catastrophe, the utter and complete artistic disaster” — as you so aptly described these bad films — where you’ll not see just abject failure but also a glimpse of a Scorcese, or a DePalma, and then you’ll know it was worth the trip. So get out of the office. Come see us up in New Hampshire some time.”