By David Poland poland@moviecitynews.com
'Film Snob's Dictionary': Defining Cinema For the Smug Obsessive in All of Us
This is the part of the blog where I channel the omniscient traditon of Liz Smith in the spirit of full disclosure: “A lovely writer like Lawrence Levi does not need this good friend to vouch for him. From the moment I previewed the new book The Film Snob’s Dictionary, which Levi co-wrote with Snob mastermind David Kamp, I knew that the pair’s priceless wit and wisdom would be the toast of cinema obsessives for years to come. And that Lawrence, with his quiet sensitivity and charming…”
OK, fuck it: Lawrence Levi is a friend of mine. He writes a pleasant film blog called Looker and is indeed also one of the lucky bastards behind The Film Snob’s Dictionary, which hit stores Tuesday. The book collects a few hundred cinematic touchstones, phenomena and other outlandish minutiae as a point of reference for anyone, as the cover states, “for whom the actual enjoyment of motion pictures is but a side dish to the accumulation of arcane knowledge about them.” Or as perhaps a cheat sheet for more casual moviegoers flummoxed with guilt over an inability to distinguish essential character actor Brian Dennehy from essential character actor Charles Durning. Ever the egalitarians, Film Snob‘s authors make such aesthetic diagnoses easier for everybody (though you can beg to differ in the Nitpickers’ Corner at Snobsite.com). And since I am acquainted with Levi, you might assume I will go easier on the guy while reviewing his work. In reality, however, I am so jealous that I had to have another colleague edit this item for excessive playa hating.
In the end, I saw Film Snob for the gem it is: A genuinely engaging resource camped in the treacherous terrain between humor and criticism, as assured in its grasp of the fossil record (The 4:30 Movie, Kenneth Anger, Hammer Films) as it is in assessing contemporary terms that have found a niche in “serious” film culture (Shannon Tweed, wire-fu, Steve Zahn). It really takes a freak–nay, two freaks–to not only know this much about movies, but also contextualize, cross-reference and then satirize basically all of it.
“The reason why I think Lawrence and I pull it off so well is because we know this to be true of ourselves sometimes,” said Kamp, who started the Snob series with a collection of articles in Vanity Fair before publishing The Rock Snob’s Dictionary with co-author Steven Daly in 2005. “There’s a film-snob part of both of us that we’re lampooning–whether you call it self-loathing or self-lampooning. But that said, we also are poking fun at this far more insufferable person. It’s, ‘Oh my God, if you’ve suffered in conversation with film snobs, or not been able to hold your own, this is the decrypting thing. This will crack the code for you so you can understand what these people are talking about and you can hold your own with them–with the added benefit of not even having seen the movies.”
And thank God for that, because face it: If you have not sat through all ten hours of Kieslowski’s The Decalogue by now, you just ain’t. But beyond defining obscure Snob rallying points like Skidoo and Flaming Creatures, the authors also supply handy analyses differentiating vaguely similar film terms (Bibi Andersson versus Harriet Andersson, The Trouble with Harry verus The Plot Against Harry); cataloguing “lost” masterpieces like Welles’s Don Quixote and Hitchcock’s Kaleidoscope; and a quick-reference guide delineating what separates “movies” from “films” (“It’s a MOVIE if it has T&A in it,” for example. “It’s a FILM if it has penises in it.”).
Film Snob is not necessarily some exhaustive compilation of arcana, however. Rare mainsteam mentions of stars like Tom Cruise notoriously confused poor Cindy Adams last week, and legends such as Robert Evans and Sam Peckinpah get their own entries. Kamp and Levi write at length about Dennis Hopper’s turbulent career, concluding, “If pressed, Snobs will argue that Hopper’s best work is as the director of two films nobody has seen, The Last Movie and Out of the Blue.” Conspicuously absent are icons like Bergman, Kurosawa and Fellini, whom the typical Film Snob “generally scoffs at… deeming them to be mere name-drops for bourgeois losers wishing to seem cultured.”
“David suggested (costume designer) Edith Head,” Levi recalled over the phone. “And I said Edith Head was too popular. She’s not a Snob item. She won countless Academy Awards, and she was nominated for probably every movie she worked on, more or less. She was even parodied in The Incredibles, which I think makes her too common. I think a Snob would say, ‘Edith Head was OK, but you really need to think of someone like…”
Levi drew a blank. “It was that one-named costume designer. Do you remember?”
Of course, hyper-cool non-Snob that I am, I had no clue. “Adrian!” Levi’s wife shouted in the background.
“Thank you, Meghan,” he said.
Then there are the critics–a Snob Hall of Fame comprising Pauline Kael, Andrew Sarris, Jonathan Rosenbaum and… Dave Kehr? “If Dave Kehr isn’t legendary, then we say he’s respected by Snobs in a way that other Times critics aren’t,” Levi told me. “He has a suitable pedigree as a Snob critic, which he demonstrates every week in his DVD reviews.”
Add a few genre definitions, the genius pairing of the words “samurai goonery” and a flashback to Anthology Film Archives’ “Invisible Cinema,” and you actually have the foundation for a fairly comprehensive survey of cinema history. Sure, it is as skewed as Ross MacDonald’s almost-but-not-quite caricatures sprinkled throughout the book (Clint Howard and Bud Cort never looked better, let me tell you), but it also yields a critical respect for movies that blind snobbery tends to either overlook or ignore. And, of course, these extreme cases do exist–if not in each of us, then sitting with his or her breath held in the third row of the theater where you are reluctantly, against all better judgment, viewing some interminable Fassbinder clusterfuck. Or something.
For the most part, Kamp says, he and Levi avoided any major Snob discord during their collaboration, which unfolded almost entirely through e-mail and was hardly conducive to fisticuffs. “One thing I may be a little too harsh on is that I just think that the whole idea of martial arts genre pictures has gotten way overblown by cinema aficionados in America,” Kamp said. “In Hong Kong, people don’t think of these movies this way. They think of them as entertainment. I think maybe Lawrence didn’t really take issue with it, but he doesn’t feel as strongly that way as I do. On the other hand, he seems to like to make fun of the Europeans more than I did.”
Levi intimated as much to me last week. “I’ve wondered for years–knowing people whose tastes run to the truly arcane, or people who can sit happily through the longest Tarkovsky movies or seven hours of Bela Tarr–whether they actually enjoy it or whether it’s the feeling of self-importance that they get from enduring these films in empty theaters,” he said. “Knowing that it separates them from the rest of the moviegoing masses. Whether it’s that feeling they’re proud of as opposed to simple cinephilia. I don’t know. That’s a question I’ve never been able to answer.”
As such, even if it never settles any arguments, Film Snob provides some clear, classic perspective from which nobody really emerges unscathed–subjects, readers or authors. “Caring about movies means having strong opinions about everything,” Levi said. “And inevitably, that came through, because that’s how you talk about movies–with your opinions. Neither of us could comment on something without evaluating it either explicitly or implicitly. And that’s part of the fun: taking a stand.”
