By Ray Pride Pride@moviecitynews.com
Jarecki: You're either with David Denby or you're with the terrorists
Over at Pride, Unprejudiced, I have a few thousand words each with directors Gavin Hood and Eugene Jarecki, both of whom are infectiously enthusiastic and uncommonly smart. Here’s a sample exchange with Jarecki, when I asked him about “the incredibly jejune review that David Denby wrote in the New Yorker of Why We Fight. “I think it’s a form of unfortunate elitism where the reviewer probably does not have sufficient experience sitting in an audience and feeling the way people are affected the movie. So their review reveals more about the rarefied world in which they watch films than about the way those films actually impact the public. In the particular case of that review, I think Mr. Denby literally didn’t realize that most of the film he was watching was original footage. … He often invokes the name Marcel Ophuls in the review. I daresay, I think Marcel Ophuls, wherever in this universe he is, was an artist who would not have thought that a critic should set parameters by which artist should operate. It’s just a tragic closure of the American mind, and thankfully audiences have not seen the film the way Mr. Denby did… I do go out of my way to find people who disagree with whatever impulses I have when I start… I honestly believe that David Denby has hurt too many filmmakers by writing things in the mainstream press that are vicious, that reveal a too-great distance from the creative process. If that makes me unpopular with David Denby, I think that any artist should be unpopular with any critic who sets tyrannical parameters about art… I guess, the way Mr. Denby would see the world, you’re either with him or you’re with the terrorists.