By David Poland poland@moviecitynews.com
Reeler Pinch Hitter: Eric Kohn, Film Critic
[Note: Reeler editor S.T. VanAirsdale is taking the week off, but the blog is in the good hands of trusted friends and colleagues; click here for other entries in the series. Eric Kohn is a regular film critic for the New York Press. His writing has also appeared in Entertainment Weekly, FHM and Reverse Shot. He blogs at Screen Rush.]
It’s hard to keep up with the fantastic writing about film by veterans in the critic crowd, considering the lesser effort required to rely on the blogosphere for regular bite-sized updates on the state of cinema. Finding the time and strength to pick up a book is a much heavier task than it used to be. Consequently, I’ve just gotten around to finishing Jonathan Rosenbaum’s seven-year-old tome Movie Wars, a solemn tirade against a loosely defined “media-industrial complex.” Rosenbaum, the accomplished Chicago Reader film critic and scholar of all things celluloid, brazenly accuses his projected antagonists of wasting time pumping up mediocre corporate products, preventing commendable foreign and independent cinema from receiving well-earned love. Call it Chomsky for cinephiles.
Surprisingly, however, the only aspect of the book that’s particularly iconoclastic is the title. Despite a few possibly justified jabs at David Denby’s tunnel vision taste, Rosenbaum spends most of the 225 pages discussing films that he considers worth watching, then thoroughly rebukes American theatergoers for not paying closer attention. This is engrossing stuff–the first thing I did after completing the last chapter was place Hou Hsiao-hsien and Abbas Kiarostami at the top of my Netflix queue–but Rosenbaum unevenly oscillates between analyzing specific films and decrying the treatment of art as a commodity, which obscures the intended polemic.
The book also has an odd tinge of anachronism. I was shocked to find that the Internet, in all its film journalism complexities, is excluded from this discourse–and Rosenbaum, writing when Ain’t It Cool News and other movie sites were in their infancies, was surely aware of medium’s relevance, even if his early career pre-dated it by several decades. As a result of this regrettable omission, more accomplished worker bees than myself have long ago tackled the supposed flaws of Rosenbaum’s unremitting contempt for studio tactics that often bind critics to the whimsical will of a publicity-driven economy.
Actually, I read the book while on vacation, and the best result of exploring its self-styled diatribe is that it got me pumped to be back in New York, with all the lovely variety this city offers. I’ll suggest with equal fervor that you dig Film Forum’s upcoming series of Frank Tashlin films and trip out to Monster House in 3-D at the multiplexes. Because, folks, if this is a movie war, then somebody needs to bring down the wall.
