By Ray Pride Pride@moviecitynews.com
Career LA Times journo makes funny about apparent lousy education; Synecdoche, NY the butt of his affectation
Once upon a time in a land far, far away, the role of a journalist was to inform, educate and elevate public discourse. Now it’s to pretend you’re as stupid as the next straw man. In a rare “Big Picture” blog foray that doesn’t involve lunch with powerful people or the fear of being taken for a parking valet by powerful people, LA Time’s Patrick “P-Bloggy” Goldstein asks after a Los Angeles screening of Synecdoche, New York, “Can anyone pronounce the title of Charlie Kaufman’s new movie?” “[B]efore the screening, a gang of us grungy media types lollygagged around, like a cut-rate version of NPR’s ‘Wait Wait … Don’t Tell Me,’ trying to guess how to pronounce the movie’s title, a play on Schenectady, N.Y. (The only person who seemed to truly have a clue was Christian Science Monitor critic Peter Rainer, but I think I spied a dictionary in his back pocket.)” I don’t mean to go all Mark Rabinowitz on anybody, but what the fuck does that mean coming from someone who’s over 50 and has spent their entire career working with language, on staff at the Times for a decade once of the most prestigious outlets for journalism? Aside from the de rigeur har-de-har reference to KCRW? “I think I spied a dictionary in his back pocket.” To whom precisely is the condescension directed? “Always a good sport, Sony [Pictures] Classics co-chief Tom Bernard laughed when I asked if he’d given Kaufman a list of other possible New York towns that might roll off the tongue a bit more mellifluously, like Rochester or Syracuse or even Ithaca.” Bernard’s smart enough to know that the name of Erin Brockovich wasn’t Erin Brockovich: in the real world, it was “Julia Roberts IS Erin Brockovich.” Quotes Goldstein, “We’re completely happy with the title… The whole idea is to brand it as a Charlie Kaufman film. So if it’s an issue with anyone, people can just say it’s the Charlie Kaufman movie. Maybe it will be a good thing. If people can’t pronounce the title, that simply means they’ll have to spend more time talking about it.” Frets the man, “[T]he title is a still a tonsil-twirling tongue-twister.” Tonsil-twirling… Pr0n term? Medicinal? Carnivalesque?: Have to get the Google out of my hip pocket… This is extremely silly stuff.