Odienator

I remember the first cinematic opinion I got my ass kicked over: Grease. I was the only person in my class who didn't go ga-ga over the movie John Travolta did before Moment By Moment, and when I expressed my displeasure with this poorly directed musical debacle, people played Hand Jive on my face. It was then I knew I wanted to be a film critic, preferably one with a stronger jaw. I started devouring every film review I could get my hands on, and in nearly three decades I have found some memorable opinions on which to chew. I have also endured numerous cases of heartburn. Here are a smidgen of the former and a dash of the latter.

1. Roger Ebert. Cinema snobs always pick on poor Rog, but I am not ashamed to admit I love Mr. Ebert. He influenced me in so many ways, even though I frequently disagree with him. His writing always seemed like a friendly conversation, a trait I have tried to mimic. He won the
Pulitzer, which I've dreamt about since I was 8 years old. He did fun, unusual things in his reviews (I am still trying to figure out his take on The Howling). And like me, he loves Black women and big tits: Of Queen Latifah in Living Out Loud, Rog wrote that she "is tall, striking, carries herself with placid self-confidence and wears dresses that display her magnificent bosom--not as an advertisement, but more in a spirit of generosity toward the world."

Sure, his positive reviews of dreck like Cop and a Half made my head hurt, but I admire (and emulate) his utter lack of shame.

2. Bosley Crowther's Bonnie and Clyde review. Nobody did histrionic outrage better than Bosley
Crowther, who seemed at times to be permanently stuck in 1937. I was always impressed at how distressed he got over post-Production code movies; as hard as I tried, I could never get that pissed over light shooting out of a projector. Crowther's review of B&C plays like Rex Reed minus the Paul Lynde bitchiness and the Winona Ryder jazz hands. For someone so upset by the film's violence, he sure can't stop talking about it. "This blending of farce with brutal killings is as pointless as it is lacking in taste, since it makes no valid commentary upon the already travestied truth," growls Crowther at one point. He warns us that "astonished people are machine-gunned" (as opposed to "slightly displeased people"), and uses the same adjective to describe himself a paragraph later. "And it leaves an astonished critic wondering just what purpose Mr. Penn and Mr. Beatty think they serve with this strangely antique, sentimental claptrap." Perhaps he felt machine-gunned.

Crowther announced his resignation from the Times shortly after this review. Like so many other critics, he wound up in Hollywood, taking an advisory position at Columbia Pictures. You may remember then as the studio that passed on M*A*S*H because, according to them, "people don't say 'fuck' in films from Columbia Pictures."

3. Joe Klein's review of 1989's Do The Right Thing infuriated me like Bosley Crowther at a screening of Pulp Fiction. Klein called Spike Lee's film "reckless" and indicated that only White people would be able to have a civil, detailed discussion on the film's message. "Black teenagers won't find [the film's message] so hard," Klein wrote, "white people are your enemy." In 1989, I was one of those people Klein painted with his monolithic brush, a Black 19-year old computer science major entering his final year at college. Despite dreams of being a critic, I had become a computer science major because there were no Black film critics (or so I thought), and I didn't think I'd be able to get a job. Klein's erroneous predictions of race riots at every screening made me wish I had done the right thing and gotten that degree in journalism or film, if only so I could publicly let him know what an asshole I thought he was. As a result, I started writing reviews for anyone who would read them. I owe 1,542 movie reviews to Joe Klein's comments.

4. The Divine yet Frequently Wrong Ms. Pauline Kael gives the Odienator his moviegoing credo: "The movies are so rarely great art, that if we can't appreciate great trash, there is little reason for us to go." That's from her essay "Trash, Art and the Movies."

5. The Passion of the Seitz. He'll kill me for doing this, but I could not leave our very own Matt Zoller Seitz off this list. As the resident The New World and Miami Vice dissenter on this blog, I have had my disagreements with Matt, but I can't help but be inspired by his passion for the films that challenge and change him. When he falls in love with a movie, he falls hard, and his prose is so vividly seductive that even I, after rolling my eyes in disagreement, wish I could have seen the movie with him as my projector.

In his 10 best blurb for 2004's The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou, Matt invoked Peanuts, a very odd analogy. I wrote him a snarky E-mail saying the Peanuts analogy was "appropriate; I think Charlie Brown's comic strip is boring as shit too." This is part of what he wrote me back:

"I also think that if you accept the movie on its own terms -- i.e., if you agree to give in for a couple of hours and see the world through Anderson's eyes -- the emotion becomes apparent. On its most basic level, The Life Aquatic is about confronting and accepting mortality, a theme expressed in the bookending dramatic events (the death of Zissou's partner at the hands of the Jaguar shark, and the death of his maybe-son in a random helicopter crash) as well as in Zissou's obsession with leaving behind an exploration/filmmaking legacy that will endure after his death. It's about accepting the fact that you can't do anything about death. ("I'll fight it, but I'll let it live," Zissou tells a skittish backer who doesn't want him to slay the shark that killed his partner. "Now where's my dynamite?") The finale where the mini-sub goes right up to the Jaguar shark and observes it without confronting it, much less fighting or killing it, is a metaphor for the need to get close to death, to understand death, without succumbing to it."

Even though I still thought the movie was garbage, I saw a different perspective on it. That's what great criticism does for a person.
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The Odienator occasionally haunts The House Next Door, professing an undying love for Billy Wilder, Barbara Stanwyck and good trash. He also looks a lot like Cuba Gooding Jr.