What is behind this popular and patently false critical suspicion that a “well-crafted” movie is automatically phony or inauthentic, while a film that is “unpolished” is considered genuine — automatically real or truthful?
Great question. As I’ve noted, the proficiency-as-deficiency argument has been used most memorably against the likes of No Country for Old Men and Children of Men, but it’s also popped up (with varying degrees of vehemence and slightly different points of attack) in discussions of Beowulf, 28 Weeks Later, even 300.* “Craft is the enemy” is a weird motto for film critics of all people to embrace.
Anyway, read the post and then stick around for the comment thread, which veers off into an engaging discussion of The Mist of all things. This very spoilery post ultimately goes somewhere I don’t agree with, but it starts out by critiquing the film for answering several of the original novella’s most haunting unanswered questions, which I definitely think works against the film.
(Via Ken Lowery, a leading light of ADDTF’s burgeoning comment scene.)
* By linking these movies, I don’t mean to imply that their skillful craftsmanship is deployed to uniform, or uniformly successful, effect.
Glad you liked that post. Scanners is a daily stop for me… not all the posts generate that level of commentary, but many do, and it’s not uncommon to see someone like Jonathan Rosenbaum pop in to talk.
More appreciation here. The more I read about the critics who dislike “too much” craft, the weirder it gets to me. I keep thinking of Roger Ebert’s very sensible column about the difference between watching films the way reviewers generally do (and also critics and scholars, though he didn’t touch on that) and the way regular audiences do, and how easy it is for critics to get detached from what films mean to anyone else.
Jim’s point that rough style is just another style is well taken and can scarcely be repeated enough. Every film has a style, just like every song and piece of prose and whatever, and creators always make choices about them.
Carnival of souls
* The teaser poster for the next M. Night Shyamalan movie, a natural-disaster-apocalypse movie called The Happening, is out. Needless to say it hits my buttons. Via Bloody Disgusting. And Jason Adams points out something about the poster’s tagline that…