Bill O'Reilly is a Smelly-Pants! (Neener Neener)

So apparently Bill O’Reilly has decided to boycott Sean Penn movies. He recognizes that Penn is a great actor but doesn’t like the man’s politics, and so he has decided to protest with his dollars, as is his right.

It’s also completely childish.

Several years back, I did the same thing. Except for me, it was John Wayne who was to be shunned. A sometimes strident right-winger who made movies like The Green Berets, I decided that the man was an ignoramus and could safely be ignored. I went on like that for years. (I wasn’t so crazy about Clint Eastwood, either, for exactly the same reasons, and stayed away from his films as well. Dirty Harry? Please.)

(There was one exception made: The Quiet Man. But that’s because the movie was set in Ireland and made by the great John Ford, so I rationalized the exception by saying it was an atypical movie more about Ford than Wayne, and in it Wayne played a man desperate for peace after a lifetime of fighting. Plus it had Maureen O’Hara and her streaming red hair, and who could resist that?)

At the same time, I vociferously stood up for Jane Fonda’s right to speak out. And Vanessa Redgrave’s. Even though I didn’t always agree with them, damn it all, surely they had the right to speak their mind like anyone else! And yet never once during that time did I stop to question my own hypocrisy.

And then I saw The Searchers. Another John Ford film, and a truly great movie. At this point I had a dilemma: in order to catch up on the ouvre of John Ford, I was going to have to watch a lot of John Wayne films. What to do? What to do? (Then I discovered that Ford was himself pretty right-wing. Curses!)

And I thought, You know, Wayne gave a pretty damn great performance in The Searchers. Can it be possible that I’ve been, o horror at the thought, a bit unfair to the man? I watched Stagecoach, with that brilliant zoom-in on Wayne’s first appearance that made him an instant icon. I began to appreciate his incredible physicality (no one else, ever, has been able to walk like that), and I began to find levels to his performances that I’d never have been willing to grant before. And Fort Apache followed, also a truly great film. And Man Who Shot Liberty Valance with one of my favorites, Jimmy Stewart. (Another dilemma: how could I reconcile the fact that I loved Jimmy Stewart but that he was great friends with both John Wayne and Ronald Reagan?)

(I even watched Dirty Harry, and by gum, it’s pretty damn entertaining. Plus of course there was Unforgiven, which in a stroke turned me around on Clint Eastwood--and which Bill O’Reilly claims is one of his favorite movies. Mine, too--see, there is room for agreement here1)

I now knew for sure that by denying John Wayne I had been denying myself an awful lot of good movies. But what about the Wayne flicks that weren’t directed by John Ford? The Shootist answered that question as well. John Wayne was a terrific actor, and I’ve had hours of pleasure and edification catching up on his movies for the last couple of years. People can have whatever opinions they want, and they can say what they want no matter what those opinions may be. And I can choose to listen or not to listen. It’s fine, I’m an adult, I can handle it.

And so we come back around to Bill O’Reilly, who is older than me and really ought to have figured this out by now. He says he’s a movie guy, he loves watching movies, and he also says he realizes Sean Penn is a great actor. So I can only say to him, Grow up already!

Review vs. Critique

I've always hated those "There are two kinds of people" comparisons, because they are inevitably reductionist, often to the point of absurdity. With that said, there are definitely two types of movie reviewers: those who critique a film, and those who simply review it. To me, a critique is the more stringent of the two forms, comprising a critical (from the same root, obviously) appraisal of the movie's relative merits and demerits, while a review is exactly that: a re-view, a going-over-again of the movie's contents, with a particular emphasis on the reviewer's experience of the movie rather than a more objective evaluation of the movie's content and themes. Or to put it another way, a critique is about the movie; a review is about the reviewer.

Here are a couple illustrations, pulled from the Rotten Tomatoes site's collection of critiques and reviews of a truly superior movie, Michel Gondry and Charlie Kaufman's Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, both from critics/reviewers who didn't like the film:

Stephanie Zacharek of Salon says that Eternal Sunshine "represents a failure of nerve," complaining that its intricate structure interferes with the aching beauty of the relationship at the heart of the movie. She writes:

It's as if young filmmakers fear that their audiences will become bored with a movie if they don't have a clever mind-boggler to wrestle with along the way (the equivalent of a magnetic bingo game on a long car trip). In grappling with these perplexing riddles, we're supposedly exercising our intellect. But isn't it also possible that we're using them as a handy diversion, a way of distancing ourselves from emotions that might be too strong for us to deal with easily? Labyrinthine plots are supposed to stimulate us. But are they really just distracting us from the work at hand -- the work of feeling?

A fair point, in which Ms. Zacharek brings her concerns from the specific to the general, asking whether modern moviemakers are afraid to just Go There. Now, by contrast, the reviewer who calls himself "The Cranky Critic" also grouses about the movie's stylistic conceits, but in a manner that never rises above itself:

...Kaufman has now moved into the realm of rubbing the viewer's nose in how clever he is. It's a very strange feeling to walk out of a screening thinking little of the actors or the story or its gimmick; the only thought wafting through our deteriorating gray matter was "gee, that was clever writing." Good writing is only the starting point for good film making. We should not be thinking about the writing, and only the writing, when all is said and done. That was the case with Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, a film so dead on target with the mind set taught in film school that it will have cinerati dancing in the aisles. Everyone else gets some chuckles and a whole mess'a clever visual effects to drive the story along.

Which begs the question: why does this guy take the time to set himself up as a movie critic when he doesn't seem to like movies? Or rather, when his view of what movies can or ought to be is so rudimentary, so narrow? There is all over his review that rampant anti-intellectualism that disguises itself as a reverence for "authenticity," but betrays itself over and over again as what it is: a fear of intellect, of challenge, of being asked to participate in the artistic experience at hand.

Consider this, from Cranky's "about me" page: "There is no applause for intellectual musings over entertainment value in Cranky's world, 'cuz Cranky doesn't live in the stratified world of private screenings and lavish PR parties." It is, of course, a false comparison: plenty of people don't get invited to private screenings or PR parties, but they're perfectly happy to engage a film on its own merits, however challenging (or not) those merits might be. It's a potent reverse snobbery in which a reviewer represents himself as an Ordinary Guy, claiming that in a democracy, the Ordinary Guy is king. Anything else is elitism, oligarchy, and that smacks of, you know, Socialism or even Commie-dom.

Then, of course, there is the fact that on the internet, anybody can start a website and call himself a critic. For these people, the art of the review deteriorates completely: "This movie was boring and it sucked" becomes the be-all and end-all of criticism: I didn't like it, therefore it sucks. No appreciation for other points of view, and any point of view that does differ from the reviewer's is automatically pretentious and elitist.

Zacharek's concerns, however, are exactly the opposite: "...there are moments in "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" that bring us as close as anyone should ever come to staring at the sun. The movie's warmth is irresistible; the risk of getting burned should have been left to us." This is (a) better writing in and of itself; and (b) an urgent plea for this artful movie to be both simpler and more complex, all at the same time--simpler in its artifice but more complex in its emotional search. Zacharek is frustrated because the movie isn't artful enough, her frustrations with complexity a result of a sense that they interfered with (and obscured) the beautiful story at the center of it all.

Now me, I loved the movie almost unreservedly, and didn't find myself distracted by the things that distracted Ms. Zacharek, so I don't happen to agree with her criticism--but I respect it, and it makes me take an even harder look at a film I love, to see if maybe there's something I should have been paying better attention to. That's good criticism; Cranky, he does nothing to elevate my experience of the movie, he just makes me awfully glad that I'm not him.