professional critics should leave their personal politics out of a review as much as possible.
okay so if a movie has blatant sexism (True Lies) or dangerous jingoism (Lone Survivor) or racism (The Searchers) should critics leave those aspects unexamined?
What about "issue" movies like Green Book? How can you talk about whether Green Book's messaging about about race in America is good or bad without discussing what you think about race in America? If you think Green Book is well made but has a fucked up handling of race issues, are you supposed to give it a positive review anyway?
Likewise, how do you engage with TDK without dealing with Bush-era messaging and how do you do that without invoking your own feelings on wiretapping or the suspension of civil liberties for a quasi-ambiguous 'greater good'?
like, if all art is political by definition, how can a critic do their job by ignoring their own political and moral values? You can't. Art is multifaceted and more than a checklist of ethical values, but reckoning with those coded values are essential to both your personal experience and in engaging and understanding the text, each of which critics are paid to write about. Ebert himself completely agreed with this.
If you don't like a movie's politics fine, go ahead and make that clear in your review, though. You should still try to attempt to critic/judge the film on whether the plot and actions of the characters work within the world of the constructed film. You don't have to agree with it's message but that doesn't mean the movie is bad.
I do think people who are viewed as professional critics, the ones who publish for magazines and newspapers,etc (whatever ones are still around) should show more naunce in letting their personal politics take control of a review. They shouldn't let the review become a launch pad for their own diatribe against something they see as wrong in our society. That's also something Ebert did. He wouldn't post reviews like the ones in Time magazine of Entertainment Weekly just did for this film.
if you're suggesting more conservatives get into the arts i think that's a phenomenal idea
That’s not really my point. Most here know I lean left but I also like to hear POVs different from my own. It challenges me, I don’t want to live in a echo chamber like many on the left do. I think once we get past insane Trump this will be possible. We do live in crazy/confusing times though.
I don't know, I think I can turn off my politucal and moral bias if I need to. Like for instance Triumph of the Will is a great film. I just don't like it.
I don't know, I think I can turn off my politucal and moral bias if I need to. Like for instance Triumph of the Will is a great film. I just don't like it.
Sure, you can still appreciate technical aspects of the film (which is still not an objective review) but to give those critics some credit, it's also easier to remove your personal political bias for films that are so far removed from modern world issues and which topic has been condemned for years now, like Triumph or The Birth of a Nation. If they made them today about say the greatness of Putin or Bolsanaro with amazing cinematography and scope of a true epic, it would be much more difficult to appreciate it without pointing out the obvious propaganda of said piece. I had issues with American Sniper and Lone Survivor that I couldn't overcome even though they were made by competent filmmakers.
For people who use the word "objective" in regards to film criticism...
As far as politics in art, every piece of art has traces of political/social/religious values that have stemmed from the artists experiences in life. However, it is up to the artist whether they want to show them implicitly or explicitly. As William Bibbiani says, "You’re not nostalgic for the time before art was political. Art has ALWAYS been political. You’re nostalgic for the time before *you* were political".
Exactly. And Joker is pretty damn explicit in showing those (though not making a stand) so to not engage with this stuff would be foolhardy.
Also I guess I suspected North American critics not liking it as much from those first script reactions on Film Twitter(TM) - you bring your own context into a film. Most people at Venice don't live in a country with the amount of mass shootings, the discussion of the whole 'incel'/8chan mentality and more dominating things. For North American audiences of course the film would hit closer to home - now the question is whether it's something that Philips really intended, or (and the more I think about it, and especially after having read the - mostly the same as the final film - leaked script, that's what's he's doing imo) he wanted to present this in a 'look how DAMAGED he is' way, as if it's almost cool (without endorsing it) and almost revelling in it/the tone. It really needed a subtler hand than his to bring this home.
However, as someone who thankfully doesn't live in a country with all these deeply fucked up things happening to the same extent (though we have a big movie worthy fuckup of our own happening right now) I was able to separate these things out more. And that's equally as fine as what the American viewer might go through with this film.
Last edited by antovolk on September 11th, 2019, 2:53 pm, edited 1 time in total.
