- Into the Storm
One of the best things about my job is that it regularly forces me to confront my aesthetic prejudices and the limitations of my cultural literacy. Just a few weeks ago, for instance, someone commented on a blog post I wrote that I knew nothing about post-70s Bollywood cinema, and I had to admit this person was right. Thankfully another modern-Bollywood fan e-mailed me a few days later with a list of recommendations. I look forward to going through these films and broadening my knowledge (though one of the worst things about my job is that I now have less time to watch movies for pleasure than before I started reviewing them professionally).
To a certain extent, I can relate to this mindset. Auteurist critics act on a similar inclination when they champion flawed films that nonetheless communicate a personal directorial vision. (For examples of this mode of thought, check out Dave Kehr’s Reader capsule for Leo McCarey’s My Son John, Jonathan Rosenbaum’s for Otto Preminger’s Skidoo, or my own for Iciar Bollain’s Even the Rain.) But where a distinctive authorial voice provides me with a sense of interpersonal connection with the filmmaker (or, to put it another way, the spectacle of seeing the world through another person’s eyes), I feel no such connection to special effects artists no matter how impressive their work. When films employ these effects without using them to expand upon viewers’ sense of reality, all I see are pixels.
- Hercules
