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In his review of Runaway Train, (the link is to Not David Kerr on Letterboxd), David Kerr refers to "a Tarkovsky thumb sucker like Stalker". Does anyone know what "thumb sucker" is meant to convey?

I would imagine he's using it in something close to the journalistic sense of a long, self-aggrandizing think-piece masquerading as "news analysis" despite containing few hard facts or any actual news. So in this case, it would be a long, self-consciously serious film that purports to be about Big Ideas but is really just Tarkovsky "sucking his thumb." Sort of similar to calling something a "chin-stroker," but more derisive. I could be way off, though!

Thanks. I hadn't encountered that sense of the word before. I think you're right, but Kerr's usage in that case isn't very apt -- simply "chin-stroker", as you suggest, would have been better.

Webcast of Jonathan Rosenbaum on on Film Criticism (21 June 2019) 15' and on American Independent Cinema (24 May 2019) 15'

cléo is the latest casualty of an increasingly hostile environment for film criticism.

The end of cléo speaks to a failure of our industry. Film and culture writing has become beholden to a craven economy that makes it all but impossible to hold down staff positions or live comfortably as a freelancer. We did our best to choose quality of work over quantity of clicks. We paid the price for that decision, and we’d gladly pay it again.

...

The end of cléo is also a failure of our governing institutions. Here in Ontario, we are at the mercy of a cold, unfeeling and frankly incompetent Conservative government that, among its many egregious values and acts, does not see the arts as worthy of investment.

This is so sad. We're really struggling with funding for criticism here in Australia at the moment too – the consequences of neoliberalism and an ideological commitment in government to cutting arts funding at every opportunity.

That's touching, and I'm glad he was being literal and not just hyperbolic

Incredibly good piece, and my semi-recent decision to get sober came from a similar place of having a mirror held up to me by a piece of popular culture and events surrounding it, so I feel a little less alone in the process. I'm very glad Glenn is able to look back at that milestone so lucidly and I hope that piece can also serve as a mirror that helps somebody else.

DarkImbecile wrote: Tue Jan 28, 2020 6:16 pm Glenn Kenny on how Shutter Island changed his life

Wow. I knew he loved the movie for personal reasons (writing only that it reflected something he was going through, nothing more), but I would never have guessed. Startling because I used to see him at virtually every film screening I went to during that time frame (2009 & 2010), which was a lot - never would have guessed any of that was going on.

I stumbled upon a terrific series of clips from the early days of Siskel and Ebert back when they were on PBS in the late 70s / early 80s, presenting their "Dogs of the Week," and it is absolutely worth two hours of your time to watch all thirteen chronological compilations. It's really sweet in a way to see both men at this stage of their career where they clearly like each other and these segments, where each of the two critics goes out of their way to see a movie they think will be bad and then make fun of it (though they will admit if the film they ended up seeing was good and will instead recommend it) in a way that seems solely engineered as a competition to make the other man laugh the most. Some of the funniest lines I've ever heard from this show are collected here, and some of the bad films they watched will be familiar (too familiar to me, thanks to all those Slasher movie screenings) and not all are that bad. But then you hear about something as ludicrous as the Wilderness Family Part 2, Siskel's description of which made me laugh til I cried and Ebert was right there with me, or are treated to Siskel loudly losing it at Ebert's description of the sound effects of Cannibal Girls. What's fun about watching them in order is that both critics get a lot better at coming up with funny things to say as they go along, so you can see comic growth unfurl over the clips. They also cycle through more than one "Wonder Dog" introducing the films, and the technical difficulties in one of the last videos is hilarious when the new dog refuses to stop barking and they have to soldier on through their bits. Highly recommended.

Here's a very long playlist with a lot of extra videos tacked on, but it starts with the thirteen compilations in order

LexG has unlocked the gates, allowing the public to see his splendid criticism on Twitter.

Jack Kubrick wrote: Sun Jun 14, 2020 12:58 am LexG has unlocked the gates, allowing the public to see his splendid criticism on Twitter.

Splendid.

There's no other trusted film critic who could nitpick the tedious Indies from the Fanning sisters.

If you need some hate-reading with which to fritter away your only and precious life, this guy is awful: Robert McKee, The Aristotle of Our Time. Sort of a Ray Carney for fourteen-year-olds. The polar opposite of Carney, but his equal in preening and dogmatic prescription, with a writing style borrowed from Entertainment Weekly. For a supposed plot guru, he sure is terrible at synopsizing.

I read his book Story for the one and only screenwriting class I took in college, and I found it unbearably prescriptive, but it's a well-respected classic of the genre for some reason.

Raoul Ruiz's two volumes of Poetics of Cinema are framed, thoughtfully, as a critique of the dogmas of screenwriting gurus like McKee. Vastly entertaining (and silly and idiosyncratic) books to boot.

bottled spider wrote: Tue Jun 16, 2020 8:19 pm If you need some hate-reading with which to fritter away your only and precious life, this guy is awful: Robert McKee, The Aristotle of Our Time. Sort of a Ray Carney for fourteen-year-olds. The polar opposite of Carney, but his equal in preening and dogmatic prescription, with a writing style borrowed from Entertainment Weekly. For a supposed plot guru, he sure is terrible at synopsizing.

He's brilliantly lampooned by Brian Cox in the Charlie Kaufman/Spike Jonze film Adaptation; in fact, Cox's character is actually supposed to be McKee and is identified as such. Here's an excerpt from a memorable moment in the film:

Robert McKee : ...First of all, you write a screenplay without conflict or crisis you'll bore your audience to tears. Secondly, nothing happens in the world? Are you out of your fucking mind? People are murdered every day. There's genocide, war, corruption. Every fucking day somewhere in the world somebody sacrifices his life to save somebody else. Every fucking day someone somewhere takes a conscious decision to destroy someone else. People find love, people lose it. For Christ sake a child watches her mother beaten to death on the steps of a church! Someone goes hungry, somebody else betrays his best friend for a woman. If you can't find that stuff in life, then you my friend don't know crap about life! And why the FUCK are you wasting my two precious hours with your movie? I don't have any use for it! I don't have any bloody use for it!

Charlie Kaufman : Okay, thanks.

I am not sure about the 'screenwriting seminar' side of things (I am not particularly convinced by the notion that people can be taught how to be successful writers) but have to admit to having a big soft spot for Robert McKee for a couple of wonderful television shows he presented: one half hour episode of his Reel Secrets series for Channel 4 was on Bergman's Through A Glass Darkly synposised here and is a great dissection of that film. And I have always been fond of his early 90s Filmworks series for the BBC which introduced me to a lot of films in my early teens and helped me to think deeper about them. His introductions for that series included Bringing Up Baby, Shane, Annie Hall, The Phantom of Liberty and The Wages of Fear, but especially good are the introductions to Chinatown and especially The Terminator, which is the best piece of criticism of that film that I have encountered.

Thanks for offering a contrary view, and for posting those links. I'll watch them tomorrow. I watched about a minute of the Annie Hall one, and it does give a better initial impression than the short reviews I dipped into on his web page.

I forgive everything for his magnificent eyebrows.

I liked the Terminator and Chinatown intros a lot. Definitely learned things from both. I don't think the Annie Hall or Phantom of Liberty intros said much of substance, but they didn't irk me either, and I have to admit I didn't know until now the title 'Phantom of Liberty' is a phrase taken from the Communist Manifesto. I haven't seen Wages of Fear yet, so I'll save that intro for another time.

The reviews on his website that I found so off-putting were for Everybody Knows, the Salesman, and Lady Macbeth.

And here's McKee on the use of his character as an 'antagonist' in Adaptation.

colinr0380 wrote: Tue Jun 16, 2020 9:27 pm (I am not particularly convinced by the notion that people can be taught how to be successful writers)

They can't! But you can make a lot of money if you can convince lots of people that you can teach people to be successful writers!

Domino and Colin, thank you for posting those links for the Siskel & Ebert "Dogs" and McKee intros from the BBC! I only watched a few of each, but they are wonderfully entertaining!

I grew up outside Chicago and watched S&E's "Sneak Previews" religiously (reading Siskel in the Chicago Tribune and Ebert in his yearly Video Companions). The "Dogs" clips brought back happy memories, and I agree with Domino's characterization of their style, the friendly competition aspect to their professional relationship. When they appeared together on local radio or Letterman's show, you could tell they had an honest, respectful, and intelligent rhythm that subsequent pretenders (Lyons and Gabler, for example) failed to even sniff.

I'd never seen the McKee intros, and I echo the appreciation for the ones on Terminator and Chinatown, really insightful! Especially the latter, it made me pull the disc off the shelf and into the "watch next" queue (unfortunately joining a few dozen others, including some kevyip; I've learned to keep this queue handy, however, so if we can convince everyone to put down their phones for a family movie, I don't fumble precious minutes away searching for options). McKee's delivery is more serious, but those intros reminded me of Geoff Pevere and Elwy Yost, who hosted weekly movie series (I think they were "Reel to Real" and "Saturday Night at the Movies", respectively) on Canadian TV that I cherished when I lived in Detroit in the '90s. Pevere in particular had great, serious opening pitches for art films, then revisited at the end of the movies to offer specific notes of insight; his show was where I first saw Tampopo and The Gospel According to Matthew and others, and I have his segments still on DVD (copied from VHS) for a few. I couldn't find his segments posted on the vast inter-webs, but hopefully they're out there somewhere, like McKee's. Yost was more the genial uncle or grandfather, but his love of movies came through in his interviews with cast, crew, and media critics that accompanied the airings.