Peter Rainer's Movie Criticism

IT’S almost impossible to find a word that can be changed in Peter Rainer’s film criticism, or a way to express an idea better than he already has. That’s a lesson I learned the hard way, during the year I served as Peter’s editor. It makes his work a pleasure – sometimes a revelation – to read. I can’t recall many critics who you really feel thinking on the page quite as well as Peter does; the ideas and critical themes unfold in the same way great storytelling does.

Here at The Misread City, we’re quite excited by the release of Rainer on Film: Thirty Years of Film Writing in a Turbulent and Transformative Era. The collection includes plenty of film reviews – from Night of the Hunter to L.A. Confidential to Blue Velvet, as well as longer essays on cultural/aesthetic issues, pieces on actors and directors (Bergman, Robert Altman), and sections on documentaries, literary or theatrical adaptations, and the movies of Steven Spielberg.

In the book’s introduction, Peter talks about falling for film as a kid watching the same picture over and over on the TV show Million Dollar Movie, and his youthful attraction for critics Pauline Kael and James Agee.

Peter loves film as deeply as anyone I know, but he doesn’t keep his disappointment to himself when he’s let down by a filmmaker he admires. “Gus Van Sant’s Good Will Hunting is like an adolescent’s fantasy of being tougher and smarter and more misunderstood than anybody else,” he writes. “It’s also touchy-feely with a vengeance.”

Peter has served as film critic for the Los Angeles Times and New York magazine. He wrote for me at New Times LA in the late ‘90s (that work made him a Pulitzer finalist); he currently writes for the Christian Science Monitor.

This is my Q+A with Peter, who appears at Book Soup on Monday June 10 and at Vroman’s on Wednesday June 19.

Did coming of age as a cinephile in the ‘70s – writing for your college paper and programming a campus film society, then writing your first professional review of Chinatown – spoil you for the decades that came after?

I feel spoiled to some extent by the way in which I came up as a critic. I was film critic for my college newspaper, the Brandeis “Justice,” which was a great laboratory for putting my ideas into print and then hashing out the blowback from my students and teachers. There was a great immediacy about the whole process. In some ways, it’s a microcosm of the ideal situation for a critic – having as an audience a smart, contentious, captive audience of true believers.

What I didn’t realize at the time is that the movies that were coming out then, the early mid-‘70s, represented a golden age. This isn’t nostalgia. Week after week I found myself reviewing “The Godfather,” “Cabaret,” “McCabe and Mrs. Miller,” “Mean Streets,” “Straw Dogs,” “A Clockwork Orange,” “The Last Picture Show,” “The Sorrow and the Pity,” “Sounder,” you name it. I used to joke that back then even the bad movies were good. (Now *that’s* nostalgia).

One of the main qualities that distinguishes your criticism, I think, is

your talent at “seeing through” a film, to spot its invisible claims and pretensions, to look squarely at what it is selling us -- whether a mainstream Hollywood movie or independent art film. Where does this impulse come from, and how the hell does it work? I’m not sure I know a critic in any genre who does this so insightfully and accessibly.

I love “looking through” a movie because there is often so much more going in a film, politically, psychologically, morally, aesthetically, than simply what is being presented to us. This is my natural disposition. I don’t like feeling conned when I go to a movie. I’m a natural skeptic who, of course, is also open to being gulled on a regular basis. I guess this makes me a magician’s ideal audience, and the best movie artists are indeed magicians.

Movies reflect the society in which they were made – this is a concept that runs throughout my criticism. I didn’t realize to what extent this was true of my writing until I began collecting my pieces. It’s kind of like packing up your library when you move. You begin to see patterns in the books you buy that you may not have been consciously aware of.

Pauline Kael said that the critic was the only thing that stood between the audience and the marketplace. These days we have a more sophisticated style of marketing, and perhaps a less sophisticated brand of taste: Blockbusters, sequels, an amplification of special effects that makes the corporate ‘80s look nuanced, and a Hollywood system increasingly geared to violence- and sensation-loving teenage boys. (In some ways it ‘s a parody of the kind of cinema Kael called for.) What’s the role of the critic in this 21st century funhouse?

The role of the critic in the 21^st century funhouse, assuming there is a role anymore, is the same as it’s ever been – to write as well as you can on movies worth writing about. The increasingly overmuscled marketing juggernauts and the pile-on of pronouncements on movies from every quarter, digital or otherwise, makes life difficult for a critic who wants to be heard above the din and say something worthy of more than a tweet.

Is there a type of film – a genre, a certain budget -- that has become almost impossible to make, or at least to distribute with any hope of finding an audience? What are we missing?

Small-scale, handcrafted dramas, especially featuring people over 40, are difficult to finance in Hollywood nowadays. Television has become much more of an arena for the sort of serious, extended domestic dramas that used to be standard in Hollywood, before the franchise mentality took hold and the budgets went blooey. The life of a TV critic is in some respects more challenging these days than the life of a movie critic. But then again, I am writing this here in the summer movie doldrums!

It’s easy to doubt, lament, and lose faith in the movies. Who are a few of the filmmakers, from past or present, who restore your love of the medium?

There are wonderful directors working now and doing good work against considerable odds: I loved Paul Thomas Anderson’s “The Master,” a real risk-taker, and shot in wide screen; I think Drake Doremus (“Like Crazy”) is quite talented, Jeff Nichols (”Mud”), Deborah Granik (“Winter’s Bone”). Richard Linklater is extraordinarily versatile, maybe the best of his generation.

There are way too many directors I admire from the past, so just a brief stab here – the humanists: Satyajit Ray, Vittorio De Sica, Charlie Chaplin, Yasujiro Ozu, Jean Renoir. It doesn’t get any better than their best.

Prog Rock Tales

YOU would have to look long and hard to find someone who felt less warmly about the movement known as progressive rock as your humble blogger. (If the genre was bad in its original appearance, it seemed doubly awful in its ‘80s AOR rebirth.) I expect a lot of us who came of age in the years after punk feel the same way, and preferred the concision of college radio or “modern rock” acts like R.E.M. and Elvis Costello to endless prog symphonies. (Of course, I will make an exception here for the bizarre genius of Robert Fripp.)

 

Why, then, can’t I put down this new book, Yes is the Answer , a collection of writers on prog? I’m still not sure, but I love its combination of humor and critical seriousness. The book is edited by longtime LA writer Marc Weingarten – an old friend whose music journalism I read in the '90s -- and Tyson Cornell, who once booked authors at Book Soup and now runs Rare Bird Lit. 

The years between Sgt. Pepper’s and those first Clash and Pistols singles were a strange disorienting time for rock music. Glam found one way out of that puzzle, and prog took another road. Was all that heavy, high-pitched silliness worth it?

In any case, Yes is the Answer includes writer/producer Seth Greenland on The Nice, novelist Matthew Specktor on Yes, Wesley Stace (John Wesley Harding) on the prog scene of Canterbury, UK, Rick Moody on Emerson, Lake & Palmer, Jim DeRogatis on Genesis, music writer Margaret Wappler on getting laid to King Crimson, New York Times food writer Jeff Gordinier on how failed sex is a lot like a Styx concert, writer/bassist Jim Greer on Guided by Voices' debt to prog, and many other sharp, counter-intuitive pieces. 

Overall, it's way more fun than it has any business being.

Keep your eyes peeled for events around town. For now, here is my conversation with Weingarten.

Why did this seem like the right time for a book on this once-mighty musical form? Is there a prog revival going on, like when Yes returned with “Owner of a Lonely Heart,” and Rush and Asia were rockin’ the suburbs? 

I think there are a lot of bands out there who secretly love prog but don't want to admit it - they have no cultural cover, so to speak, because this is the last rock subgenre that hasn't been reclaimed by hipsters.  So, we thought it was a good a time as any to point out that there's a lot of great music here, made at a time of pretty outrageous and often overreaching experimentation. Which is also part of the charm of prog - how crazily ambitious it was.  I love the idea of bands writing hour-long suites and traveling with orchestras - it speaks to a kind of silly grandeur that I think is lacking in indie rock  - you see it in contemporary metal, I suppose.  

Most of your contributors are -- like you and me -- Xers who came of age with post-punk or alt-rock. We’re a generation, then, for whom prog became a punch line or a bad memory. What undercut prog’s world domination back then? 

Because Prog was almost exclusively a British phenomenon, it was completely stomped by Punk Rock, because Punk in England was really a tsunami.  It was time for Prog to go, anyway - it had gotten really overblown and quite awful.  I don't think any of our contributors would argue that Relayer is better than London's Calling, but we all have a soft spot for Prog.  

How did you and your co-editor come up with your contributors? There are a few well-known rock critics like Jim DeRogatis, but mostly this is literary folk.

We didnt want this to be a wonky, "Robert Fripp created Frippertronics in 1979," facts-and-figures book. We didn't see the point of that, especially with a genre like Prog, which is so rooted in adolescence, and cherished memories of early drug experiences, arena shows and gatefold album analysis.  It seemed like a good idea to have non-music writers have a fresh go at it.  

I count two women among all the contributors, and suspect this is NOT the fault of the editors. Could it be that prog has traditionally been a guy thing, and as some of your essayists suggest, a pre-adolescent guy thing?

Totally young dude thing. One hundred percent! 

Do you have a favorite prog band or album? Anything involving Phil Collins?

Well, Phil Collins is an incredible drummer - and I do love all the Gabriel-era Genesis stuff. I guess King Crimson's Red is my favorite album - a noisy, dark and disturbing record. So unlike most Prog, in other words! 

Culture and Criticism

TWO of my favorite journalists, film critic A.O. Scott and media reporter David Carr, have gone back and forth about a number of important issues lately. Some of this is analog vs. digital, print vs. Internet stuff.

Some of it has to do with the nature of the press, of DIY/artisanal culture, or the revival of vinyl records. And in this swirl of new and old, they ask, what is the role of the culture critic?

(Cue chin-stroking music, please.)

I wrote about a fading golden age or arts criticism a few years back, in a story -- eventually titled "Critical Condition" -- that drew so many letters, pro and con, that the LA Times added a Sunday letters page to contain them. Norman Lear responded to the article in a speech. That kind of thing.

My piece tried to look back, and to speculate on what was coming next. Here it is.

I'd like to think that what it said has held up pretty well, and that things are, if anything, bleaker than I forecasted at the time. How have things changed since then?

Ken Burns vs. His Critics

AS a former (and very minor) member of the nation's conspiracy of jazz critics, i remember quite well the vitriol hurled at ken burns for his "Jazz" documentary. the UK's guardian, for instance, called the series, for its treating jazz like an art form that died with ellington, "a jam session in a mausoleum."

in some cases the charges were fair, in other cases not.

in any case it struck me that burns was experiencing a critical backlash, an exhaustion of the good will that had built up with "the civil war" in the early '90s. compared to hipper/angrier figures like errol morris and michael moore, the earnest burns was deemed as cool as his famous bowl haircut.

HERE is my piece on what may greet his new "the national parks: america's best idea."

i met burns not long ago to discuss his new project, his early work, and his critical reception. i like him a lot, a very intense guy who's willing to get swept away in a story, its characters and conflicts. anyone who helps bring more attention to john muir cant be all bad.