The House Next Door

I'd been wondering when and if this was ever coming out (Colin made it prior to The New World, after all), and then, low and behold, the press screening notice showed up in my inbox the other day. I can't wait to see it.

Is Jeffery Wells a good critic? I read a review by him once and it seemed incredibly glib and superficial.

dvd: not to be an ass, but it's "lo and behold."

Damn. My phoenetic slip-ups of that sort usually tend to be more Freudian in nature. What a disappointment.

let's change it to "lol and behold" for the 21st century.

Jeffrey Wells is first and foremost a columnist, which is to say he's got his fingers in too many different pies to just be considered as a critic, so I'm not sure it's fair to judge him against people who write criticism exclusively. A lot of what he does entails judging a movie's artistic/technical worth against the possibility that it will be a sucess of one kind or another. I spotlit this particular column because it was anomalus: obviously the film moved him so much that all the other factors he normally takes into consideration didn't even get mentioned, and he just wrote about how great the movie was and how much it meant to him, and why.

Spelling errors in the above, I know. But it's early and I haven't had my coffee.

lol and behold? :0

Matt, that's one reading of Jeff's tone in that review; that "all the other factors" don't get mentioned could mean that he was transported. My reading of it is that he wanted to like the movie more than he actually did, but wanted that so much that he feels obliged to cover that distance. I've gotten on Jeff's case before for the somewhat hectoring, "the plebes are ruining the world" tone he'll occasionally slip into, but there's so much hedging language in his Ask the Dust piece that I have to wonder if the movie really got to him in that place where his insistent criticism usually comes from.

It read to me like he knew the movie wasn't commercial, and probably wouldn't even appeal to that many people, but it appealed to him. And although his language is pretty groping and uncertain -- the result of not being exclusively a critic, and being in some way unequipped to handle a revelation like the one this movie made him experience -- I know what he meant when he said you have to have time to think about certain movies before you realize how amazing they are. It happens to me more often than I like to admit.

PS -- It's 7:15 a.m., bro. I've got two kids. What are you doing up this early? What is anyone single doing up this early? I urge anyone reading this who can go to sleep to do so immediately. Sleep vicariously for me, won't you?

I particularly like one of Wells' phrases: "serene and nourishing."

Lo, low and lol, Matt, I also have two kids, and it's furthermore 6:30 here in central America, but -- irony -- I have a New World review that I'm overdue to edit for my online publication, so I'm trying to get a jump on it before the weekend overwhelms me.

Good luck with that! (What online publication? English or Spanish?)

Flak Magazine, although 2005 was not a great year for film content for the publication -- Flak is one of those all-volunteer affairs, and last year was one of those astronomical flukes where the moon was the in the seventh house and Jupiter aligned with law school/law practice/two kids/etc., causing a number of great writers to retreat back to their paying work.

(I wondered why you asked if it was Spanish, but now I see; by "central America," I meant Wisconsin.)

Hey where has Odie been? Come back, Odie.

Whoa, Sean, are you the same Sean who wrote The Spielberg Ending for Flak last year? Really nice piece.

http://www.flakmag.com/film/spielberg/index.html

Wells is a gossip columnist, and hardly a film critic at all.

That makes me excited, too, but I'm wary after reading JW's recent raves for Rent and Little Miss Sundance Darling...

Saw it yesterday, and Wells is out of his mind.

Sorry to hear that, but I can still dream, can't I?

Dream away. I'd love to hear from someone (else) who enthusiastically supports what Towne's doing here, since for the life of me I can't figure out what he's after. That's sort of a criticism, but also an admission that the movie left me so cold I almost don't know what to say except it doesn't work for a second. It feels like an homage to a genre that doesn't exist.

Grand Epic: Yes, that was me. Glad you liked it.

I wouldn't call "most of last night and a couple of hours this morning" a particularly long time to come to terms with anything. This sounds symptomatic of the kind of movie "criticism" that implicitly regards films as something to be consumed, exhausted, used up within the theater. I wonder how long it took Wells to "come to terms" with The New World.

How about a new rule: no more quoting columnists' critical opinions. Wells is a step up from David Poland (his writing on old movies is often good) but come on.

Whoa. I like and respect Jeffrey, Chill, guys. He never pretends to be Jonathan Rosenbaum, more like Roger Ebert plus Walter Winchell, or Harry Knowles with journalism chops. He's honest and not interested in appearing cool, and I like that.