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Aug. 6th, 2008 04:00 pmA retiring professor was giving books away today, and among my haul was John Simon's Movies Into Film: 1967-1970. I read all of his available criticism in a certain phase of my youth, not because he's accurate or likable, though there's a refreshing release of gratitude-toward-the-good-cop on the reader's part when he actually praises something, but because he is the devil. He is the only film critic who can fairly be described as chaotic evil. I think he's still active, but he changed c. 1980--he's surely the critic Woody Allen speaks of (in Hannah & Her Sisters?) as having married a woman with huge breasts and suddenly shifted from hating to liking everything. He was famous for a while for his astonishingly mean descriptions of Barbra Streisand's appearance. You'd take them as anti-semitic if you were unfamiliar with his general reviewing style, which those passages don't stray far from. His other great hatred, from this period anyway, was Godard, though his attacks on him are much longer and warier. When he actually likes something (Bergman & M*A*S*H here--ihe hits his stride in his '70s books, where, as I recall, the only American movies he actually praises, in balance, are Badlands and The Candidate) he seems very unhappy. Gore Vidal called him a hatchetman in an essay--Simon bizarrely registers hurt feelings about this, but doesn't really counterattack, and generally shows evidence of a crush on master polemicist Vidal (who doubtless found this sobering), in Paradigms Lost, a book otherwise dedicated to viciously attacking various people for sub-nitpick-level grammar mistakes, most of which I'm still not sure I understand.
From Simon's assassinations of movies I remember liking:
End of the Road: "an abortion from beginning to end" & "a pretentious, unappetizing disaster"
Women in Love: "for all its superficial fidelity to the novel, a profound betrayal of it"
The Lion in Winter: "sticks closely to the original and suffocatingly in our craw" "bad writing...pseudoliterate hack work...inept direction"
Bonnie and Clyde: "slop is slop, even served with a silver ladle" "a frail and leaky cockboat"
Rosemary's Baby: "Polanski likes to make trashy films, and he makes them as routinely as anyone else" "perhaps not horrifying but certainly disgusting"
2001: "a kind of space-Spartacus and, more pretentious still, a shaggy God story"
Etc. Bizarrely endearing--so over the top it's impossible to take seriously, like Jacobean tragedy, and the violence converts to fun. What made the E. European critical style, of which Simon may not even be the most extreme example, so murderous? Ayn Rand had this too, Dostoevsky at times. Oddly parallel to Usenet flaming at its height, c. 1995.
From Simon's assassinations of movies I remember liking:
End of the Road: "an abortion from beginning to end" & "a pretentious, unappetizing disaster"
Women in Love: "for all its superficial fidelity to the novel, a profound betrayal of it"
The Lion in Winter: "sticks closely to the original and suffocatingly in our craw" "bad writing...pseudoliterate hack work...inept direction"
Bonnie and Clyde: "slop is slop, even served with a silver ladle" "a frail and leaky cockboat"
Rosemary's Baby: "Polanski likes to make trashy films, and he makes them as routinely as anyone else" "perhaps not horrifying but certainly disgusting"
2001: "a kind of space-Spartacus and, more pretentious still, a shaggy God story"
Etc. Bizarrely endearing--so over the top it's impossible to take seriously, like Jacobean tragedy, and the violence converts to fun. What made the E. European critical style, of which Simon may not even be the most extreme example, so murderous? Ayn Rand had this too, Dostoevsky at times. Oddly parallel to Usenet flaming at its height, c. 1995.
