Gerry P.

Are the Oscars mainstream enough, because Godard will be getting a lifetime achievement award at this year's ceremony and an film based on a Tati script (The Illusionist) is up for Best Animated Feature.

Tracer Bullet

I don't think Iggy is a snob, but he does come across as incredibly pretentious, what with all his talk of cinema and true art forms. My boyfriend and I made fun of his No Country for Old Men segue for a good five minutes.

NIMH Rat

God FORBID somebody talk about film as an art form.

Damn the snot-nosed punk for taking up valuable TV time talking about shit you can't even read about in Entertainment Weekly.

Movies are not art. They are my segue between video games and Facebook. And a way to get laid.

Jacques Tati? Life is too short. If you'll excuse me, I have to level up on WOW and FishWorld.

calhoun07

I never put anybody on this show for talking about movies as an art form. In fact, that's a reason why I watch the show. But I just don't buy into into this list of five movies he picked as the reason he became critic...it does come off as pretentious to me.

The reason being that there had to be something more mainstream...and it doesn't have to be the flavor of the week in Entertainment Weekly...but something just a little more accessible...that made him delve even further into these movies of this nature. Sorry, but nobody his age just starts with those movies.

I am glad he's talking about movies like this...don't get me wrong. I am just not buying what he's selling so far. Maybe in time the guy will grow on me but something about him seems...off.

Gerry P.

The theme of the episode is "the movies that made us critics," not "the moves that first made us love movies." It's not a list of childhood favorites, but a list of movies that made him appreciate cinema for the first time as a serious art form with unique qualites. These five specific films inspired him to write about movies as a vocation. What's pretentious about that?

NIMH Rat

I do think there is a window of time in a person's life, somewhere between adolescence and middle adulthood, when one or more of the arts can change from something you do just for fun to something you think about critically. It takes a LONG time to develop a unique critical voice, but it doesn't take that long to develop a sensibility that responds to movies (or music, or books, or whatever) with more than just "oh I like that, oh I don't like that."

If Iggy isn't articulating himself very clearly or with telegenic prowess, well, he'll probably get better with more practice. But he's got the sensibility, at least, to be a critic.

Tracer Bullet

Yes, that is what I said.

Brian T

Good point, and probably a good reason why so many of the movie "reviews" on the internet from the past couple of decades have to be taken with massive grains of salt (including a few at this very site), and probably won't withstand the test of time for quality writing or astute observation, despite what I'm sure is the decent traffic they may generate for the sites that host them. What happens when the 18- or 21-year-old who wrote a particular review suddenly wakes up at 30 or 35 (or even older) and realizes he was way off-base because his critical faculties were impoverished at the younger age, as is often the case for just about anyone, I'm sure? Hopefully he revisits the work and revises his review, but then he opens himself up to accusations of not being true to his (original) word, especially when that word might still be plastered on the web and easily referenced.

I once called out an acquaintance about this a couple of years ago. His rave review of a particular Hong Kong B-movie, which aligned with the general consensus long attached to the film, was in stark contrast to a scathing (and still-extant, much to his chagrin ) review he'd posted on another site back in the mid-1990's as a much younger man, and seemingly as a barely-veiled attack on the tastes of what a reader could only assume were the then-members of some long-defunct discussion group who'd generally liked the movie. Typical internet geekery, but it stuck around to bite him in the ass.

(on balance, I've seen people in their 40s and 50s write like they're going on 18, so it's always a chore for the individual to separate the wheat from the chaff according to one's personal needs)

NIMH Rat

That brings up another good point: internet critics. I don't read everything on the net (who can?), but I've taken a look at places like SlashFilm and HitFix and the Onion AV Club (I gave up on AintItCool and CHUD a long time ago....) and for the most part their stuff is really good. There are more serious places like SensesofCinema, but those are in a different category, I think. I'm talking about the regular-reviewer beat that is strictly online with no print forum, which would exclude online versions of reviews by Sragow, Denby, Scott, Ebert, etc.

I say these places are good but I am also aware that they have a limited sensibility. For the most part, internet critics are young men, and they have a typical young man's taste for franchise product. After they've exhausted their coverage of that day's developments in adaptations of comic books, video games, fantasy novels, etc. etc., they might turn their attention to the "art cinema" of people like Ridley Scott, Cameron, Del Toro, Tarantino....you know, the gods of geekdom. These critics are smart, articulate, passionate, and 100% confident in their opinions, which makes them entertaining and once in a while sharply observant.

But they simply do not have a sense of either film history or world history, or the history of any other art form. If they read at all, they read within a small range. They show interest here in there in the other arts, especially music, but I don't think any of them look at paintings or sculpture, and even their musical taste is narrowed to a standard cluster of bands they've been following since their teen years---oh, and film composers. They don't know their Shostakovich from their Tchaikovsky, but they can definitely tell an Elfman from a Zimmer.

"Who cares, right? It's just movies, right, entertainment? Isn't it just supposed to be fun and disposable? Why be so serious about something so frivolous? Not even the people who MAKE movies really think about them all that deeply, right, so why should we?"

I remember when Armond White (who is crazy, but a genuine critical voice) went on the Slash Filmcast to talk about Inception, and he basically told off all the young whippersnappers on Slash who were calling Nolan a genius, by saying Nolan makes adolescent films, and that if White himself were an adolescent he might think it was great but he is no longer that young and impressionable. You could almost hear the grinding teeth of one or two of the Slashfilm guys, and I don't think it was because they thought White was wrong....it was because White was asserting himself as an experienced person and being more than a little condescending.

White could have made his point a little more politely, but he made the point and it was inarguable. When you're young you think if something affects you deeply that it is a special thing, when in fact the older you get the more you realize how hackneyed and unoriginal it was. Or the reverse: something that didn't affect you at all as a young person can take on great meaning later on in life, and you really appreciate it in a way that you couldn't as a young person.

Anyway, all that's to say it's a terrible risk for a young person to put himself out as a critical voice on a public stage, and to show even a glimmer of a sensibility is to risk looking like a pretentious dork. But that's better than playing it safe all the way, and putting up walls of irony like so many other young critics who defend some of their most asinine opinions by saying "it's just movies, it's just entertainment, only a jerk would take it seriously...."

bluetoast

But that does get me thinking....how MANY damn movies did Ignaty see as a kid, and how much did he think about them? He is only 24...and already it seems like Tarantino would have a hard time keeping up with him.

calhoun07

I bet a lot, actually. I get the feeling he didn't have too many friends.

Fist of Doom

Maybe he takes his job seriously, and has seen a shitload of films and thought a great deal about them. 24 is young, but it's not that young.

bluetoast

Except that it isn't really your job to do so as a kid, I'd say. Though I'd agree that he probably has been looking at them critically for a long time.

Hokeyboy

If you don't think "Sherlock Holmes" is a masterpiece and you champion the likes of Ozu, Cassavetes, or Jarmusch, you are obviously a pretentious tool. Right.

Hokeyboy

If that entire point was in Seattle, the concept of "inarguable" is resting comfortably in Tierra del Fuego.

Quatermass

I just saw this weeks episode and have to say I thought it was a big improvement. More like the traditional format and some good discussions and disagreements. I may just hang in with it after all. The only part that didn't work was the Asian girl reading her review off a teleprompter. It wasn't the review that was bad, just the delivery.

Solid Snake

I doubt that. I bet Tarantino and Scorsese could outnerd any critic out there in watching films. HEAVEN FORBID you put these two together and somehow they disagree cuz I know that argument would last forever.

I'm 24, and I heavily doubt that guy has seen as many films as some of you. Much like myself when I talk to you guys..I'm young...I could only have seen sooo many films unlike you old bastards.

When I decided to be a filmmaker I was 17. That was the magic number when I saw films in a very different light. Apocalypse Now and Pulp Fiction changed me. Fuck being a geneticist. Filmmaking was the way to go.

NIMH Rat

White's point was much less arguable than the consensus point by the young bloggers that Inception was a grand masterpiece of dream logic on par with the greatest works of Griffith and Lynch. White went on to list about 10 different, older, and greater films that explored dreams and had associative-editing techniques, and though the SlashFilm guys probably saw some of those films, they didn't want to do comparisons....which is something you sort of have to do as a critic. They COULD have argued with White but couldn't do it on White's terms, so White ended up "winning" (via condescension).

At some point an experienced critic has to deal with huge knowledge gaps between him/herself and the readership, and the WAY in which that is done is very tricky. The best way to handle it is probably to say nothing, but White said "I'm older, and I know better than to call Inception anything special, and here's why...." And our response to that is either to say "How DARE he condescend!" or "Can't argue with that.......(though he doesn't have to be such a dick about it)..........."

If we're going to make "age" a basis for putting down young critics, then that should go for the smarties as well as the morons. Or why don't we just take "age" off the table, as we probably should???

calhoun07

Who the heck thinks Sherlock Holmes is a masterpiece?

And why must every movie on the list of what made them be critics be masterpieces? Couldn't a just good movie or OK movie make their list if it was a movie that made them think about looking closer at movies with a critical eye?

If I was to pick the top five movies that made me fall in love with movies they would NOT be movies by Cassavetes or the sort. Sorry...that's NOT putting those movies down. It was more mainstream stuff that made me want to delve further into film.

Solid Snake

Because some people can separate their entertained value of a film while understanding it's qualities (good or bad) while others think that if you liked the film than it was good...and depending on how you liked it it's either a really good film or a really bad film.

jfoobar

Just saw this week's episode (I am Number 4, The Eagle, etc.) and it is indeed continuing to improve substantially each week.

They do need to continue to use a narrator for Ebert's reviews though. The computerized voice was annoying. It doesn't need to be a celebrity. Just hire some guy to do it every week and be done with it.

bluetoast

I still feel that the use of The Third Man's music really doesn't fit the show...we get it Ebert, it's one of your favorite movies. But the version used is a bad rendition, and your balcony music was great as it was.

Cellar Door

Yeah, I thought Ignatiy was more relaxed this week and he had a more conversational tone with Lemire.

Hokeyboy

Just pulled a movie out of a hat. Then again, fanboys lost their freakin' mud when Ebert dared to not to love 'Gladiator'. How rude!
We all love good movies, OK movies are nice time fillers, but the masterpieces make you stand up and say HOT FUCKING DAMN, there's something about the construction of films that stirs me in a way that's both passionate and intellectual. I doubt anyone got that from "Taken" or "Unstoppable", and if they DID, well...
Fine, but that's you, and it's an entirely valid opinion. Someone picking more obscure choices, foreign films, art films, etc. has an entirely different experience. Why these critics are suddenly decried as "pretentious tools" because of it is just entirely dopey or embarrassingly immature. Maybe a little of both.

Gerry P.

The thing is, Ignatiy is a cineaste and you are a movie buff, so of course the moves you would choose are different.