Let's Be Real Here

I am a Sex Addict

2011-02-17T09:59:00.000-08:00

When I sat down to watch this movie, all I knew was that it had an intriguing title and it was something that my exquisitely film-literate friend Jeff was going to watch. It's a hybrid documentary, a mixture of voice-over and reenactments about the filmmaker Caveh Zahedi's struggles to true to be himself, be honest with the women he loves, and manage his insatiable desire for prostitutes.

The first thing you'll notice about this movie is that Caveh Zahedi, unlike most people one sees in sex scenes on film, is pretty gross. His eyes are buggy. He's skinny and weird and his body language is pretty desperate. He looks like a sex addict. You know immediately that what you are watching is pretty real - and that's what makes its mixture of derision and defense of his behavior so entertaining and interesting. He is asking us to mock him, but we also know that he is him; the filmmaker is not superior to his pathetic subject; he IS that pathetic subject.

Highly recommended. I laughed, I cringed, I did the "don't go in there!" horror movie routine. How often are movies both hilarious and strangely erotic? Plus it is a master class in making a low-budget into a benefit rather than a handicap. Zahedi goes on priceless (and short) digressions throughout the film, explaining the various filmmaking choices he had to make, in the same neurotic tone in which he explains why he had to have just one more prostitute. You will love him and you will be very glad that you/ your daughter/ your friend/ your mother is not the woman he is marrying at the end.

True Confessions

2011-02-17T09:23:00.000-08:00

This movie, a kind of behind-the-scenes look at the machinations and repercussions of the Black Dahlia murder in Los Angeles in 1948, stars Robert De Niro and Robert Duvall, two of my and everyone's all-time favorites, and was written by Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne. So why is it so bad?

Briefly, the movie is not about the investigation or the crime - it is about two brothers caught on either side of it, one an ambitious monsignor who has been raising money for the church (DeNiro) by working with Jack Amsterdam, the dirty boss of Los Angeles, and one a corrupt LAPD detective who used to be in Jack Amsterdam's pocket and no longer is (Du Vall). The bad brother ends up ruining the good brother when he takes down a bad man. It's a wonderful irony and one that could have made a great movie but the problem is this: the movie centers around the investigation of a crime but doesn't depict it, so the moments of suspense fall flat because we don't have enough context to be able to do the guessing and double-guessing that make thrillers thrilling. The movie is like a long piece of New Journalism about a murder, made for an audience that wasn't reading the details in the dailies. After it was over, I wanted to google the details of the Black Dahlia murder.

I want to blame someone other than Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne for the screenplay. And in the general Culture of Creative Irresponsibility of Studio Pictures (perhaps the subject of another post in the future), it is always an option to assume that the screenwriter wrote something brilliant that was then diced up and reshaped into something not brilliant, but it is also true that the list of bad movies written by great prose writers and awesome couples is long - and whatever the reasons, I think this movie belongs on that list. As Didion-Dunne screenwriting collaborations so, I prefer Up Close and Personal.

How Do You Know, Written and Directed by James L. Brooks

2011-01-19T10:20:00.000-08:00

Come on, it was pretty good!

This movie got horrid reviews. I don't normally like to read reviews until after I've seen a movie (and I guess I assume other people are the same, since I give away everything that happens in the movies I review here), but even I had read several snarky comments like "this movie lost its purpose along with the question mark," before I watched it. I think I even read that exact claim in a few places, so I'm not attributing it.

As all who know me know, I love romantic comedies, and I refuse to let go of hope for contemporary romantic comedies the way that some of my friends have. I can get incensed and rather emotional if I think that people are being snobby against romantic comedies, or unfairly privileging "better" genres of movies. But I still have standards. Of course I don't mind coincidences or situational misunderstandings, the cornerstone of the medium, but I can't stand movies that revolve around premises that feel emotionally fake. To highlight one of the most appalling of offerings: why exactly does one need to learn to lose a guy in ten days?

"How Do You Know" is an eccentric romantic comedy and one that could probably only have been made by an auteur of the genre because it basically has no hook. There's no essential misunderstanding that launches the plot, and the only coincidence to speak of (the fact that two characters share the same luxury DC apartment building, and its doorman) is hardly central. If, after the movie was over, the female lead was to describe to one of her friends how she met the man she ended up with, it would not sound remarkable - it would not automatically sound like the kind of thing that should be turned into a romantic comedy.

Lisa, played by Reese Witherspoon, is a professional softball player who gets cut from the national team that has defined her life and has to begin to face a life post-sports. She feels lost and decides to pursue a relationship that she knows is never going to be really serious with Matty, a goofy professional baseball star, played by Owen Wilson, who sleeps with so many women he has a supply closet full of team sweatshirts to temper their walks of shame. Around the same time, she meets George, played by Paul Rudd. He too has just been evicted from his life as a corporate who-knows-what, since he is now the subject of a federal investigation, for having done he-literally-doesn't-know-what. They have an awkward conversation before either of them knows that professional doom is on the way, and once he gets his bad news, he calls her and asks her out in an effort to distract himself. So desperate is he for distraction that he becomes obsessed with her. She likes him too, but she is distracting herself from her own doom by trying to make her relationship with Matty work. Then some other things happen and finally they get together. And unlike so many cloying studio romantic comedies, it's actually fun to watch!

The movie has flaws. There are some real comic misses, jokes that were so bad I felt myself almost laughing at them just out of pity because I liked the movie, and I found Reese Witherspoon tightly wound and kind of unlikable - there's almost something ugly about her cute little face. But Paul Rudd really committed to the role of the hapless bambi suitor who is actually right for the girl, and in the scene where he finally wins her heart by giving her play dough, I was rooting for him all the way. I agree with the New York Times pan that the single best moment in the movie may have been the declaration of love that George's secretary and best friend Annie receives from her boyfriend, Al (Kathryn Hahn and Lenny Venito), though the worst scene in the movie was the moment immediately following that one, when they try to recreate the moment because George forgot to click "record" on the video camera (I considered not liking the movie anymore for about 30 seconds right around then).

A small taste of how quietly bizarre this movie is: when George is making his final play for Lisa, we know that if she loves him back, George's father, played by a rascally Jack Nicholson, will have to go to jail for the rest of his life. So even though we want them to get together, we also kind of don't want it to work out. As they kiss happily in a bus stop, George knows this fact, and so does his father who - taking advantage of that one coincidence - sees them kissing from the vantage point of his balcony. He smiles to himself, happy to see his son in love. And then, remembering, he stops smiling. This movie isn't good enough to pull this off as a deep moment about the dark side behind every happy moment, but... come on, this movie was pretty good.

A Mention: "Career Girls" directed by Mike Leigh

2011-01-19T08:25:00.000-08:00

In light of the review I wrote yesterday of "Another Year," I would like to mention another Mike Leigh movie that I saw recently and that I think is just about a perfect film: "Career Girls."

The movie takes place over a weekend when two college friends get together, not having seen each other in six years. It's also punctuated by flashbacks of the two of them in college, which really can't be described because they are so amazing. I'll only say this: the performances from the college days were so extreme that at first I honestly wasn't sure if I was supposed to assume that they were at a college for the mentally impaired, and it took me several scenes to come around to understanding that Katrin Cartlidge's character was NOT supposed to be a speed freak, since everything in my body was telling me that people not on drugs don't act like that. Ten minutes in though, I bought it. To me, that ten minute feeling that something must be very, very wrong with an actor is an good indication that a transcendent performance is about to unfold; I remember feeling the same way when I saw Mary Louise Parker play the lead in "Proof" in 2000: there must be something wrong with that girl; why is she playing the role like that? I gotta get out of here, think people will notice if I leave the theater? Well, I still remember that performance and I don't think I'll forget Katrin Cartlidge's performance as Hannah either. Lynda Steadman is also wonderful as Hannah's shy protege-turned-best-friend, Annie.

The flashbacks are all the most arresting and fantastic because the two characters look and behave completely different six years later. Not only that, but - a huge relief to those of us in the five-year-reunion moment of life! - they are a thousand times hotter, saner, and possibly even happier.

Their reunion adventures have them pretending to be rich and looking at real estate, and running into three of the main characters from their shared college past: the roommate they both ditched in order to move in together; a guy they both liked who eventually dumped both of them; an oddball who was living on their couch for a term and developed a crush on Annie that Hannah encouraged, but which never developed into anything. This last run-in, and the subsequent flashback that illuminates it, is what makes the movie not only a poignant and hilarious meditation on friendship and time, but also a deeply sad inquiry into the fact that reminiscing, however poignant or hilarious it may be, is a privilege to which only those who have survived the past are entitled.

I should also mention that Katrin Cartlidge's performance as the grown up Hannah is actually even superior to her performance as the mad child Hannah. With her beautiful horse-ish features and tall languid figure, she has all the arch charisma of Kristen Scott Thomas with considerably more edge. As an adult, she has come to know herself and the sources of her anger, and she no longer throws herself against the world with the shoulder-thrashing meanness she did as a young woman, but when she tells Annie with perfect frankness what her failings and troubles continue to be, one certainly doesn't have any false assurances that her future is resolved. These two performances together paint a portrait of a complicated and lovable person as real as any I can remember.

There's also something fascinating about watching this movie 13 years after it came out. With just enough time having past for the movie to be safely no-longer-contemporary, I had a sense watching it that the present moment in the film was just as calcified in the past as the film's past was. Hannah and Annie would be in their mid-40's now, nearly as far away from their reunion weekend now as they are from college. And actually, Katrin Cartlidge is dead, from a sudden illness when she was 41. Their time in college as well as the present-moment of the film, the weekend in London, are like all moments: presents destined to become pasts. And they are also like all filmed moments: rescued from the wreckage of time by the camera lens.

I wonder if I would have felt that quite as strongly if I had seen the movie in 1997 when it came out. (I did see my first Mike Leigh movie, "Secrets & Lies," in 1996 in the theater with my mom, so I very well might have - but didn't.) I was 14, so probably not! Though I did have a melancholy streak... Who knows. Who knows about any of it, man.

Film Review: Another Year

2011-01-18T07:02:00.000-08:00

Gerri: Ruth Sheen

Tom: Jim Broadbent

Mary: Lesley Manville

Joe: Oliver Maltman

Katie: Katrina Fernandez

Ronnie: David Bradley

Last night I did something I almost never do and may not have done since I stopped watching VHS tapes: I watched the second half of a movie because I had not watched it all the way through the first time. The movie was Mike Leigh's "Another Year," and while many factors contributed to my having turned it off at an hour and 8 minutes last Friday, a prominent one was that I just needed a break from the misery. I have an artist friend who refuses to watch dramas of any kind, and I had a little bit of sympathy for that position during the movie.

"Another Year" tracks a year in the lives of a couple, Tom and Gerri, their thirty-year-old son Joe, and Gerri's divorced friend Mary. Other characters come into the film throughout, each of whose life seems to exist somewhere between Tom and Gerri's blissful contentment and Mary's lonely life of unmet needs. When we first meet Gerri, we see her in her professional capacity as a therapist. She is speaking to an abject woman (Imelda Staunton from Vera Drake), attempting to counsel her out of a depression that has left her sleepless for a year. Gerri, her face a buck-toothed question mark of a smile, asks this woman to remember the happiest moment of her life. To me, this seemed like a cruel question, and one rather out of touch with the reality of despair. As a viewer, I couldn't answer the question myself and any answers I could come up with seemed in themselves reasons to be sad (two weeks in a summer I spent years ago; a moment of achievement that pointed toward the certainty of a future that wasn't certain; another such moment). We next see Gerri in a similar dynamic with her old friend and colleague Mary. Mary is a mess, though when we first meet her, she is a relatively cheerful mess. She is one of those incredibly vulnerable people one meets in life whose crippling lack of self-awareness ensures that she can never solve her problems. She is lovable when we meet her and Gerri, who is clearly indulging her, again feels smugly superior. At that point, my expectations became set that this would a movie about the how the happy Gerri is actually a knot of rage, and soon she will come apart and Mary, at least honest with her unhappiness, will emerge victorious.

This never happens. Instead, as the movie goes on, in the excruciating real-life manner in which Mike Leigh's movies do, the dark and miserable reality of Mary's life becomes increasingly sad and hard to take. She is never going to be the hero of this tale. She is the Blanche Dubois of this universe, and hope as I might that one of the men who wander into the story will become the man who can rescue from her self, she remains evermore and ever less-sustainably dependent not on the kindness of strangers, but on a crumb from its cake: the indulgence of friends. In the film's most excruciating sequence, Mary arrives for a date at Tom and Gerri's, only to be surprised by their son Joe and his new girlfriend, Katie. Mary has a crush on Joe, whom she has known since he was ten. Mary was clearly once a very attractive woman and part of her attraction to Joe seems to be nostalgia for an earlier time in their lives together, when he probably had an adolescent crush on her. By the time he brings Katie home, nothing remains of that crush. It's at this moment that we realize how truly out of control Mary really is - that there is nothing funny about her situation at all. Joe's girlfriend Katie, like Joe himself, is affable to the point of nausea (note: do I just hate the mores of the British Middle Class?), but as we watch Mary sulk and seethe in the presence of her competition, and opine about the many traumas she and her car have suffered recently, it is clear that even Katie is a far more eligible option than poor Mary.

In previous scenes with Mary, I felt myself consciously trying not to identify with Gerri and Tom's outlook on the scene, but it was here, at the dining room table with Joe, Katie, Gerri and Tom, that I finally could not help taking glances at Gerri across the table. Gerri was her most likable in the scene that immediately followed this one, where she and Tom discussed Mary's horrible behavior and when Gerri said that it was "very upsetting," I believed her, and saw that she was a really good person, not just a person pretending to be a really good person.

I wonder if this movie doesn't serve as a kind of Rorschach test to determine one's attitude towards winners and losers. I am sure there are people I know who identified and sympathized with Gerri from beginning until end, but after everything, and maybe because of the mesmerizing performance of Lesley Manville, my alliances never really changed.

I was still rooting for Mary until the very end, when Ronnie, Tom's just-widowed brother turns up as a last desperate romantic possibility. Even as the last final shot lingered on her sad face, and I knew that it was the last shot of the movie, I still found myself hoping against hope that there would be some kind of Woody Allen-esque coda, where we would see that Mary ended up running away with Ronnie to Majorca, where she once worked as a cocktail waitress, and suddenly discovering happiness in middle age. I've never watched a movie that has made me feel more emphatically that the key to happiness in life is simply having someone to be with. Especially in the last shot, as we watch Mary's sad face, listening to Tom's happy story of the seven months that he and Gerri spent traveling the world when they were young and newly in love, I had the sense that what Mary doesn't have in her life is exactly what Mike Leigh and we the audience are giving her at that very moment: we are bearing witness. It seems like so little, but for those who don't have it, it can be everything.

Sex and the City 2

2010-06-01T07:52:00.000-07:00

Okay, yes of course it's bad. Something doesn't get the kind of reviews it's gotten without being really fucking bad. The first one was bad; this one is bad. It's still not entirely clear why that has to be the case, but it seems to be a fact at this point that Sex and the City movies are bad.

So how bad is it? And is there still a redemptive reason to go shell out $12 to see it?

It's so bad that you talk to your friend throughout the whole showing, somewhere between speech, laugh and wail:

"Why! Why!"

"I expected more of Miranda!"

"This plotline is so desperate!"

"Just wait, now it's going to get even worse"

"Does she really not know anything about relationships?"

"Oh carrie."

"That line's so bad she can barely say it!"

You bury your head in your hand and laugh, not at the jokes but at the shame.

It's so bad that when the fabulous fashion and the opulent wealth fill the screen, all you can think about is carbon footprints. "It's obscene," you cry into your friend's shoulder. "They're already rich! Why do they want moooore?"

It's so bad that when Samantha cries out "Lawrence of my labia!" about a hot Danish architect and gamely throws herself on to her friends in girlish longing, for the first time in the movie you have an inkling of why the gals are in Abu Dhabi: because Michael Patrick King thought of that line first and wondered how he could use it.

It's so bad that when Carrie gets upset about a caricature drawing of herself that accompanies a bad review of her new book in the New Yorker, the image of a woman with crisscrossed tape over her mouth is only offensive until you remember the movie you are watching and agree with the reviewer that perhaps Carrie should consider not speaking anymore.

And yet...and yet...it's still kinda fun!

What the Sex and the City movies have become is a sort of girly version of Startrek. When Carrie goes on an idiotic date with Mr. Big, she wear a dress patterned with the New York Times typeface and a woman in the orchestra level of the theater -- I was in the Mezzanine at Lincoln Square -- screamed out "I love that dress!" A little murmur went through the crowd: "wait, which episode was that dress from?" “I remember that episode!”

At one point, which I dare not give away lest I spoil the moment for some other intrepid movie-goer, something happens that we all thought was a bad idea and spontaneously, everyone hissed! I was right there with them. Screaming, booing and hissing! Girl you didn't! I wouldn’t have been surprised if popcorn and junior mints were thrown. It was phenomenal.

And then later, at the comic climax of the movie, when things take a turn so lurid and outrageous that I genuinely cracked up, everyone in the audience was howling and cheering!

The audience didn't laugh at the bad jokes. They landed like giant pancakes in a swimming pool. The audience didn't coo over the insane wealth or the false notes. But everyone was there to have a good time. The movie is such a mess, especially in the insane second half, that the theater felt like going into the kitchen at a wild party. "Look at those people out there!" the strangers were saying to each other, leaning up against the fridge. "What the hell is going on."

At one crucial (and totally cliched, but actually well-written, which made it rare) moment, when Miranda and Charlotte have a drink just the two of them and confess that certain things about motherhood aren't perfect, there was a sense that we were all at that bar with them, taking long sips of our martinis in order to be able to face the mad and chaotic debris of what was once a beloved series.

It’s the kind of movie you discuss while standing outside on the street afterwards, with friends and with strangers. So what if you’re rehashing just how outrageously bad it was and whether there were any good parts, and whether anything at all could be salvaged from the whole depraved thing? It was stimulating and it was fun.

Why do we go to the movies anymore, when we can watch anything at home? We go for the shared experience of the theater. At least that's why I go. And SATC2 was totally worth the $12 for what I'm sure will be my most hilarious theatrical experience of the summer.

Just please go with someone so you can talk through the whole thing.

That Face by Polly Stenham

2010-05-19T08:36:00.000-07:00

That Face, the British play which opened last night from the Manhattan Theater Club, is about a dysfunctional family. Mom is an alcoholic and also probably insane. Dad is gone, in Asia with his new family. And the two teenaged children have to deal with the situation. Henry, the older of the two, is his mother's caretaker and companion, while Mia is a boarding school rebel.

I saw the play twice, once at its invited dress rehearsal and once last night at opening night. The first time, I was impressed with the the theatricality of the play, even as I felt that the reason I was aware of its theatricality, as separate simply from it, was because it was somewhat contrived. The play opens on a scene during which an unconscious girl sits in the middle of the stage, bound and gagged, as her boarding school housemates argue about how best to torture her. It creates a good deal of suspense and I noted that, impressed. Likewise, I noted the way that the pseudo-incestuous relationship between Henry and his mother created uncomfortable suspense that propelled the play forward. In a scene in a hospital, the constant threat that someone might come in and find our characters in a compromised position created suspense; I noted it. In the final scene, a huge dramatic blowout among the four characters in the first time they have shared a room in years, Henry is dressed in his mother's nightgown, his mother's jewelry and his mother's make-up. "You look ridiculous," remarks his father in the middle of the drama and he does. And it's a shrewd move on to the part of the playwright. But the first time I saw it, I didn't feel much because I basically felt like I could see through to the bones of the thing. It hadn't come alive yet.

Last night, I felt much differently. Last night, as I watched the show, three weeks more rehearsed and with the intermission removed, I was much less aware of the devices and much more aware of the emotions and the real drama. This time around, it seemed much less a story of extremes pumped for their dramatic value and much more a universal story. When the final scene unfolded and everyone was in misery, I had the sense that it was every divorce I was watching unfold. The children blaming themselves and their parents; the mother needing too much; the father wanting too little.

It was an interesting lesson in scheduling. In the future, I will think twice about going to a play when it's in previews.

NOTE: I wrote this before the largely poor reviews came out. I wonder when the reviewers went. They must have gone in previews, but I wonder whether it was closer to the Invited Dress or to Opening Night.

August: Osage County by Tracy Letts

2010-05-16T22:50:00.000-07:00

(As a caveat, I didn't see August: Osage County, I just read it. I picked it up at the amazing Samuel French bookstore when I was in LA last week.)

If I were a professional reviewer who saw everything and had the burden of deciding the fates of theatrical runs and giving advice to people making plans to attend a show in the near future, I might very well have given August: Osage County a review as august as many of the ones it received. However, since I have the privilege of being a blog reviewer, with no such burden, my only duty is to give my opinion of the merits of the play in the larger context of dramatic literature. Which in this case is: Eh.

I think that August: Osage County can best be understood as a kind of theatrical version of Jane Smiley's A Thousand Acres or Michael Cunningham's The Hours. It is not original so much as it is a lively re-interpretation of an old and much beloved classic, in this case A Long Day's Journey Into Night or something like it. Of course, its aim is much lighter than Tennessee Williams, or at least I hope it is. And there begin my major problems with the play. What is it? There's not enough fun for it to be send-up. This is not Tom Stoppard's Jumpers. There are no pies thrown, no paint spilled. And yet there's too much irony for it to be a genuine update of an American classic, or even a genuine attempt at a new addition to the family drama canon. It then functions as a kind of entertaining cliffsnotes, the exact show that you want to see on a Friday if you've been at a Tennessee Williams festival from Tuesday until Thursday. To that end, I admire it for knowing its audience, since who can afford to go to theater these days except for the theater-obsessed, but I still have higher hopes for contemporary theater.

Which brings me around the my specific complaints about this play. I don't like a play where every third line is one of the characters calling another one of the characters out for bad behavior. "Jesus!" "You're in rare form today, Vi." Do you have to say that?" "Do we have to do this now!" "Can't this wait?" "Settle down, mom." "Barbara!" "Bill!" "Mom!" "Christ!" This seems to be another important instance of the fact that the play is dumbed down. Very rarely do these exclamations illuminate the people who say them, or the situation. Rather they serve as signs to the audience that we are watching a Very Dysfunctional Family here. If the behavior is really that shocking and if the characters are really that dysfunctional and out of touch, shouldn't it be the audience that is crying out "Jesus!"? All of the exclamations dial down the drama and make the play feel pre-digested, even more so than it already does. In my opinion, it does this because the family is not as genuinely dysfunctional as Letts wants it to be. All of the dysfunction, from the pill-popping pioneer woman mother to the philandering professor son-in-law to the incest to age-inappropriate liason, is totally generic. If there were a dictionary in which you could look up "family dysfunction" and then cross-reference it with "American theater," this list would be right there. This is not a real family with real dysfunction. But it is not a send-up of the dysfunctional family drama. So what is it? I laughed when I read that Barbara, the oldest daughter, screamed "EAT THE FISH, BITCH!" but does that great American theater make? Eh.

That said, one thing in the play did really strike me and really stay with me. During one of the dinner scenes, Jeanne, the 14 year-old-girl whose rebelliousness generally felt very rote and unspecific to me (unforgivably, no 14 year-old girl in 2009 would say "I don't remember it too hot" meaning that she didn't remember it too well), tells the rest of the family why she is a vegetarian. She says it's because when animals are about to be killed, they are afraid and their bodies produce chemicals as a result of their fear and that to ingest meat is to ingest the animal's fear. I thought that line was brilliant, both in its terrifying saliency and in the context of a family drama where everyone feels a constant sense of mortal fear, as well as a nagging feeling that they might be being eaten alive. I also approved of the fact that the thought was simply laid out by a character who was in no other way particularly shrewd. It struck me as the key to the play, as Samuel Beckett once said that Lucky's incomprehensible speech in "Waiting For Godot" was the key to that play, or as Harold Bloom has said that Barnadine's short scene is the key to "Measure for Measure," one of the most puzzling and interesting of Shakespeare's plays, in my opinion.

Along the same lines, after Jeanne explains her position on meat, Jeanne's mother Barbara totally undermines, it, claiming that Jeanne isn't actually a vegetarian. Jeanne protests, claiming that her mother is a liar, but the issue is never resolved. Barbara has incentive to lie, but there's certainly enough evidence to suggest that Jeanne is lying just to be provocative. Even the wisest sentiments are subjective, vulnerable to seeming untrue by being uttered by fools. Therein lies much of the ambiguous power of theater and to me it was the most powerful moment in Tracy Letts' play and one of the only actually ambiguous moments.

On Reviewing

2010-05-16T22:46:00.001-07:00

As biographers often write a word about biography that is usually of no interest to anyone until possibly after completing the book and looking for a couple last salacious details, so I would like to say a word about reviewing before I begin this blog, the purpose of which is to review plays. One night a couple years ago, I was sitting on my bed in my apartment on the East Side of Los Angeles, reading from a pile of books that I had picked up at the Central Public Library downtown. I had been reading Charles Bukowski and had then moved on to a book about Susan Sontag and Pauline Kael. It was getting close to when I wanted to turn off the light and I was basically only skimming for salacious details when suddenly I sat up and gave myself some advice: "It is always better to be Sontag than Kael." Kael was the populist, perhaps more courageous in her attitude toward enjoying low culture not as camp but simply as it was meant to be enjoyed, purposely at odds with what she saw as "the trap of condescension" that pervaded much of contemporary American criticism. Sontag was brilliant, ever serious, the purist and it was she who defined the dialogue. Kael is a name increasingly unknown among people my age (b. 1983) and Sontag is a name emblazoned upon the intellectual history of the 20th century. Most people who know both writers will agree that Sontag was a Critic and Kael was a critic. But even as I said those words to myself, I think I knew that the writing was already on the wall. I have never succeeded in defining an insider outlook, or even in agreeing with one. In all likelihood, the majority of this blog will be devoted to exposing the cracks in the paint of the well-reviewed as well as defending trash that everyone else hated. I generally accept this contrarian streak of mine, but it is not without regret that I embark on this endeavor, knowing that it is always better to be Susan Sontag than Pauline Kael (leaving aside for a moment the plight of being Camille Paglia).