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The News

By Ray Pride

May 15, 2020

Philip Lord: “not sure I get how people who profess to love movies want to spend any energy slagging the people who make them. Every filmmaker I know works their ass off to make something great. When a movie falls short, it’s important to remember it happens to the best of us.”

Glenn Kenny: “Rex Reed has often acknowledged that the labor expended on filmmaking is such that it’s a miracle that even awful ones are completed. And that doesn’t stop him from tearing apart the many movies he hates. You apparently want a participation trophy system of reviewing.”

Chelsea Paretti: “whatever!!! bad movies suck!!!!!!!!!”

Farran Nehme: “Vincent Canby was known to look for something, anything to praise in a film if possible; but that didn’t stop him from writing excoriating pans when the need arose. It takes enormous effort to write even a bad novel, but book critics don’t generally face these reproaches.”

Nick Pinkerton: “The odious myth of ‘filmmakers’ as a caste of exceptionally driven individuals uniformly striving for excellence. As in any profession their ranks include naturals and strivers, ass-kissers and medium-talent workaholics, and loads of coasting mediocrities. The late, lamented Mark E. Smith often spoke of treating being in a band the same way he treated his job as a shipping clerk on the Salford docks. Art is enormously important to me, but it’s also shift work. If you receive especial praise for doing it, you’re exceptionally lucky. Which then suggests a separate-but-related issue, which is that several world-historically great filmmakers—Rossellini, Buñuel—were notoriously incredibly fucking lazy. Try softer!”

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