There is a tag that crops up now and again on my favorite destination on the interwebs for the past year, The Awl. It's THE NEW NICENESS, which, given that it appears in all caps, online, would seem to suggest that it means anything but. Well, it's complicated. Awl contributor Maura's gloss:
There's been a lot of talk around certain watercoolers about "The New Niceness," which many people have seized on as a sort of organizing principle for the Internet going forward. But venture outside of a few safe spaces where people are pretty content with their jobs and their lives on the whole (and where they are probably saving their Old Not-Niceness for backchannel communiqués) and you'll realize that as an idea this is sort of bull, if only because, surprise, even the seemingly nicest people are just not nice all the time. And nor are the most unpleasant sons of bitches out there mean and nasty all the time! But it's the capacity for online communication to amplify and inflate that tends to turn the best and worst aspects of human behavior into announcements written in 140-point type and plastered over every nearby bit of Internet for all of us to see, and oftentimes cringe at.
To which commenter NinetyNine chimed in with this all-too-true point:
Everyone I know has someone they unapologetically hate read. Think about those you hate read — would you ever say you witnessed any change in their thinking/doing/writing (regardless of your input or anyone else's)? Would that even be a little disappointing? The range is so odd and perversely constructed, it's safe to assume that someone, somewhere is hate reading you right now (hi hate reader!).
Why bring this up? And what does this have to do with movies? Well, the cinetrix has been guilty of all sorts of Not-Niceness and hate reading [hi hate reader!] in her years online. Worse still, she writes under a pseudonym! What a bitch!
But I find myself increasingly exhausted by this sort of vitriol on the blogs and on Twitter. Maybe it is because I am an Old. Perhaps I have iron-poor blood. [Not really. Quite the contrary, actually, but you take my point.] Now, I won't foreswear it utterly because, you know, hatred of stupidity is the last acceptable prejudice. Today, however, I intend to take up the remainder of this post highlighting two bits of writing I liked and making one suggestion about a potentially productive way to think about a subject that's gotten more than a few film bloggers in a swivet of late.
First up, Stephanie Zacharek's been knocking 'em out of the park over at Movieline [also inadvertently making space for FOC's Sam Adams and Lisa Rosman to shine at her old crib], amirite? I keep meaning to hunt down a SZ-specific RSS feed because without one I might miss lovely little turns like this, from her Letters to Juliet review.
After befriending these women, Sophie makes a discovery that could be the subject of her first big story: Hidden behind a loose brick in the wall, she finds a letter dated 1957, from an English girl who fears she’s made a mistake by walking away from her young Italian lover. Sophie responds to the letter, and is astonished when a stuffy young English twerp, Charlie (Christopher Egan), shows up in Verona along with the writer of the letter, his grandmother Claire (Vanessa Redgrave), now a 70-something widow. Claire hopes to reconnect with her lost love, a guy named Lorenzo, and Charlie is none too pleased about it: He doesn’t want to see his grandmother hurt or disappointed. Nonetheless, the three find themselves criss-crossing the Tuscan countryside in the hopes that Claire will find her Lorenzo, among the dozens of Lorenzos with the same surname who live in the area. Their search — and Sophie’s gradual realization that Charlie isn’t such a dink after all — constitutes the “formula” of Letters to Juliet.
A dink? Swoon! Resolved: work "dink" into casual conversation much more frequently.
Second is Ms. Manohla Dargis making with the celebrity color from Cannes. Her arch, gentle amusement at the business of show is revealed in an account of her 10 -- actually 13:58 -- minutes of face time with Michael Douglas at the Wall Street 2 junket. The whole thing is a well-calibrated delight to read, pointing up the sheer ridiculousness of the encounter without ever once becoming insulting or suggesting the experience is somehow beneath him, or her.
Though he’s made other good films, including Steven Soderbergh’s “Traffic” (also 2000), Mr. Douglas hasn’t been a major draw in a while. In recent years, he has appeared in good and bad and mostly small films (he calls them “pictures”), sometimes stealing the show, as in “Ghosts of Girlfriends Past.” He has done a little television. But he still looks like a matinee idol, a part he plays effortlessly. We had only a short time together, but he delivered, immediately taking off his sunglasses as we sat down for some manufactured intimacy. I asked general questions, not yet having seen the movie. And he in turn provided the kind of boilerplate that works in every language.
Just yes.
Which brings me to this "slow cinema debate." [Google asked if I meant "slough cinema." Perhaps!] I'm not even going to dwell on the mis-appropriation of the "slow + noun" construction from the slow food movement, although I continue to be enraged every time a TV chef or fashion designer allegedly "deconstructs" something when they strip it down to its elements or whatever it is they think they're doing. What I'd like to suggest is that it might be constructive for all parties to consider David Bordwell's "The Art Cinema as a Mode of Film Practice," which I have conveniently uploaded for you. In the article, he "suggest[s] some lines of work," among them the observation "that whereas stylistic devices and thematic motifs may differ from director to director, the overall functions of style and theme remain remarkably constant..." in what he terms the "art cinema." Do with it what you will. That's just what I thought of when I read the laundry list of directors -- Bela Tarr, Tsai Ming-liang, Bruno Dumont,Weerasethakul, Sharunas Bartas, Kore-eda, Hou Hsiao-hsien, Sokurov, Lisandro Alonso, Carlos Reygadas, Pedro Costa -- under discussion.
But, heck, what do I know? I've only seen one Dumont film -- Hadewijch -- and on the whole I much preferred the other movie about the moon-faced brunette who falls in with a fringe group that encourages her to commit shocking acts: Whip It.
