Comments on: Blogging Phantoms of the Opera Jawa NYT Review Controversy

By: HarryTuttle

HarryTuttle — Sun, 20 Jan 2008 15:23:06 +0000

You should send the DVD to Catsoulis, because I’m afraid she only saw a trailer on her iPod.

1) The xenophobic card sounds a little far-fetched at first sight. I would say it’s more snobbery, superficiality and ignorance than an intentionally malevolent insult. But Rosenbaum is right to raise awareness on this passive kind of cultural superiority.

2) I don’t like the principle of a capsule review, to condense the film in less word than is possible to go beyond the surface. It’s not criticism. It’s merely a “pitch”.
This said, it doesn’t excuse writers who are paid to be meaningful in few words. It is possible to write good “pitches”.

3) Pertinent context could be incorporated in a single sentence, or even through allusive comments disseminated throughout the capsule. It’s not a matter of word count.

4) Personally, I thought the link between the various films part of the “New Crowned Hope” package was no more meaningful than in any given festival selection. Besides it’s not a proper commission, but films already in the making were aided financially. And the Mozart theme is tenuous. Although, it’s journalist duty to report such “marketing info” and a perfect occasion to advertize on other underexposed art-films.

P.S. Well said Dave.

By: Joe A.

Joe A. — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 14:45:08 +0000

The tone of above-it-all snarkiness in Catsoulis’ review seems pretty common these days, and not just in reviews of “foreign” pictures. “Xenophobic” is a little much I think. The word-count thing is a cop-out, don’t you think? The debate seems to be mostly about tone, and you can convey tone in 20 words, let alone 200. And, well, I think Catsoulis should respect her audience enough to believe that they might be interested in New Crowned Hope as well as Madonna.

And yeah, “Mizoguchi”’s comment is a little “imperialist” itself in its suggestion that filmmakers from “Third World” countries shouldn’t be allowed to draw on whatever intellectual/artistic ideas interest them.

By: Dave

Dave — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 04:48:54 +0000

I think ‘xenophobic’ is a stretch. The Times review comes off as clueless, probably due in equal parts to a reviewer who just didn’t ‘get’ the film and the near-inability to write a 200-word review on a film of any complexity that actually says anything. The review seems to me to be one of those moments where, rather than engaging with the film, a critic cops out and runs with a theme that they can write about.
Isn’t context most of what’s provided in a small capsule review? Perhaps a writer can squeeze in how ‘good’ they think a movie is, but they don’t have much time to justify that.
New Crowned hope is much more interesting, because A) The NCH audience is closer to the audience for the film than the Madonna audience and B) NCH is inherently interesting to me more than Madonna (though that’s a very close call). It’s A that we should rely on here.

All of these issues come down to one core issue: this review is lazy and bad in that it neither engages with the film or the film’s potential audience. Instead JC chooses to ridicule and relies on misguided attempts at wit and populism that end up sounding a lot like ridicule for both film and audience. It’s not xenophobia per se, it’s xeno-ignorance.