Critics Ought to Be Better at Fact-checking
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Precious Doll
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Re: Critics Ought to Be Better at Fact-checking
Most so-called film critics today are pathetic. I've gotten to the stage where I don't read very many reviews beyond Film Comment and Sight and Sound and even they have fallen in standard in recent years. The number of errors (and not just film related) in all areas of the press is staggering.
"I want cement covering every blade of grass in this nation! Don't we taxpayers have a voice anymore?" Peggy Gravel (Mink Stole) in John Waters' Desperate Living (1977)
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Big Magilla
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Critics Ought to Be Better at Fact-checking
From Dave Kehr's February 3rd DVD review:
Released in 1938 and now available in a remastered edition from the Warner Archive Collection, “The Great Waltz” was one of Louis B. Mayer’s frequent attempts to bring culture to the American masses by buying up wholesale lots of European talent. A biographical fantasy woven, with no particular concern for the truth, around the figure of the Austrian composer Johann Strauss, the film was directed by a Frenchman, Julien Duvivier, who was making a critical reputation for himself with a series of movies starring Jean Gabin, including “La Bandera” (1935), “La Belle Équipe” (1936) and “Pépé le Moko” (1937). These noirish dramas don’t suggest a sensibility in tune with the Hollywood musical, but Mayer and his lieutenant, Irving Thalberg, might well have been impressed by Duvivier’s imaginative handling of the waltz sequences in his 1937 “Un Carnet du Bal,” which featured a bold use of slow motion and canted camera angles.
Thalberg might have been impressed if he were still alive, but he died on September 14, 1936. Critics, as well as filmmakers, should have more concern for the truth, dont you think?
Released in 1938 and now available in a remastered edition from the Warner Archive Collection, “The Great Waltz” was one of Louis B. Mayer’s frequent attempts to bring culture to the American masses by buying up wholesale lots of European talent. A biographical fantasy woven, with no particular concern for the truth, around the figure of the Austrian composer Johann Strauss, the film was directed by a Frenchman, Julien Duvivier, who was making a critical reputation for himself with a series of movies starring Jean Gabin, including “La Bandera” (1935), “La Belle Équipe” (1936) and “Pépé le Moko” (1937). These noirish dramas don’t suggest a sensibility in tune with the Hollywood musical, but Mayer and his lieutenant, Irving Thalberg, might well have been impressed by Duvivier’s imaginative handling of the waltz sequences in his 1937 “Un Carnet du Bal,” which featured a bold use of slow motion and canted camera angles.
Thalberg might have been impressed if he were still alive, but he died on September 14, 1936. Critics, as well as filmmakers, should have more concern for the truth, dont you think?