LA Times film reviewer Kenneth Turan writes about the risk of being wrong in the face of “the tyranny of the masterpiece.” I am kind of amazed by the comments — many vitriolic, from whocareswhatcriticssay to whydontyoureviewmorelatinofilms — because I think he’s entirely right. He may specify film, but he could just as easily be writing about book reviewing:
Whenever I get to moments such as these, I reread, as I did then, a passage from “The Immediate Experience” by critic Robert Warshow. “A man goes to the movies,” Warshow wrote. “The critic must be honest enough to admit that he is that man.”
By reminding us that anyone who writes about film is a person with idiosyncratic tastes before he or she is a critic, Warshow underscores how human and personal a job criticism is when it’s done right. If I didn’t appreciate “Amores Perros,” I had to say so (and in fact I did in a subsequent Sunday essay), even if it meant realizing sometime down the road that I’d missed the boat on the “Vertigo” of our time.
To pretend either to like it or that I didn’t really have an opinion, to pretend in effect that I was someone else to save face and be one of the gang, was simply unacceptable. Criticism is a lonely job, and in the final analysis, either you’re a gang of one or you’re nothing at all.
I like Turan. He usually comes across as fairly sensible. And his voice is, for me, memorable – not sure why, but reading that excerpt, I could hear him. Thanks for linking to it; I’ll read the whole piece later…