San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
MICK LASALLE
Hi Mick: What would you say is the change in relevance of critics from major newspapers now versus when you started out at the Chronicle?
David Sironen, San Francisco Dear David: Some of my best memories as a critic — and my best times in a movie theater — go back to the 1990s and the wonderful repertory shows that the Roxie Cinema (now Roxie Theater) put on and that I wrote about: the Norma Shearer tribute, the Lon Chaney festival, the Monta Bell festival, the Hong Kong Cinema showcases and the various
nd pre-Code festivals.
The energy in the room was wonderful and the houses were always packed. And what made it even better is that I was the one who packed them. In those days, I could write about something that nobody had heard of and then, that afternoon, I’d drive by and see a line outside the box office going all the way down the block.
Today, I can still pack a house, but it takes a multipronged effort involving the physical paper, the website and various social media platforms, and it would probably take more than a day to make it happen. So that’s not a good change. But you asked about relevance, and that’s different.
There used to be a very limited national dialogue about movies. Newspapers in the 1980s were like individual kingdoms that determined opinion within their designated regions. Today, there are aggregate sites that put film critics in conversation with each other, and our website is accessible to anyone with a computer or smartphone, so it’s possible that something I write in San Francisco can have an influence on the other side of the world. That’s a change I do like.
Dear Mick: When interviewing actors, individuals highly trained in the art of beguilement, do you have difficulty judging their veracity? How do you untangle their true essence from their public persona?
Ralph Mateo, Fairfield Dear Ralph: I can’t, and it’s yet another reason why interviewing movie stars is a soul-killing, degrading experience. Stars get interviewed only in connection to some movie, and they have one goal: to feed the exact same pretested information to every media entity.
If I admire them, I’ll be less enthusiastic about confronting them. If I don’t admire them, it’s worse, because if they’re an idiot, and I’m writing down everything they say, I must be an even bigger idiot.
I should add that interviewing a movie star for a book is different, and interviewing any other kind of person — such as a director or Al Gore or Willie Brown — is fine. It’s just the movie star publicity tour thing that I find so ghastly.
Dear Mick LaSalle: You wrote, “I assumed (Marni) Nixon looked like Shrek. In fact, she was quite presentable.” The notion that a woman (or a man) has to be attractive to the male gaze to be suitable as an actor or singer is part of the problem.
Kathy Hartzell, Inverness
Dear Kathy Hartzell: I understand what you’re saying, but you’re bringing up the “male gaze” when Shrek is a universal standard for male unattractiveness, almost as a foundation of the character. All I did in that column was go way out on a limb to suggest that a woman who looked like Shrek would be similarly unattractive to general audiences.
There are all kinds of beauty, and sometimes standards of beauty and handsomeness have been too narrow. But acknowledging this doesn’t obligate us to believe, or pretend, that it’s some kind of injustice that the winner of the Shrek lookalike contest doesn’t get to sing “I Could Have Danced All Night.” Not every role is for everybody.
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