San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Ask Mick LaSalle:
Revisit old movies or concentrate on things like “Black Panther”?
Dear Mick LaSalle: How about writing an occasional column called “Second Time Around”? In it, you go back in history and choose someone that didn’t win the Academy Award but who could have (should have) won.
Robert Freud Bastin, Petaluma Dear Robert Freud Bastin: Involving the Oscars into the concept would imply that the Oscars are a genuine standard of quality, which I don’t believe. They represent something, and something not entirely useless, but they’ve never really been about enduring excellence. But as an excuse to write about great movies and performances, that’s not bad. Roger Ebert did it in a more straightforward way, with a series called “The Great Movies,” which was later anthologized as three books — possibly his three best books.
Critics are never more useful than when they are explaining why something has value. However, I’m not sure if there’s much thirst for the past out there. When it comes to movies, the general public might be a lot more interested in “Black Panther” and “Mission: Impossible — Fallout.” A few years ago, I had an idea for another series, inspired by Spotify, in which I go back and listen to albums that were huge when I was a teenager — just listen to them straight through, maybe for the first time in 30 years, and write about them, because pop music is so of the moment that it’s interesting to revisit these things in the light of history. Then I remembered I’m not a rock critic and dropped the idea. The second most common disease of critics is to think they’re experts on everything. The first most is to think they’re experts on something.
Hello Mick: You’re right. The British critics selecting “Vertigo” as the best motion picture of all time means nothing. The entire premise centers on a man who essentially loses his mind trying to recapture and revisit his past. James Stewart was way too old for this movie and Kim Novak, as usual, can’t act. Stewart fared much better in “Rear Window” with a better actress, Grace Kelly.
Nicholas Duka, Lafayette Hello Nicholas: Stewart was 50 when he made “Vertigo,” which strikes me as exactly the right age: At 50, you feel as young as you ever did, but you also sense, on a molecular level, that a clock has been installed. This makes it, in fact, the most likely age for a man to completely crack up over a woman because the guy is old enough to feel grateful but also like he’ll never be lucky again. (The second most likely age is about 15 or 16, for different reasons, plus hormones.) It’s funny that you cite “Rear Window” in contrast to “Vertigo” because in “Rear Window,” especially, Stewart seems too old next to his beautiful co-star. After all, in “Vertigo,” Kim Novak is merely playing him. In “Rear Window,” Grace Kelly is genuinely crazy about him, and he’s pretty much indifferent to her. He just sits there in his toupee, tolerating her. I also don’t share either your admiration/contempt for the respective acting talents of Kelly and Novak, who are both great to look at and whose acting is invariably as good as it needs to be without ever being any better.
But your larger point is well taken: Critics might just as easily have focused on “Rear Window” as the masterpiece to end all masterpieces, because at a certain level of quality, deciding which great movie is the greatest is a matter of deciding what you most value and what you can live without, a process that not only is subjective but also involves subjective judgments about things other than the movie. Ultimately all art can be considered flawed because of what it leaves out. Nothing can encapsulate the fullness of life. But great art seduces us into not feeling the absence of what’s missing, even as it throws a shadow larger than itself, suggesting a larger world. How these elements are perceived changes from person to person and is subject to fashion, so no movie can be the best. All we can say is there are a lot of great movies, but never enough.
Have a question? Ask Mick LaSalle at mlasalle@sfchronicle.com. Include your name and city for publication, and a phone number for verification. Letters may be edited for clarity and length.