“This weekend we’re saying to hell with the conventional wisdom,” announces Jim Emerson, author of the blog Scanners and notable Amazon critic. “We usually say that anyway, but consider the Contrarianism Blog-a-Thon an excuse to express how you really feel.”
More importantly, there is a poll: “Which of these ‘great directors’ [Altman, Antonioni, Godard, Fellini, Ford, Hitchcock, Kubrick, Welles, Wilder] do you think is not-so-great?”
My problem with this list is that I feel nearly all the directors listed are overrated with the exception of Hitchcock and Altman.
From where I stand the most underrated directors are:
Woody Allen – Pedro Almodóvar – Catherine Breillat – Luis Buñuel – Roger Corman – David Cronenberg – Michael Haneke – Juzo Itami – Patrice Leconte – Spike Lee – David Lynch – Radley Metzger – François Ozon – Roman Polanski – Nicolas Roeg – Jacques Tati – Alex van Warmerdam – Michael Winterbottom – more …
Nevertheless, Jim Emerson’s post offers some interesting quotes:
“For serious critics … the second-best thing to perfection is often the near-miss, the disreputable and even the despised. Next to discovering a new director, planting a flag in an uncharted national cinema or sitting next to Zooey Deschanel at an event, few things please a critic more than polishing a tarnished career or taking on a dubious cause, particularly if everyone else really hated it.”
— Manohla Dargis, New York Times, February 14, 2007
“I deeply believe that taste is a kind of prison for oneself – when a critic finds himself or herself always rigidly repeating the same opinions, the same positions, the same likes and dislikes (that is the kind of bad posture which Pauline Kael bequeathed to criticism). Critics should feel free to bring in their own emotional reactions to films – it is hard to keep them out of writing – but the phenomenon known as the ‘gut feeling’ or gut reaction can become a terrible end in itself: ‘this film makes me angry or it makes me happy, so it’s a rotten film or a great film, and I’m not going to discuss it any further.’ The important thing is always argument, analysis, logic. I have an irrational side (critics need it), but my rational side believes in logical demonstration: if you can prove to me that what are saying about a film makes internal sense, if you can marshal the evidence from the film itself to back up what you say, then I too can be persuaded to disregard my own first gut reaction and explore that film again in a new, more open way.” — Adrian Martin, Cinemascope, January – April, 2007 “
Also an interesting submission to this blog-a-thon:
Steve Carlson @ Blogcritics: “I Spit on Your Grave”
“As it turns out, ‘I Spit on Your Grave‘ is not the hateful nadir of cinema. It is, instead, the ‘Unforgiven’ of the rape-revenge genre, in that it is simultaneously the perfect expression of and the eulogy for the genre. It’s as brutal and confrontational a cinematic work as I’ve yet seen; Zarchi reduces the genre ito its barest elements and in doing so asks the audience to consider why they are there in the first place.”