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August 26, 2008
Team Picture
Kentucker Audley's lovely Team Picture is out on DVD today, thanks to Benten Films, and so I whipped up a little review for Hammer To Nail:
Post-collegiate malaise is not a new topic, of course. Nor is inter-collegiate doldrums or pre-collegiate jitters, or any combination of the above; is it worth mentioning that the protagonist of Team Picture reveals to his mother early in the film that he’s actually foregone the college application process entirely? The crux here is not the specific terms of David’s decision, but what he more generally represents: on the one hand is youth, blissfully ignorant of the practical realities of adulthood, and on the other is youth once more, but this time wisely aware of precisely what can be gotten away with.
See how I screwed the rest of it up here.
On the subject of criticism (and my own paucity of knowledge on the topic), I've been reading the many tributes to and remembrances of Manny Farber, who died last week, and quickly realizing that this is somebody whose writing I need to be familiar with, and soon. I'd always been aware of him, and had a cursory understanding of the ideas behind White Elephant Art vs. Termite Art, but it never actually occurred to me that I should read his work. Now, just the little that I've picked up in quotations and commemorative paraphrases has set me straight, and I'm about to pick up Negative Space. In the meantime, here's one little offhand quote that I especially like, which I've lifted wholesale from Girish Shambu's post:
It's terrible that a certain language and capacity to make judgments come so easily. It should be hard to write on these films. Whatever the film, we are told endlessly, shot by shot, scene by scene, what's good or bad. It's crazy, totally crazy. I'd like to see that mode of criticism applied to Cezanne or Mozart, saying what does and doesn't work at every step [...] In short, the resistance posed to artistic criticism has vanished; it's turned into a pie that critics quickly slice into pieces.
A shame it took his passing to actually incite this interest on my part, but then again, there's no such thing as too late when it comes to a body of work.
The next thing I write here is not going to have anything to do with movies.
Posted by David Lowery at August 26, 2008 11:24 AM