There's some very nice writing at the film site Usherette (usherette.wordpress.com). From "Situation: Critical," on August 7, 2007: “These days a spoiler-filled rehash of the press release and an arbitrary tacked-on rating is increasingly what passes for film analysis. The critic of old—lone canary in the coalmine of culture—represented the demand for excellence, for sincerity, and for sheer, giddy enjoyment in the pleasures of the picture palace.”

Which led me back to the best film critic ever, James Agee; from a review in the Nation, July 5, 1947:

“If you regard all experiment as affectation and all that bewilders you as a calculated personal affront, and if you ask of art chiefly that it be easy to take, you are advised not to waste your time seeing Jean Vigo’s ‘Zero de Conduite’ and 'L’Atalante’; go on back to sleep, lucky Pierre, between the baker’s wife and the well-digger’s daughter, if you can squeeze in among the reviewers who have written so contemptuously of Vigo’s work. If you regard all experiment as ducky, and all bewilderment as an opportunity to sneer at those who confess their bewilderment, and if you ask of art only that it be outre, I can’t silence your shrill hermetic cries, or prevent your rush to the Fifth Avenue Playhouse; I can only hope to God I don’t meet you there. If, on the other hand, you are not automatically sent either into ecstasy or catalepsy by the mere mention of avant-gardism, if your eye is already sufficiently open so that you don’t fiercely resent an artist who tries to open it somewhat wider, I very much hope that you will see these films. I can’t at all guarantee that you will like them, far less that you will enjoy and admire them as much as I do, for they are far too specialized. I can only be reasonably sure that you will find them worth seeing.”

Wow. I'm going to Netflix them right now. Feel like I just had a writing lesson, re-typing how Agee laid it down. Reminds me of a good friend, a great writer, a real writer, now gone, long gone, too early: Chris Fuhrman, author of The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys (available at Amazon). He used to re-type stories by F. Scott Fitzgerald and so forth, said it was helping him become a writer, which he was so passionate about. I miss him all the time. Here’s to you Chris, wherever you are.