Issue #26/81, January 26 - February 1, 2000 
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First, one more word (a brief one, I hope) on this whole year-end list thing. Presumably, most folks would agree with me if I were to say that these lists are essentially a waste of time. As ephemeral commentary on cultural artifacts that--more often than not--are themselves far from enduring, these observations should be viewed as occupying a derelict territory that lies somewhere between the angular pen-on-cardboard scribblings of that especially obnoxious undergraduate physics student (you know, the guy who always seems to conceive of the solution to a problem from yesterday’s lecture at the precise moment the last slice of pizza is removed from the container) and the weekly shopping list (e.g., "Week of 27 June: 1. Milk (whole), 2L; 2. Milk (skim), 1L; 3. Condoms (lubricated), 12-pack;" etc.) of a more-organized-than-average suburban homemaker. Robbed of even the most fleeting significance almost as soon as it is filed, the average year-end list is at once its own obituary and an indecipherable hieroglyphic that describes a time and place to which few would care to return. For example, it’s hard to imagine any reasonably intelligent person going back to review The Blair Witch Project (which appears on a good 95% of the "Best Of" lists currently out there) any more than he would The Wild Wild West (which although not actually any worse than Blair, nevertheless has the stigma of appearing on at least as many "Worst Of" lists). But whatever their year-end fates now, both should be long gone by the time spring arrives; if anything the inordinate praise heaped on Blair might resurface in time to be remembered with some bewildered amusement as the two young directors’ follow-up fails to live up to expectations, becoming a commercial and critical bomb.
In a way, it’s hard not to feel just a little bit sorry for the hapless list writer: he has no choice but to include a movie like Blair in his "Best Of" list; otherwise, he risks looking like an idiot, or worse. It is also his unenviable duty to frame some kind of amorphous argument around this messy collision of lazy craftsmanship and aggressive marketing--preferably an argument that’s vaguely uplifting and instills the reader with the hope that maybe this will be the year that Patrick Swayze finally grabs that Oscar that has always eluded him. And so, the hack turns his bullshit filters to the their lowest settings and churns out the year’s one final 1,000-word lump of verbal inertia before wandering down to the office Christmas party, where he’ll get all good and drunk and generally make a not very amusing dick of himself just like he did last year--and the year before that, if in fact he has been in the business that long.
Of course, if your publication is one of some esteem--say, The New Yorker--then chances are you suffer from delusion rather than desperation. If you’re in this position, you might find it satisfying to knowingly refer to some "classic list" produced by one of the "legends" who held your position before you (Pauline Kael, perhaps). Thereby, you claim for yourself some share of the admiration granted to such legend by those who are too young to have read her original publications but nevertheless know that she is to be respected simply by virtue of the fact that she is a "legend." At the same time, of course, you’re setting an example for those who will follow in your footsteps, hoping that they too will some day have the professional courtesy to recall your words, restoring thereto some tiny parcel of the relevance that was never there in the first place. Given a sufficient lack of awareness, you might even manage to delude yourself into believing that your words, even now, have any meaning beyond that of an advertorial brochure whose crude promotional tactics are just barely disguised by a well-honed understanding of the mechanics of punctuation. Which really isn’t all that bad for a hack, when you think about it.
It certainly beats the situation of our second-tier provincial hack from above, who by now has already done two or three things at the Christmas party that he would regret tomorrow--that is, if he had any dignity left. Alas, this poor fellow is like the academic drone of the journalism world. Not permitted to pronounce inane, instantly irrelevant opinions of his own, instead he must catalogue and parrot those of his so-called betters. Not necessarily because they have anything to say either, but simply because that’s the way the pecking order functions.
Take John Hartl, for example, movie reviewer for The Seattle Times, his modest little year-in-review piece awkwardly entitled "Highly Promoted Movies Disappointed, But There Were Still Some Real Gems in 1999" (presumably, all of the fancy New York glossy journos snapped up the good titles before the holiday rush). Hartl leads off with the seemingly ironic but nevertheless quite true observation that the Star Wars prequel, despite becoming one of the three top-grossing films of all time, still "‘failed to meet the hype-induced expectations at the box office.’" Not exactly Nietzsche, but it’s still a respectable enough comment in its way.
Except that Hartl is actually citing (note the nested quotes) a certain Milt Freudenheim of The New York Times. I’ve never heard of him, but presumably he’s a sufficiently trusty source to be quoted in a year-end list.
But then Hartl tumbles a bit down the food chain, speaking upon "heavily hyped would-be blockbuster The Green Mile, on which "The USA Today’s Mike Clark complained about ‘the absence of much substance… it’s difficult to see what the movie could possibly offer on subsequent viewing (always the real test of greatness).’" Surely even a
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Even after this gutless performance, Hartl tries to slip a few legacy-establishing pronouncements into his top-10 list. His blurb on Toy Story 2 (his #9 for the year) ends with: "Decades from now, when Anna and the King and The Green Mile are gathering dust, parents will still be watching this one with their kids." Now that takes balls, attacking a Jodie Foster/Chow Yun Fat costume epic. Fuck it.
You want my year-end list? OK, here it is. There’s a big fucking difference between American Beauty (which made it onto just about everybody’s top 10 list) and Happiness (which was picked by no one that I’ve come across), despite the fact that both tended to engender a certain amount of discomfort or anger in viewers. The difference is simple: American Beauty, while occasionally amusing and even insightful, is essentially a superficial quasi-transcendentalist wank. The strip-mall multiplex audience to which it ended up playing often thought the movie was going over their heads when in fact they weren’t missing anything at all. The discomfort and anger was simply confusion.
Happiness, on the other hand, barely even found its way into the art-house market. Presumably, a large portion of this audience understood that it was being confronted in an unusually direct manner. This recognition, I gather, tended to give way to discomfort, which in turn led to revulsion. The lesson here being that Americans aren’t yet ready to accept the fact that their lives are dismal and empty, despite all the nifty gadgets and supposed prosperity. Good for them, I guess.
Now to get back to that unusually long title at the top of the page. It just so happens this week that I could be speaking of any number of legendary old-fart directors. We’ve got Roman Polanski’s presumably
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No, unfortunately, the title refers to the director who first uttered almost those same words so many years ago: Martin Scorsese. Not that I’m saying that I want to blow Marty’s head off--far from it. If anyone would understand my "Kill Your Idols" sentiment, I think he would. Frankly, I’d like to take the guy bowling or something, maybe play a few games of pool or even play some Speed Scrabble. Anything to keep him from making another movie. At least until he has taken a nice long break and thought things through a little bit.
In other words, Bringing out the Dead is a washout. Never mind the fact that Nicolas Cage and Patricia Arquette are both in it (he mostly sucks and she’s not looking so good these days). Don’t see it… it will just depress you. Believe me, you don’t need that.
