Alejandro Iñárritu's "Birdman" and Alex Ross Perry's "Listen Up, Philip" The Business of “Art vs. Commerce” in Hollywood by LOUIS PROYECT
Starting around this time each year I try to catch up with the American narrative films that I anticipate my colleagues in New York Film Critics Online will be considering for awards at our yearly meeting in early December. Unlike those who get paid to review junk like “Horrible Bosses 2”, I write about films that my colleagues tend to ignore. As one fellow pointed out a couple of years ago, he never reviews documentaries because his readers do not go to see them. For the most part, the films that I put on my list are those that are likely to make the final cut at the NYFCO meeting. These tend to be those that the New Yorker Magazine and other arbiters of middlebrow taste deem “intelligent” and “daring”. Inured as I am to such judgments, I see watching them more as a chore than anything else. All in all, it reminds me of the cramming I did in for high school geometry finals. This week I made time in my busy schedule for “Birdman” and “Listen Up, Paul”, films that have main characters involved with making art. In “Birdman”, Michael Keaton plays the former star of the Birdman movies now in his sixties who is directing a Broadway play based on Raymond Carver’s short story collection “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love”. The eponymous antihero of “Listen Up, Paul” is a young novelist who develops a friendship with an older novelist clearly based on Philip Roth. With allusions to Raymond Carver and Phillip Roth, what could go wrong? Clearly we are miles ahead of “The Transformers” and “Pirates of the Caribbean” but when you start a thousand miles behind the marker set by a Stanley Kubrick or an Alfred Hitchcock, the prospects are guarded at best. full: http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/11/21/the-business-of-art-vs-commerce-in-hollywood/ _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
