Doling out the credits.

L--
I think this is a really important disucssion to have--who do you give credit to when a film is working, and what do you do when one falls apart? I know we discussed this recently in relation to The Namesake, a film with a brilliant director behind it and a few good actors as well, and yet it didn't work. Who would I blame for this? Well, I know the source material is good because I've read it, but when fiction doesn't "translate" well into film is that the fault of the screenplay writer? And let's just say it is, shouldn't we hold Nair responsible for not reigning the writer in if they were off in mood, tempo, etc? Because bottom line one job the director definitely DOES have is to be a CEO of sorts, keeping people plugging away at their smaller roles in order to make sure the larger machine of movie making chugs along. Now, having said that I have a hard time blaming Nair for this, and that's purely because of my own highly subjective reasons for liking her work. I don't want to believe she's capable of taking good material and turning it into something fairly mediocre.

I will go one step further and say that I do value the "auteur" filmmaker over the one trick pony, and that's because your artistic capabilities have to be so much stronger to do that. I don't think being the "CEO" of a film is easy, but those are skills you can learn whereas the artistic ones are much more precious to me, and those are the ones you have to execute well in order to be an auteur.

As sort of a corollary I also wonder where the critic falls in this interpretive frame? I mean it's no secret that the critic is subjective and undoubtedly has directors/actors/writers that they perfer over others, but regardless of who the movie is targeted to they have to find a larger way to speak to it because their reader won't strictly fit the target demographic (unless you're the New Yorker, in which case you exude elitism and a contrarian nature--here's looking at you David Denby)? So, for example how does someone like Kenneth Turan look at a niche film like Volver? Well, some might argue that we all have the ability to step outside the narrow confines of our own critical inquiries, but actually I don't think that's true. I think we end up with informal genres like "chick flicks" because the critic, like anyone has a limited world view, and can't always conceive of certain tropes and characterization without reverting to simplistic categories. So, what I'm wondering is if everything is slippery and subjective on what ground can the confident blogger speak?

~R