Many folks that I have met in the comic industry are multi-tasking, multi-talented people. Case in point: writer/critic Jamie S. Rich. When Jamie S. Rich is not writing graphic novels (his and Joëlle Jones’ You Have Killed Me made my top books for 2009 at Robot 6), his critical analysis can frequently be read at DVD Talk or at his own blog, Confessions of A Pop Fan. I recently email interviewed him to get some of the thinking behind his critical analysis.
Tim O’Shea: In a recent post, on the topic of best of 2009 movie lists you wrote: “in case you’re not sick of best-of lists yet (I’ve avoided most, and it’s still like a lot of white noise to me)”. What annoyed you about from a most of the best of movie lists from 2009?
Jamie S. Rich: It’s nothing about any specific choices, it’s just that there is so many lists out there now, the chorus has gotten too large. There is no definitive voice, no standards. I mean, there are now lists just to keep up with the lists, a conglomeration of top 10s and top 15s and the like. What with the end of the decade countdowns also going on, I am just at a loss to see what purpose it serves anymore. I’m not a big fan of crowdsourcing, because I think that it eventually kills the formation of legitimate opinions. Even before that was a term, you could see how certain lines of thinking took root and critics and fans alike would start parroting one another. It’s something I wrote about when I reviewed the most recent DVD release of The Godfather trilogy. People don’t bother to watch the third one and react to it in their own way, they already have the common thinking to draw on. It’s like, right now, I can log on to Facebook, and I’ll see ten updates in my friends list about Avatar, and all say the same thing. “Looked great, but the story was boring,” like this is some new opinion of great value. Okay, sure, and…?
I read a handful of movie lists, mostly by people I already follow regularly–Jason Bailey, A.O. Scott, Michael Phillips, Roger Ebert, some of the Portland-based writers–but I avoided most others, because if I didn’t already have a handle on the opinions of their authors, I am not sure what any other list mattered. Plus, let’s not forget there are lists for music, TV, books, comics. At least for the latter, I could just use the search function on my computer and type in my name. Nope, not there, move along!
O’Shea: Not asking for a best of list, but what films were some of the most underappreciated in 2009?
Rich: Well, I did finally do a list, so I’m a big hypocrite in the end. Proving I will sell out my ideals for a pretty face.
It’s usually the foreign and indie films, stuff that didn’t even make my top 15, the list just on the other side of the top. I left a few off that others included, too, thinking they were maybe 2008 films in some ways, stuff like Revanche and Gomorrah. I really liked Beaches of Agnes, the autobio documentary by Agnes Varda. The Argentinian film Lion’s Den. Moon surprised me by not being on more lists. I also think Stephen Soderbergh’s films, The Girlfriend Experience and The Informant! didn’t get enough play. The Harlan Ellison documentary, Dreams with Sharp Teeth. The whole output from Adam Yauch’s Oscilloscope Studios has been pretty amazing. The Messenger and Treeless Mountain were on my list, and you’ve also got Wendy & Lucy and Scott Walker: 30 Century Man.
O’Shea: why do you think there was not a greater degree of coverage regarding the Harlan Ellison documentary, Dreams with Sharp Teeth?
Rich: Well, the words “independent documentary” immediately spring to mind. I’m not necessarily surprised the mainstream media hasn’t heralded the work more, but I can’t understand why the comics and more pop-culture oriented press hasn’t been talking the movie up. It’s the kind of portrait that is perfect for reinvigorating interest in an extremely influential author, one without whom I don’t think a lot of current writers, including myself and I daresay Michael Chabon and Jonathan Lethem, would exist. Neil Gaiman makes no bones about how Harlan influenced and helped his career, and the fact that there is a lengthy conversation between the two on the disc you’d think would be sufficient enough to see it get some heat.
My personal theory about why Harlan is not more celebrated these days is that I think he doesn’t fit. The entertainment industry is increasingly cautious, increasingly cowardly, and a guy like Harlan who isn’t beholden to anyone, who is unpredictable and unafraid to speak his mind, scares the living crap out of them. His skills as a raconteur should have made him one of the more sought-after guests in our chat show culture. His commentary would be colorful, his anecdotes are always entertaining, but anymore, celebrities are expected to show up and pretend everything about what they are promoting is perfect, artists are expected to humbly thank the world for looking their way, and pundits are expected to take an extreme position regardless of whether they believe it or not. Inject any truth into that, and the illusion will shatter.
O’Shea: I’ll really move on from the whole Best of concept after this question, but given your inclusion of one of my favorite films, Wings of Desire (that I did not know had gotten the Criterion treatment)–I have a few questions stemming from your review. Your love of Depeche Mode indirectly lead you to this film. Can you think of other moments where Depeche Mode indirectly informed your film watching experience? You were already a fan of Wings of Desire for a number of years, but I wonder if the new edition in 2009 caused you to increase your appreciation of certain scenes or performances? How could you not love the sequel, Faraway, So Close? Wings allowed me to form a connection with the characters, so when Faraway was released, it allowed me to reconnect with these characters–do you think it’s bad when one forms a bond with characters or a universe so much (as happens often in mainstream comics) that they fail to discern strong storytelling from weak?
Rich: I’m not sure Depeche Mode contributed original music to any other films, so I don’t know that there is anything else I can give them credit for. “But Not Tonight” was recorded for something called Modern Girls, I think, but I never saw it. I guess Depeche Mode 101 made me aware of D.A. Pennebaker and was one of the reasons I saw Don’t Look Back, which changed my mind about Bob Dylan. And there’s the whole Anton Corbijn connection. But I’ve never seen Depeche Mode in cinematic terms, never saw much of a link between them and that world. Whereas, Wings of Desire caused me to like Nick Cave, and his presence on the soundtrack for Gas, Food, Lodging or his acting in Johnny Suede, that was a real thread for me. And, of course, now he does scores and even screenplays.
I think the way one reacts to Wings of Desire is going to change with just about every viewing. Where you are at each time, the life experience you’ve accumulated, these things will inform your reading of the film. In my younger days, I would have reacted more to the romance, as well as the more existential questions about being who you are despite what other definitions might be foisted upon you. I think things that struck me the most in my recent viewing were the metafictional elements, the craft of the movie within the movie, and also the ruminations of the older poet, the idea of legacy. The scene that immediately springs to mind, though, is Cassiel reacting to the suicide. That struck me hard. His cry of protest is so raw, and for some reason, despite having seen it, I believed the fake-out, that the guy wasn’t going to jump, and so that he actually did jump really surprised me.
Faraway, So Close is a movie I saw on VHS when it was first released and haven’t seen since, so my thoughts on it now are based on a memory that is what? Fifteen years old? I just think Wenders should have recognized that he had done something that need not be messed with and that most likely could not be matched. Wings of Desire is so specific, so pure, there is no replicating it. I think the automatic reflex that anything and everything is ripe for a sequel is not necessarily a good one. It drives me mad as a storyteller, actually, that audiences have such a hard time accepting anything as finite. When Madman Atomic Comics #16 came out, the issue that Joëlle Jones and I had a story in, right away people started asking me when we’d be doing a sequel, when we’d find out what happened to the girl in the story after that. It nearly drove me to violence. It’s not your right to know what happens next, the cycle is complete. She gets what she wished for, and if that’s her punishment, that’s her punishment. Do the same readers go insane reading an old EC archive and realizing they’ll never see a reversal on all the ironic twist endings?
So, while I love characters, I love a beginning, middle, and end more. I respect the courage of an artist saying, “That is what it is, there will be no more.” I don’t need to revisit characters in ten years time, in twenty years time, I am the one that is meant to grow, they are not. And a character never ending, that’s it’s whole own kettle of cod. You know, how many Superman stories are enough?
Specifically in relation to Faraway, So Close, seeing the mundane day-to-day of Damiel and Marion gave me nothing new about them as people, it didn’t answer any lingering questions. I knew they’d get on. Also, I seem to recall the third act being some ludicrous, contrived plot out of a 1940s movie, something about them stopping gun running or whatever, hijacking the shipment on the river, just being kind of dumb and not up to the poetry of the original film. My opinion could totally change if I see it again, and I do realize that it was always in the cards, that Wings ends with “to be continued,” but it doesn’t mean they couldn’t have put on the brakes. In fact, I gave my old edition of the DVD to Joëlle, and she was surprised when I told her that there was a sequel. She thought “to be continued” was just an ellipsis on the end, a statement of being. Because everything is “to be continued,” these people will go on. I kind of like that.
O’Shea: Looking at your monthly column, Talking Out of Frame, I’m amazed at the amount of information you jam into that column. How long does it take you to gather that much info on an average month?
Rich: Not very much, an afternoon or so. I have made some efforts to keep it running each month and add movies to an open file as the other writers post their write-ups, but that’s a good idea that’s so simple, it’s easy not to do. It’s just a manner of honing in on the essential elements of the reviews that have already been written and trying to sew them together. There’s not much actual writing on my part, and so it’s employing a certain kind of skill. I get faster each time. I was asked to do it and follow some templates set up by similar columns on the site, the ones focusing on horror and anime, DVD Stalk and Anime Talk. It was tough coming up with a good “Talk” related title. I wanted it to be called “Fancy Talk,” but some of the folks up the chain thought it was too tongue in cheek. Which was kind of the point. I didn’t want it to be so serious, which is why I avoided “Art House Talk.” Or any of the various titles I came up with in French!
O’Shea: Which critics do you think helped inform your critical mindset?
Rich: Harlan Ellison is probably the only guy who I ever sat and read a book of his TV and movie criticism cover to cover. My critical studies background was mostly in literature, and Harlan is far from the academic. His work gave me permission to react on a personal level and to sometimes go off on tangents. The personal was also something I picked up from all the British music mags I read in the 1990s, which often covered film, too. The Trainspotting era. My more traditional influences…well, I grew up watching Siskel and Ebert. I’ll also watch any DVD commentary with Martin Scorsese, and I love his cinematic essays on American and Italian films. And when I started at DVD Talk, I was reading The New Yorker every week, and I was fascinated by the different styles of their two main film writers, Anthony Lane and David Denby. Lane frustrated the hell out of me, because he’d write a review so full of snarky jokes, you could never tell if he liked a film or not.
O’Shea: How do you avoid critic burnout?
Rich: It’s tough. Sometimes I have to treat myself to movies I don’t have to write anything about. I’m also lucky in that DVD Talk is set up in such a way that I mostly only have to see movies I want to see, so I can skip something like Transformers 2 or Gamer or whatever Sandra Bullock is in. Seeing anything that has a title that begins with National Lampoon’s or American Pie Presents is the quickest way to get the mean reds.
O’Shea: Back in October when I interviewed you, you said that “Milligan’s *Human
Target* is a favorite, particularly for the main character”. Are you looking forward to the TV series?
Rich: Not even remotely. It doesn’t look anything like the Milligan version, and were that show to come out under a different name, were I to just see the commercials and it were the same show but called “Man of Action” or somesuch, I’d not even give it a second glance. My money is on it barely making its half season, though I secretly want it to do well so we can finally get the back half of the Milligan series collected into book form.