Pierre Rissient once said: “It’s not enough to like a film. One must like it for the right reasons.”
That might sound like snobbery, but it's easy to understand what Rissient means. While it doesn't take a rocket scientist to know whether or not a film had a good plot or actors it also is true that film criticism is about more than plot and acting. Good criticism is a skill that must be learned, practiced and perfected.
What is Criticism?
Criticism is about looking inside oneself and figuring out why things touch us. It’s different for everyone. The critic's job is to give a starting point for the reader's own path to self discovery. Here's an example: There's a scene in Million Dollar Baby where Clint Eastwood is faced with a life changing decision. His face is half lit, dividing him, while his head floats down in the bottom left-hand corner of the screen (the weakest spot). The shot is filmed on a high angle, the camera looking down on his weakened state.
Fine, but now one is reminded of a quote from Robert Warshow who wrote: “A man goes to the movies. The critic must be honest enough to admit that he is that man.” To state what angle Clint Eastwood filmed himself on is like saying that Heath Ledger was creepy in The Dark Knight: it offers no insight. Talking about angles or the nuance of performance is great technical talk when assessing the aesthetic value of a work, but it’s not criticism.
Criticism takes the elements and places them into a larger emotional or intellectual context, because isn’t the essence of all great works their ability to move us on either an emotional or intellectual level? It’s about creating a connection between those who love to write about film and those who love to read about it.
The Heart of Great Criticism
If someone says that Eastwood uses his aesthetics in order to explore the turmoil that his character is facing or that Ledger is creepy because he calls to mind Freudian implications of uncanniness, and explain that, he has fallen out of opinion and into criticism. Not only has the claim been validated, but the writer has given his audience something to take home and think about. Now it is seen what Rissient was getting at. That’s the balancing act of criticism. To know that just because Clint Eastwood chose this angle or that does not make his film a masterpiece, but what that angle implies and how it ties in to the overall emotional drive of the film.
The Truth of Criticism
Truth is, people don’t care about angles; they care about how a film will make them feel, so unless one can be used to explain the other, the task of the critic is not being met. So now here it is: The first two High School Musical films are not good ones. It’s not just that they’re corny and contrived and annoying, that can be dealt with that, but they just plain aren’t well made.
Take the climactic sequence on the gym floor of the first film. The number has about two shot variations: 1) a straight-on medium tracking shot that moves across the floor and 2) a static overhead shot looking down on the entire cast, with a few extras thrown in here and there for flavor. That’s boring filmmaking. Most musicals are filmed with 10 cameras or more, it would be be surprising to learn that High School Musical was filmed with more than three.
The film doesn’t capture the rhythm or excitement of the music and the dancing; it just kind of sits there trying to capture what little life it can from the choreography, not to mention, on top of it all, the whole story is perpetually silly. Of course the target audience for those films encapsulate a specific demographic, which does not include those who think much about angles. So, as far as its target audience went, it worked on a certain level. Who can't appreciate that? High School Musical was not a good film no matter how it is argued, but it can be understood why some would like it anyway. That’s criticism.
Now Check out the review for High School Musical 3.
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