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Welcome Home, Roscoe Jenkins is a family romp in which Roscoe’s oddly dysfunctional family delights in taking his big city pretensions to the mat, yet it also wrings plenty of juice from the family's largely cracked caricatures, which I suspect read much less funny than they end up on the screen. Lawrence thankfully sheds the flop sweat that has earmarked nearly every screen performance of his since perhaps Do the Right Thing and in doing so sets the game comic tone for his troupe of able and willing cast mates. Duncan, large and lively, has never seemed so at home in his skin on screen; he’s the good-natured, doting daddy of two mountain-sized kids who routinely calls into comic suspicion whether the undersized Roscoe really belongs to the XL Jenkins clan, but for once he’s not simply used as an awesome physical specimen. He delights in tweaking Roscoe, in tempting his recently vegan-ized brother with some home-cooked ribs; Lawrence’s slightly glazed eyes, not to mention the smear of pork grease on his lips, tell the story of his inability to resist his brother’s honey-glazed jabs. Epps is as nimble as ever as the always-conniving Reggie, who gives his lines gleeful twists of intonation that had me giggling from his first frame. (As Matt Zoller Seitz observed in his New York Times review, Epps gets big mileage out of simply pronouncing the word “Telemundo.”) And here I must confess to a perhaps unreasonable love for Mo’Nique, who has a juicy part to tear into here—the revelation of the dirty secret of her Bible-thumping visits to local prisoners gets this glorious tornado of a performer revolving at top speed. (“Is that Bible-thumpin’ or Bible-humpin’?”, taunts Roscoe, just before the hammer comes down.) 
They’re back!
Jim:
In this way, she became and remains my favorite critic because I knew in encountering one of her pieces that I could just as easily be swayed as roll my eyes in disbelief, but her writing, which facilitated her very specific voice, the kind of voice (female) that was willing to stand by, accurate or misguided, her claims and her tastes, was fresh and, to use one of her favorite words, liberating. There was something about the way she wrote that was convincing, even if you could still go out and see something she panned and love it for your own reasons. But I never felt, even when she was at her most annoying, that she ever stooped to disparaging actors over their physical attributes, a la John Simon, or adopted anything close to the “my criticism, right or right” stance of someone like Armond White. 
And certainly think John is also right in that there is value in a film being held up as a classic, an example of importance in film history that should be seen. In 1964, when this Atlantic piece was written, I suspect film academia was still trying to figure itself out. There were not even 30 years between the publishing of the Kael article and 1939, what many consider Hollywood’s greatest year, and certainly many of the movies that now do carry a kind of critical stamp of approval, films like L’ Avenntura or Last Year at Marienbad, were still relatively new on the scene. Yet given the passage of 44 years or so and all the critical knowledge that has amassed about film history and culture, I’m damned glad when someone I trust insists that I must see something, and I can rest in some assurance that the viewing of a film generally heralded as a classic or a milestone that I have not yet seen probably has a great deal of merit. Then if my experience is somewhat less than overwhelming, I don’t have a problem giving the film the benefit of the doubt and trying again later. I think that’s the essence of true cinematic scholarship, that kind of openness that can coexist with one’s own critical faculties. It’s possible that I’ll never “get” 8½, but that won’t keep me from giving it another shot. Kael would have probably dismissed this idea out of hand. But it’s partially my engagement with her and her tendency to argue against this kind of approach to film that has given me the confidence in my own assertion that this approach is right for me. She probably wouldn’t see it as being open to new experiences from the same film but instead, since a film can only yield what it has to offer on the first try, as a kind of mummification of one’s own responses. In fact, on the occasion of the current re-release of Last Year at Marienbad, I am initiating a kind of campaign to revisit many of the films I disliked or felt indifferent to when I first saw them as a college punk. Those films would include, yes, 8½, and also Last Year at Marienbad, Hiroshima Mon Amour, La Guerre est Finie, Herzog’s Nosferatu, Alice’s Restaurant, Antonio Das Mortes, Red Desert and many, many others. It’s going to be interesting to me to gauge the way I look at them now with the benefit of adult eyes. 
And despite how Andrew Sarris may have couched his introduction to the auteur theory as being already on its way out, the fact is, it was a theory of major importance to the way a lot of critics and film enthusiasts gauged their own willingness to look at movies that were often below even the kitsch radar of Pauline Kael. And if the word “theory” implies some sort of rigorous application of a template of looking at art, then, mean-spirited or not (and what critic has not at one time or another been accused of being mean-spirited?), Kael’s infamous “Circles and Squares” decimation of Sarris’s writing served a serious function, certainly for me as a film student being instructed in a film school where the auteurist approach was not encouraged but insisted upon by the staff of professors who formed the curriculum. We were not allowed to seriously challenge the tenets of the auteur theory, as it existed in 1980 anyway, openly in class, and attempts to do so in papers were to be considered off-topic. So I fully delighted in Kael’s irreverence for Sarris’s pantheon and subsets of directors of varying artistic worth, even as I delighted also in discovering the great value and substance hiding in plain sight within classic Hollywood A- and B-movie fare in class and on my own moviegoing adventures in local revival houses. In other words, Kael’s tactics were never an end-all for me, any more than Sarris’ proclamations were. 
I don’t understand when I hear people get their hackles up about how she responded to this film in her review, as if the whole thing were calculated to bludgeon other critics into getting in line with her view of the movie. Well, we certainly know that if that was her intention it did not work, nor did it necessarily encourage anyone who wasn’t already predisposed to endure the nightmare De Palma had in store for them to do so. So if this is true, are we to call Kael’s review nothing but bluster? I remain confused as to how one can look at her words on Casualties of War and not see them as a highly passionate, at times personal response to a movie that clearly moved her in a way that, by the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, had become increasingly infrequent. No critic would shrink from the opportunity to try to express to others what such a movie would have meant to them. Yet, puzzlingly, Kael’s turn here is looked upon as a browbeating directed at other critics, a late attempt to wield her still considerable powers of influence. Personally, I look on that review as one of the major highlights of her career, and it certainly doesn’t hurt that I concur with her that it is perhaps De Palma’s greatest film. (Does saying that make me an insufferable Paulette? It is in the eye of the beholder…) 
She also loved early Walter Hill; she highly valued John Boorman (Kael is the only major critic who ever admitted in print there were things to admire about Exorcist II: The Heretic); of course she was instrumental in the appreciation of Robert Altman, even as she recognized his inconsistencies, beginning with Brewster McCloud; and she constantly promoted Godard, until she began to become impatient with the process of what she envisioned as the director eating his own tail, stylistically speaking; and of course she loved Peckinpah. There were times, it seemed, that Kael’s appreciation for “Bloody Sam” was based more on her own tempestuous personal relationship with the director, which could be sussed out of pieces like her long, circuitous, anecdotal review of The Killer Elite. This essay, a recommendation of a late-mid-period Peckinpah sow’s ear, reads the movie as a personal tale of Peckinpah’s own self-disgust and refusal to knuckle under to the studio bosses and corporate bigwigs who wanted to cram him into an unwieldy mold and slice away at his talent and dignity. To read that review is to realize that no one else could have that particular perspective on The Killer Elite because none of us knew Peckinpah like that. (Note the ad copy on the one-sheet: "Long career doubtful.") Yet this kind of familiarity has been adopted through osmosis by a lot of reviewers who now look at Peckinpah’s work almost exclusively through this prism of presumed knowledge of the director’s demons. Kael’s personalized criticism, as well as powerful works of biography and criticism by the likes of David Weddle and Paul Seydor, have all contributed to this intimacy between the audience and a director who never courted such closeness.
It’s what’s behind her disdain for Antonioni’s pontificating at the Cannes film festival; it’s what behind the high percentage of uselessness of proliferating DVD commentaries in which we get to hear every dull anecdote, redundant explication of plot development and any other inanity that strikes the director of the latest Jennifer Aniston rom-com to blurt out breathlessly; and it is what’s behind a director like Eli Roth, who tailors his films’ subtexts as afterthoughts to be bleated out in defensive bursts on Larry King. (You said it best, Jim, when Hostel Part II was the talk of the blogosphere last summer: next time, Eli, let your movie do the talking for you.)
She was inconsistent, and maddening because of it. But I can’t find my way toward distrust of her writing or her thinking because of that. She was too provocative a contributor to my own experience and development as a critical thinker (one that is still well in progress, I might add), even though she would have hated to be thought of as a teacher. She reveled in her influence, of course, but if I am to believe someone like David Edelstein, as much as she enjoyed being admired she did not court, nor did she much tolerate sycophancy. (Am I being incongruous right now in that the image that just popped into my head is one of Graham Chapman’s ugly American film producer heading up a boardroom full of terrified yes-men who can never cough up the right answer, which is, of course, splunge ?) I have made peace with the fact that I could not possibly ever approve of every opinion she offered, or observation she made, insistence she insisted upon or deficit she assigned in her 30-some years of writing. Instead I’ve found in her, over the years, a critical voice I can argue with, be amazed by, dismiss or find completely convincing, as well as one who always kept her arguments for her own conception of anti-intellectualism sharp and open to challenge, sometimes from herself.
Nathaniel R., proprietor of The Film Experience, is hosting his annual Oscar Symposium beginning tomorrow and running through Thursday, February 7. And guess what-- this year he has asked me to be part of this prestigious, yet unpretentious panel. (Was that pretentious of me to say?) Anyway, in addition to Nathaniel, the event's host, I will be trading thoughts with Boyd van Hoeij of European Films, Tim Robey of Mainly Movies, Sasha Stone of Awards Daily, Nick Davis of Nick' Flick Picks, and my favorite femme fatale, Kim Morgan of Sunset Gun. The conversation should be lively all week long, so I hope you'll join us over at Nathaniel's place. There will be no red carpet to walk down or sit on (perhaps reflecting this year's real-world Oscar dilemma), but Nathaniel has made for some very comfortable accomodations and has assured me that the carpet he does have has been thoroughly vacuumed!
Come on, gentlemen, admit it: That's a hell of a specimen...
Well, he said he was gonna do it, I had no reason to think he wouldn’t, and by gum, now he’s gone and done it. Larry Aydlette has devoted the entire month of February to Burt Reynolds and the festivities comprising Welcome to L.A.’s delicious Burt Reynolds-a-Thon are now and fully under way. Day One is a spectacularly visual accounting of Reynolds’ impact on pop culture—Larry’s got a major roundup of one sheets (my favorite: White Lightning), important and not-so-important moments surrounding the Reynolds legacy (including that infamous Cosmo layout in which Burt reveals just how extensive that chest hair really is), and lots of other juice. 
Day Two is devoted to one of Reynolds’ sharper movies, Semi-Tough, a picture I’ve always felt ambivalent about, one which Larry’s review has got me interested in all over again. Warts and all, he likes Semi-Tough better than North Dallas Forty, which has always been a personal favorite, and The Longest Yard, a sloppy cheeseburger of a movie that conveys the fierceness and brutality of the sport better than just about any other. And I’ve always thought very highly of Semi-Tough’s director, Michael Ritchie, at least up through about 1982. So maybe I need to add Semi-Tough to my list of movies that need revisiting that are likely much better than I first thought. Who wouldn’t be newly intrigued after reading Larry here:
“The film swings all over the place, from Altman-esque comedy to Philadelphia Story-style romance to a sly sendup of the '70s love for self-improvement movements. Ritchie's style, which was weirdly criticized at the time for not being "personal" enough, indeed has all the hallmarks of '70s filmmaking, especially a sense that the audience is smart enough to roll with its tonal shifts. And Ritchie realizes the secret of Reynolds' screen power: If you can keep Burt's larky sense in check, he's got a brooding mystique that comes across with gravity and sensuality. And when he doesn't overdo it, the comedy rings much truer, as well. Kris Kristofferson, an actor I like for his earthy, Shaggy Man portrayals in '70s films, is simply blown off the screen here by Reynolds; it's like he ought not to even be in the same space with him. Only Jill Clayburgh, playing the Hepburn gal in the middle, holds her own with Burt.”
I’ve never been a big Burt Reynolds fan, but it's easy to see his importance to an entire era of American movies. I like how Larry takes his personality and his acting seriously, in this review and throughout the Burt-a-Thon, and how Reynolds, in his view, can end up being the standard bearer not only for a personality like Kristofferson, but for an actress like Clayburgh who was, when Semi-Tough was released, on the downside of the top of her game, but near the top nonetheless.
These are the kinds of treats in store for those of us who hitch a ride with Larry’s hairy-chested express and ride the Burt Reynolds-a-Thon to its leap-year climax. I have no idea what’s in store, and I don’t want to know. I just hope Larry can get his hands on some info on Skullduggery, or maybe Don Siegel’s Rough Cut. And I’d love to hear him on Robert Aldrich’s wonderful and disregarded Hustle.
And special for this weekend, check out Larry’s Super Bowl of Pop Culture quiz. Yes, Burt is featured prominently (he’d have to be, wouldn’t he?), but it’s a wide-ranging cornucopia of nuggets, some of which you’ll have to work extra hard to get dislodged from the furthest recesses of your pop culture memory. I got 43 out of 50, which Larry says is good enough for MVP status, the first time such an honor has ever been bestowed on me, I’ll confess right now. Hurry on over and take the quiz, and also vote on your favorite Burt Reynolds leading lady-- you’ve only got five hours to do so before Larry puts up another poll question, but only on this one will you have to pull individual hairs out over whether to vote for Angie Dickinson or Catherine Deneuve. Larry, you make life hard sometimes, and that’s only one of the reasons I love ya!
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