Overview Venom II

From: Cold Bacon
To: Whoever Will Listen

Okay so Rosenbaum is deeply informed, deeply sympathetic, and bless his big heart, deeply boring. Kael is interesting, entertaining, a sometime brilliant writer, and often wrong. Anthony Lane is amusing but British (and lives in France?). If that should tell you anything. J Hoberman is promising. That’s all I’m going to say for now. Ebert is hit or miss. Leonard Maltin is a fool. Perhaps even a damn fool. Time Out is of little use, once you think about it. Real film scholars can go to hell because they know way too much. Film Comment should be good, but they seem to have this problem of either talking about films I don’t care about (because they are bad, Far From Heaven, Kill Bill) or having twenty pages devoted to filmmakers I can’t find on DVD even with trying. Behavior which would of course be justified if it could actually foment demand. Perhaps. Who knows.

Although I hardly know what the hell he’s talking about and have not seen the bulk of the films under his jurisdiction. The fact is, and it’s obvious to me, Manny Farber probably does know what the hell he’s talking about, and that’s just frightening. Susan Sontag is very smart. She’s like a more conscientious version of Pauline Kael. And she’s been to South America more times, which makes her much smarter, of course. Finally, I would not forget Phillip Lopate. The best balancer of the personal and universal needs currently writing today. Come on, I have to like someone. Kent Jones?