May
5Shakey Summer
The “Summer Movies” sections of the New York Times and Los Angeles Times pose challenges these days on both the advertising and editorial fronts. The ad pages are thinner – Warner Bros. took no space in the sections for its two would-be summer blockbusters, the newest “Harry Potter” iteration or “Terminator Salvation.” Warners’ parent, Time Warner, has the biggest stake in print of any of the congloms, so its apparent boycott would seem surprising.Given staff cuts, the New York Times seemed troubled about filling its editorial hole, so it turned to a flurry of random “memos” from its two principal surviving movie critics, A.O. Scott and Manohla Dargis. The so-called “memos” were somewhat random in content.
Scott wrote a curmudgeonly open memo to the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Science urging it to “kill the Oscars.” Dargis then dispatched a curious screed to Lionsgate stating: “Yuck! Yeah, yeah, yeah, it’s only a movie. But if films don’t have any wider meaning in the culture, don’t have real impact on minds and bodies, why do so many of us dedicate our lives to obsessing over them?” Her memo, she said, was aimed at “extreme horror filmmakers and fanatics.”
Scott chipped in with a memo to Steven Spielberg urging him to “think small again” like his “buddy,” Francis Coppola. Scott feels Spielberg should make films “on a shoestring” (Coppola’s last effort bombed and his new “shoestring” movie opens at Cannes). Dargis followed with a complaint to “straight filmmakers” for inserting what she describes as “gay slurs” into their work. She did not provide examples.
Perusing their memos, I will probably compose a memo to the Times’ critics urging them to confine themselves to a format with which they have a greater familiarity: Reviews.
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