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The reason boredom deserves such scrutiny is that it represents pure, undiluted time in all its repetitive, redundant, monotonous splendor. Boredom is your window on the properties of time that one tends to ignore to the likely peril of one’s mental equilibrium. It is your window on time’s infinity. Once this window opens, don’t try to shut it; on the contrary, throw it wide open. (Joseph Brodsky)

Of what value is boredom in criticism?  Noel Murray wrote recently that it was one of his most hated critical terms, though I think this is more a function of the critic than the creation.  Being bored can mean that a work of art has failed to engage you on an aesthetic level, but it can also mean that you have a short attention span, or that you become easily frustrated with something confusing, unexpected, or unusually paced.  This is particularly true in the age of the blockbuster, when audiences and critics alike start to doze if something or someone is not blown up or penetrated every ten minutes.

Still, as the abolitionist Wendell Phillips observed, boredom is itself a form of criticism, and if your overwhelming response to a work of art is to be bored, the artist must answer for that.  Boredom is certainly the default reaction of most viewers to Chantal Akerman’s provocative, brilliant 1975 film, Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, so it’s necessary to dig a little deeper and ask:  what does our boredom mean?  At nearly three and a half punishing hours, the story of a single mother’s prison-like routine of housework, tending to her dullard of a son, and occasional work as a prostitute* to keep afloat is intended  to bore us.  Akerman’s motionless camera, recording without flourish the everyday banality of a struggling working-class woman, uses boredom like a truncheon, pounding us into empathy and defying our expectations at every turn.  She means to make us understand what life is like for millions of women just like Jeanne Dielman, and would trap us in this role of exhausted observer forever if she could.

What is shocking, then, is how Jeanne Dielman bores without alienating.  It is a film that bores, but is not boring; though many would find it intolerably tedious, I find it far more compelling than big-money wastes of time that pop constantly on the screen but go nowhere.  The film’s virtues are many:  structurally, it’s absolutely masterful, and for a narrative in which almost nothing happens, every scene is worth paying attention to.  Akerman’s visual constructions take the banal and make them breathtaking; the composition of many of its static shots are the equal of anything one might expect in a Peter Greenaway film.  Credit is due, too, to cinematographer Babette Mangolt and editor Patricia Canino; their work takes Akerman’s structural planning and turns it into the art of the commonplace, transforming low-bourgeois bedrooms and kitchens, welfare offices and cobbler’s shops into slowly moving tapestries of struggle.

Jeanne Dielman, too, might be the most Situationist film ever made, and coming at the moment in time it did, could be seen as the culmination of that movement’s visual argument.  Far more than the didactic aggression of Godard’s political films, or the near-mystical abstraction of the short films of SI godhead Guy Debord himself, Akerman’s masterpiece hones in with merciless exactitude on that most important of qualities, the critique of everyday life.  She forces your attention without quarter on the samey routine of her protagonist, literally never letting us look away.  The restrictions and tiny oppressions of poverty are taken as simple reality, not made into an operatic setpiece; and the stakes are shown to be grotesquely high in the most ordinary and gradual manner imaginable.

And here is where Jeanne Dielman transcends boredom, which it uses to command the viewer’s focus the way a robber might use a knife to the throat, and becomes something magnificent, something that justifies with finality the much-marginalized use of realism in cinema.  I won’t attempt a long discourse on the uses of realism; my friend Tom Block does a pretty definitive job of it here.  There is something to be said about the nature of escapism, which I may get around to one of these days, but for Jeanne there is no escape.  What is so overwhelming about the narrative is not that Jeanne’s disintegration is played as spectacle, the shocking act of a woman gone mad, but as inevitable, the predictable result of a thousand tiny humiliations and defeats.

Akerman shows us — no, makes us see – the power of the seemingly meaningless to destroy those without power. With the eye of someone who has lived it, she shows how the utterly ordinary concatenation of frustrations — dropping a spoon, running out of potatoes, breaking a shoe — can pile up to the point where they seem completely intolerable.  Little frayed ends that would occupy center stage in most ‘psychological dramas’ are here made part of the background, becoming an omnipresent factor that is barely noticed but that spells unavoidable destruction.  Jeanne’s slow decay is not rendered in moments of hysterical drama or arch obviousness, and Delphine Seyrig plays her as the complete philosophical opposite of her character in Last Year at Mareinbad.  Instead, her breakdown is a mechanical one, like a machine tasked to do the same repetitive job one too many times.  She reads a concerned letter from her sister in the voice of a ghost, and the electric flickers on her wall pass her notice, even though they are warnings of imminent catastrophe.  And when the final violent break comes, it’s not inspired by some horrible abuse or degradation — it’s brought on by a minor loss of control, which, to people who control almost nothing about their lives, can be the worst thing of all.

Akerman has always stood out slightly from her peers in European cinema:  Belgian, not French; working-class, not a product of the universities; female, not male; gay, not straight (and yet powerfully resistant to the idea of being categorized and showcased as a ‘gay filmmaker’); Jewish, not Gentile; structural, not formal; and lethally literal where others can be maddeningly metaphorical.  This shows in all of her best work (It’s nearly impossible to track down, but I cannot recommend enough her hypnotic travelogue D’Est), and the slight whiff of disrepute it gave her allowed her that extra few feet of freedom to make a movie as daring as Jeanne Dielman.  Watch it, and you will be bored, but you will hopefully gain the sense of boredom being used on you as a tool, an effect, a weapon, of witnessing realism as a trial by fire and boredom as a craft wielded as skillfully as Hitchcock used suspense.  It is the everyday as art where the game seems numbingly slow, but the stakes are terrifyingly high.

*:  Another exceptional quality of Jeanne Dielman is how, through its rigor and determination, it short-circuits the judgment that is the natural Western reaction to any suggestion of unconventional female sexuality by making it so matter-of-fact that it is almost invisible.  Until it is necessary for Akerman to bring it to the fore, she sublimates it into the ordinary so that it becomes no more worthy of comment than her washing the dishes.

Nineteen Eighty-Four is not often thought of as a useful text for illumination of the art of criticism, but like all great writers, Orwell contained multitudes of meaning in his writing, leaving great lessons barely concealed for application to whatever subject needed them.  At the book’s very beginning, Winston Smith opens his newly acquired diary, and can’t quite begin to write.  For a moment, he cannot even recall why he did something so potentially damning.  But then it makes sense:  he begins to write, and does not stop until his hands start to cramp, because he must do something, anything, to displace the endlessly streaming monologue that has been running through his head for years.  This is what is worth death to him:  the transference of thought to page.

Looking back on all the words I’ve written the last few years, I fear that I’ve come across as impossible to please, forever sounding the death knell of contemporary criticism.  If that’s true, then I’ve made my case very badly (a distinct possibility to be sure).  It is only because the rise of the Internet created so many astounding possibilities for the art of criticism that I have become so disappointed with the sad deflation of that art in the last decade or so; it is only because I find criticism such a vital and necessary activity that I demand so much from it.  Art may be a mirror in which we see ourselves and our world, but criticism is the window that lets in the light, without which the images in the mirror may not be seen.

It’s temptingly easy to blame commercialism for the decay of criticism, but it’s also increasingly inaccurate.  While it’s true that approaching criticism as only a job (not simply as a job, because much great work has been done by critics for pay) reduces it to the level of any other work-for-hire and drains it of the need for a unique perspective.  But if anything, the Internet has been the executioner of commercial criticism.  It has helped demolish print media, and made the job of a staff critic the equivalent of a typewriter repairman; it has replaced the possession of critical insight with aggregations and mathematical models, as if numbers and data fields could tell you anything useful about a work of art; and worst of all, it has given people the idea that having an opinion about something is the same thing as delivering a critical analysis of it.

Even this is too short-sighted and limited, though; the field of criticism, at least outside of academia — where it still thrives, but makes no effort at involving anyone but the elite in the process of becoming involved in their own culture — has been narrowing for decades.  And it’s hard to shake the sensation that this is because we have raised up a generation of critics who don’t believe that they are anything but mere functionaries instead of people actively engaged with art.  They flit into our field of vision, deliver a vague and impressionistic encapsulation of a cultural product not markedly different than what we might get out of a publicist’s press release, and then retreat, pathologically afraid of inserting anything into their work that might resemble a theory or a worldview.

While we expect, and even demand, passion and perspective from our artists, we hold them at arm’s length when our critics feature too much of them — or even openly revile them.  We have made a fundamental and nearly fatal mistake by thinking we have to agree with a critic to count them as worthwhile, when, in fact, very nearly the opposite is true:  we learn virtually nothing from critics we always agree with, while those who provoke us and prod us into an unfamiliar reaction to the familiar, or immerse us completely into the unfamiliar, are the most valuable.  Jonathan Rosenbaum’s ideological inflexibility and resistance to commercial art can be immensely frustrating, but hardly a more brilliant and expressive film critic is alive in this country.  Greil Marcus’ tendency to go off on dreamlike tangents, forsaking the subject at hand for how it can lead him to observations about the culture at large, strikes many as irrelevant and pretentious, but you will learn more from him than you will from a million straightforward essays by lesser critics.  I disagree substantially with virtually everything Harold Bloom has ever had to say about literature; but forcing myself to articulate the nature and substance of those disagreements has taught me more about books than any other critic could accomplish.

What do all of these people, and more like them (for the world of criticism may be in decay, but above it soar dozens of engaging writers, hard to see through the thickening gloom), have in common?  Like great artists, they believe in something.  They expect art to be a certain way, they demand a particular perspective, and if they don’t get it, they say so.  They have a worldview.  What is Peter Travers’ worldview?  What is Harry Knowles’, Michiko Kakutani’s, Sasha Frere-Jones’?  I fear I could read a million reviews by some of our leading critics of music, film, and literature (to say nothing of television, which, with a tiny few exceptions, has generated enormous quantities of critics in the last ten years, but no qualities) and never find out what, exactly, they are looking for in art, or why, beyond the pitiably low hurdle of mere competence.

They also know — and here is where we can blame the Internet, with its insatiable demand for content and its replacement of the deep read with the click-through — that there is a substantial body of work in every artform that is simply not worth paying attention to.  They are conspicuous for what they ignore as well as what they embrace.  Many younger writers feel that they have to have an opinion about everything; equally afeared of being accused of inconsistency, surely the most ridiculous way to attack a critic but depressingly common, they fail to revisit and reread.  They hold their first opinions on a subject as inviolate, ignore what they’ve always ignored, and worst of all, think the worst thing in the world is to be wrong.  Faulkner once wrote that the most cowardly and base of all things for a writer is to be afraid; if I could by fiat drop one idea into the minds of critics, it would be that it’s perfectly fine to be wrong.  Until you conquer the fear of being wrong, you will never hold an opinion worth hearing.

Possessing no especial perspective and afraid to admit the obvious truth that our critical perspectives change by the day as we are exposed to more and more of the culture, contemporary critics engage in what are essentially mathematical games:  playing connect-the-dots from one influence to another, an amusing activity that nonetheless resembles keeping score in a baseball game more than it does assembling a genuine critical perspective; substituting personal anecdotes, funny stories, and cultural reminiscences for genuine ideas, theories and observations; and, worst of all, the creation of endless ratings, rankings, and hierarchies.  This is a poison as addictive as sugar, and it can teach us only what a critic’s personal preferences are at a specific moment in time — which is good to know on the same level as knowing your blood type or what kind of food you’re in the mood for, but can reveal absolutely nothing about art or what it means.  It is exactly why Manny Farber, a great artist in the way that criticism can be an art, felt that evaluation was generally worthless, and that whether or not a critic liked something was of only marginal relevance.  He spoke of such hierarchies and orderings as “the derelict appendages of criticism”.

And so we bog down into critical work that would be laughably absurd if only we could see them for what they are:  reviews of film and television that make no reference to how they look, reviews of literature that make no reference to the quality of the prose, reviews of music that make only the most perfunctory attempt to tell you what it sounds like.  It is this stupefyingly misguided approach that Flann O’Brien identified over 60 years ago in critics of Joyce as “ignorance of the essential”.  Our critics single out plot, a fleeting trivium; they speak glowingly of individual performances with no reference to how they contributed to the meaning or message of a film (a good performance in an ineffectual film is barely worth even speaking about, let alone writing about); they praise special effects, which is the equivalent of eating at a restaurant and praising the waiter because the chair didn’t collapse underneath you.  Speaking of a cultural object’s meaning, or emotional or intellectual import, or departures from form or idiom, or place in a historical moment, is felt not to be absolutely essential, but marginally relevant and possibly elitist.

It is possible, especially now, to overestimate the role of the critic.  It’s particularly difficult to resist such habits if you are one.  But I am convinced of this:  we will not have great art if we do not have great artists, but we will not know great art if we do not have great critics.  We can trust our own critical opinions only if we have been exposed to an environment where they are shaped and nurtured and allowed to form, not if we have let them spring up in a vacuum of meaning and conviction.  If we do not have critics who believe in art as being this or that, we will not have artists who believe it, either, and what use is an artist who doesn’t believe in art?  If a dead ear hears, a dead hand strums the guitar.  If no one cares about the shape of the words, the writer will have no cause to shape them.  If the mind behind the eye doesn’t believe that what it’s seeing is capable of great meaning, great meaning will not be shown to it.  We will instead stumble around in our own culture, from event to event, and it won’t matter if we labor fast or slow to see it, because there’s always more labor after.  We must be like Winston Smith, who did not know what he believed but knew he must believe something, who wrote because he had to make real in the world what was constantly running through his mind.  If we do not, we will have finally reduced culture to commerce, because it will no longer be something through which we can reflect or improve or empathize, but merely a list of activities to be checked off as they are completed.  The greatest critic will not be the one who sees the most in what he is watching, but the one who sees the most overall — a practitioner of cultural Taylorism, a competitive eater of art who can consume the greatest amount in the least time.

What does a man need – really need? A few pounds of food each day, heat and shelter, six feet to lie down in – and some form of working activity that will yield a sense of accomplishment. That’s all, in the material sense, and we know it. But we are brainwashed by our economic system until we end up in a tomb beneath a pyramid of time payments, mortgages, preposterous gadgetry, playthings that divert our attention for the sheer idiocy of the charade.

The years thunder by, The dreams of youth grow dim where they lie caked in dust on the shelves of patience. Before we know it, the tomb is sealed.  Where, then, lies the answer? In choice. Which shall it be: bankruptcy of purse or bankruptcy of life?

Hey, cats and kittens!  My new book, If You Like the Sopranos, is out today!  Your local bookstore is just waiting for you to stop by and pick up a copy; you can also order it online from, among other places, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Powell’s, and the publisher, Limelight Editions.  Get it at once:  here’s why.

1.  It is a good book!  Even if you’re not the world’s biggest Sopranos fan, you will enjoy the maxi- and mini-essays about great crime films of the past and trends in crime fiction heading into the future, as well as analysis of how The Sopranos helped changed television for good, and hundreds of recommendations of other crime-story media for your enjoyment.

2.  It is a cheap book!  It costs a mere $15, which let’s face it is like three cheap Subway foot-longs.  You probably spend that much on bourbon before lunchtime, or at least you do if you are anything like me.

3.  It is a timely book!  Not in the sense that it focuses on a television show that went off the air four years ago, but in the sense that it looks at a lot of modern developments in crime fiction, and also it is being released just in time for the winter holidays, in which you are often obligated to buy gifts, which this makes a perfect.

4.  It is a groundbreaking book!  By which I mean, it is the first of a series of If You Like… books by Limelight Editions, which likewise recommend new paths and passages to follow if you’re into various iconic pop-culture phenomena.  Future installments include If You Like Monty Python, by the AV Club’s Zack Handlen; If You Like the Terminator, by my good friend and film critic/movie janitor Scott Von Doviak, books on Metallica, the Beatles, Led Zeppelin, and South Park, and, hopefully, my future masterpiece, If You Like Pink Lady But Not Jeff.  I’m honored to have written the first book in the series; help it get off the ground by buying in!

5.  It is a lovely book!  Lime green and scarlet:  who doesn’t love that color scheme? If it’s good enough for android superhero the Vision, it’s good enough for me!

6.  It is a book I will sign for you!  It is a book I will doodle in for you!  It is a book I will talk about on your blog, your broadcast interview show, your podcast, or your creepy talk show that you host in your basement with mannequins that have pieces missing!  For the right price, it is a book I will read to you aloud during bathroom breaks at your place of employment!

7.  It is a book I wrote!  You can buy it in order to support me and my poverty-stricken lifestyle to prove your friendship, or to destroy in some bizarre access of strangely personal hatred!  I don’t care what you do with it, just buy it!

Some of the High Hat gang were updating their 100-best-movies list; I haven’t touched mine since the pre-Netflix days, and I’ve seen more movies in the last five years than I did in the 35 years before that.  So I figured it was time I did the same.  Alas, I got to about 124 without even including any foreign films, so I thought a different approach was called for.

Instead, I put together 365 movies I loved in many different categories:  domestic features, foreign films, documentaries, experimental film, animation, shorts, made-for-TV movies, children’s and family films, cult movies, and so on.  That way, I didn’t have to limit myself to only 100, and you end up with a guide that lets you watch a great movie every day for a year.

Your corrections, complaints, and questioning of my sentience welcome.  Here, in order of release, is your year of movies:

• L’Arrivée d’un Train en Gare de La Ciotat (Auguste & Louis Lumière, 1895, France)
• A Trip to the Moon (Georges Méliès, 1902, France)
• Dreams of the Rarebit Fiend (Winsor McCay, 1921, USA)
• Nanook of the North (Robert J. Flaherty, 1922, USA)
• The Battleship Potemkin (Sergei Eisenstein, 1925, Russia)
• The Adventures of Prince Achmed (Lotte Reineger, 1926, Germany)
• The Passion of Joan of Arc (Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1928, France)
• Un Chien Andalou (Luis Buñuel, 1929, France)
• The Blood of a Poet (Jean Cocteau, 1930, France)
• M (Fritz Lang, 1931, Germany)
• Freaks (Tod Browning, 1932, USA)
• I am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (Mervyn LeRoy, 1932, USA)
• Zero for Conduct (Jean Vigo, 1933, France)
• Duck Soup (Leo McCarey, 1933, USA)
• Triumph of the Will (Leni Riefenstahl, 1935, Germany)
• Bride of Frankenstein (James Whale, 1935, USA)
• Partie de Campagne (Jean Renoir, 1936, France)
• Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (David Hand, 1937, USA)
• Bringing Up Baby (Howard Hawks, 1938, USA)
• Out of the Inkwell (Dave Fleischer, 1938, USA)
• Stagecoach (John Ford, 1939, USA)
• The Rules of the Game (Jean Renoir, 1939, France)
• The Wizard of Oz (Victor Fleming, 1939, USA)
• The Grapes of Wrath (John Ford, 1940, USA)
• Pinocchio (Hamilton Luske & Ben Sharpsteen, 1940, USA)
• Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941, USA)
• The Maltese Falcon (John Huston, 1941, USA)
• Bambi (David Hand, 1942, USA)
• Casablanca (Michael Curtiz, 1942, USA)
• Shadow of a Doubt (Alfred Hitchcock, 1943, USA)
• Road to Utopia (Hal Walker, 1943, USA)
• Red Hot Riding Hood (Tex Avery, 1943, USA)
• Meshes of the Afternoon (Maya Deren & Alexander Hammid, 1943, USA)
• Double Indemnity (Billy Wilder, 1944, USA)
• Why We Fight (Frank Capra, USA, 1945)
• Rome, Open City (Roberto Rossellini, 1945, Italy)
• Detour (Edgar G. Ulmer, 1945, USA)
• Scarlet Street (Fritz Lang, 1945, USA)
• The Big Sleep (Howard Hawks, 1946, USA)
• Beauty and the Beast (Jean Cocteau, 1946, France)
• It’s a Wonderful Life (Frank Capra, 1946, USA)
• Fireworks (Kenneth Anger, 1947, USA)
• The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (John Huston, 1948, USA)
• La Terra Trema (Luchino Visconti, 1948, Italy)
• Macbeth (Orson Welles, 1948, USA)
• Act of Violence (Fred Zinnemann, 1948, USA)
• The Third Man (Carol Reed, 1949, England)
• White Heat (Raoul Walsh, 1949, USA)
• Thieves’ Highway (Jules Dassin, 1949, USA)
• Gun Crazy (Joseph H. Lewis, 1950, USA)
• Night and the City (Jules Dassin, 1950, USA)
• In a Lonely Place (Nicholas Ray, 1950, USA)
• The Asphalt Jungle (John Huston, 1950, USA)
• Sunset Blvd. (Billy Wilder, 1950, USA)
• Rashomon (Akira Kurosawa, 1950, Japan)
• The Thing from Another World (Howard Hawks, 1951, USA)
• Singin’ in the Rain (Gene Kelly & Stanley Donen, 1952, USA)
• High Noon (Fred Zinnemann, 1952, USA)
• Duck Amuck (Chuck Jones, 1953, USA)
• The Wages of Fear (Henri-Georges Clouzot, 1953, France)
• The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T (Roy Rowland, 1953, USA)
• Tokyo Story (Yazujiro Ozu, 1953, Japan)
• Seven Samurai (Akira Kurosawa, 1954, Japan)
• Johnny Guitar (Nicholas Ray, 1954, USA)
• La Strada (Federico Fellini, 1954, Italy)
• 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (Richard Fleischer, 1954, USA)
• Diabolique (Henri-Georges Clouzot, 1955, France)
• The Big Combo (Joseph H. Lewis, 1955, USA)
• Rififi (Jules Dassin, 1955, France)
• All That Heaven Allows (Douglas Sirk, 1955, USA)
• Pather Panchali (Satyajit Ray, 1955, India)
• Night and Fog (Alain Resnais, 1955, France)
• The Night of the Hunter (Charles Laughton, 1955, USA)
• Rebel without a Cause (Nicholas Ray, 1955, USA)
• The Searchers (John Ford, 1956, USA)
• The Silent World (Jacques Cousteau & Louis Malle, 1956, France)
• The Killing (Stanley Kubrick, 1956, USA)
• Bob le Flambeur (Jean-Pierre Melville, 1956, France)
• Requiem for a Heavyweight (Ralph Nelson, 1956, USA)
• The Red Balloon (Albert Lamorisse, 1956, France)
• The Seventh Seal (Ingmar Bergman, 1957, Sweden)
• Sweet Smell of Success (Alexander Mackendrick, 1957, USA)
• Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958, USA)
• Touch of Evil (Orson Welles, 1958, USA)
• Big Deal on Madonna Street (Mario Monicelli, 1958, Italy)
• Les Cousins (Claude Chabrol, 1959, France)
• Hiroshima Mon Amour (Alain Resnais, 1959, France)
• Jazz on a Summer’s Day (Bert Stern, 1959, USA)
• The World of Apu (Satyajit Ray, 1959, India)
• Breathless (Jean-Luc Godard, 1960, France)
• Peeping Tom (Michael Powell, 1960, England)
• Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960, USA)
• Blast of Silence (Allen Baron, 1961, USA)
• Last Year at Marienbad (Alain Resnais, 1961, France)
• West Side Story (Robert Wise & Jerome Robbins, 1961, USA)
• Jules and Jim (Francois Truffaut, 1962, France)
• La Jetée (Chris Marker, 1962, France)
• An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge (Robert Enrico, 1962, France)
• The Exterminating Angel (Luis Buñuel, 1962, Mexico)
• Window Water Baby Moving (Stan Brakhage, 1962, USA)
• The Manchurian Candidate (John Frankenheimer, 1962, USA)
• 8½ (Federico Fellini, 1963, Italy)
• The Leopard (Lucino Visconti, 1963, Italy)
• Youth of the Beast (Seijun Suzuki, 1963, Japan)
• From Russia with Love (Terence Young, 1963, England)
• Point of Order (Emile de Antonio, 1964, USA)
• Dr. Strangelove or:  How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (Stanley Kubrick, 1964, USA)
• Dog Star Man (Stan Brakhage, 1964, USA)
• A Hard Day’s Night (Richard Lester, 1964, England)
• Empire (Andy Warhol, 1964, USA)
• Scorpio Rising (Kenneth Anger, 1964, USA)
• Culloden (Peter Watkins, 1964, England)
• Repulsion (Roman Polanski, 1965, England)
• The War Game (Peter Watkins, 1965, England)
• A Charlie Brown Christmas (Bill Melendez, 1965, USA)
• Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (Mike Nichols, 1966, USA)
• The Battle of Algiers (Gillo Pontecorvo, 1966, Italy)
• Persona (Ingmar Bergman, 1966, Sweden)
• The Big T.N.T. Show (Larry Peerce, 1966, USA)
• The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (Sergio Leone, 1966, Italy)
• How the Grinch Stole Christmas! (Chuck Jones & Ben Washam, 1966, USA)
• Wavelength (Michael Snow, 1967, Canada)
• Don’t Look Back (D.A. Pennebaker, 1967, USA)
• Branded to Kill (Seijun Suzuki, 1967, Japan)
• Bonnie and Clyde (Arthur Penn, 1967, USA)
• Point Blank (John Boorman, 1967, USA)
• Titicut Follies (Frederick Wiseman, 1967, USA)
• Le Samouraï (Jean-Pierre Melville, 1967, France)
• Week-end (Jean-Luc Godard, 1967, France)
• The Producers (Mel Brooks, 1968, Mel Brooks)
• Les Biches (Claude Chabrol, 1968, France)
• 2001:  A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, 1968, USA)
• Death By Hanging (Nagisa Oshima, 1968, Japan)
• Yellow Submarine (George Dunning, 1968, England)
• Night of the Living Dead (George Romero, 1968, USA)
• Romeo and Juliet (Franco Zeffirelli, 1968, Italy)
• The Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus (Michael Lindsay-Hogg, 1968, England)
• if… (Lindsay Anderson, 1968, England)
• Salesman (Albert Maysles, David Maysles & Charlotte Zwerin, 1969, USA)
• The Wild Bunch (Sam Peckinpah, 1969, USA)
• The Butcher (Claude Chabrol, 1970, France)
• Woodstock (Michael Wadleigh, 1970, USA)
• The Ossuary (Jan Svankmajer, 1970, Czechoslovakia)
• Le Cercle Rouge (Jean-Pierre Melville, 1970, France)
• The Conformist (Bernardo Bertolucci, 1970, Italy)
• Le Voyou (Claude Lelouch, 1970, France)
• Gimme Shelter (Albert & David Maysles, 1970, USA)
• Le Petit Théâtre de Jean Renoir (Jean Renoir, 1970, France)
• Punishment Park (Peter Watkins, 1971, USA)
• Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory (Mel Stuart, 1971, USA)
• Two-Lane Blacktop (Monte Hellman, 1971)
• Duel (Steven Spielberg, 1971, USA)
• The Act of Seeing with One’s Own Eyes (Stan Brakhage, 1971, USA)
• The Godfather (Francis Ford Coppola, 1972, USA)
• Roma (Federico Fellini, 1972, Italy)
• The Ruling Class (Peter Medak, 1972, England)
• The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (Luis Buñuel, 1972, France)
• Aguirre, the Wrath of God (Werner Herzog, 1972, Germany)
• Charlotte’s Web (Charles A. Nichols & Iwao Takamoto, 1973, USA)
• Cocksucker Blues (Robert Frank, 1973, USA)
• The Holy Mountain (Alejandro Jodorowsky, 1973, Spain)
• Enter the Dragon (Robert Clouse, 1973, USA)
• Mean Streets (Martin Scorsese, 1973, USA)
• Badlands (Terrence Malick, 1973, USA)
• The Exorcist (William Friedkin, 1973, USA)
• The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (John Korty, 1974, USA)
• Blazing Saddles (Mel Brooks, 1974, USA)
• Ali:  Fear Eats the Soul (Ranier Werner Fassbinder, 1974, Germany)
• Monty Python and the Holy Grail (Terry Gilliam & Terry Jones, 1974, England)
• The Conversation (Francis Ford Coppola, 1974, USA)
• Hearts and Minds (Peter Davis, 1974, USA)
• Chinatown (Roman Polanski, 1974, USA)
• Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia (Sam Peckinpah, 1974, USA)
• Lancelot du Lac (Robert Bresson, 1974, France)
• Phantom of the Paradise (Brian De Palma, 1974, USA)
• Young Frankenstein (Mel Brooks, 1974, USA)
• The Godfather Part 2 (Francis Ford Coppola, 1974, USA)
• Fox and His Friends (Ranier Werner Fassbinder, 1975, Germany)
• Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (Chantal Akerman, 1975, Belgium)
• Nashville (Robert Altman, 1975, USA)
• Jaws (Steven Spielberg, 1975, USA)
• F for Fake (Orson Welles, 1975, USA)
• Grey Gardens (Albert & David Maysles, 1975, USA)
• Taxi Driver (Martin Scorsese, 1976, USA)
• The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (John Cassavetes, 1976, USA)
• Allegro Non Troppo (Bruno Bozzetto, 1976, Italy)
• Harlan County, USA (Barbara Kopple, 1976, Canada)
• Heart of Glass (Werner Herzog, 1976, USA)
• Killer of Sheep (Charles Burnett, 1977, USA)
• Annie Hall (Woody Allen, 1977, USA)
• The Truck (Marguerite Duras, 1977, France)
• Eraserhead (David Lynch, 1977, USA)
• A Grin without a Cat (Chris Marker, 1977, France)
• The 36^th Chamber of Shaolin (Liu Chia-Liang, 1978, Hong Kong)
• Jubilee (Derek Jarman, 1978, England)
• The Last Waltz (Martin Scorsese, 1978, USA)
• Apocalypse Now (Francis Ford Coppola, 1979, USA)
• Dawn of the Dead (George Romero, 1978, USA)
• Days of Heaven (Terrence Malick, 1978, USA)
• Richard Pryor:  Live in Concert (Jeff Margolis, 1979, USA)
• Tale of Tales (Yuriy Norshteyn, 1979, Russia)
• The Warriors (Walter Hill, 1979, USA)
• Real Life (Albert Brooks, 1979, USA)
• A Walk Through H:  The Reincarnation of an Ornithologist (Peter Greenaway, 1979, England)
• The Tin Drum (Volker Schlöndorff, 1979, Germany)
• Alien (Ridley Scott, 1979, USA)
• The Ninth Configuration (William Peter Blatty, 1980, USA)
• The Falls (Peter Greenaway, 1980, England)
• The Shining (Stanley Kubrick, 1980, USA)
• The Elephant Man (David Lynch, 1980, USA)
• Berlin Alexanderplatz (Ranier Werner Fassbinder, 1980, Germany)
• The Long Good Friday (John Mackenzie, 1980, England)
• Raging Bull (Martin Scorsese, 1980, USA)
• Pixote:  The Law of the Weakest (Hector Babenco, 1981, Brazil)
• The Decline of Western Civilization (Penelope Spheeris, 1981, USA)
• Time Bandits (Terry Gilliam, 1981, England)
• The Road Warrior (George Miller, 1981, Australia)
• Fitzcarraldo (Werner Herzog, 1982, Germany)
• Conan the Barbarian (John Milius, 1982, USA)
• The Atomic Café (Jayne Loader, Kevin Rafferty & Pierce Rafferty, 1982, USA)
• Burden of Dreams (Les Blank, 1982, USA)
• Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982, USA)
• Dimensions of Dialogue (Jan Svankmajer, 1982, Czechoslovakia)
• Sans Soliel (Chris Marker, 1983, France)
• Local Hero (Bill Forsyth, 1983, Scotland)
• The King of Comedy (Martin Scorsese, 1983, USA)
• Special Bulletin (Ed Zwick, 1983, USA)
• Nacht und Träume (Samuel Beckett, 1983, England)
• Urusei Yatsura 2:  Beautiful Dreamer (Mamoru Oshii, 1984, Japan)
• Repo Man (Alex Cox, 1984, USA)
• This is Spinal Tap (Rob Reiner, 1984, USA)
• Stop Making Sense (Jonathan Demme, 1984, USA)
• Stranger Than Paradise (Jim Jarmusch, 1984, USA)
• A Girl’s Own Story (Jane Campion, 1984, New Zealand)
• Secret Honor (Robert Altman, 1984, USA)
• Threads (Mick Jackson, 1984, England)
• Brazil (Terry Gilliam, 1985, England)
• Ran (Akira Kurosawa, 1985, Japan)
• The Big Snit (Richard Condie, 1985, Canada)
• After Hours (Martin Scorsese, 1985, USA)
• Mishima:  A Life in Four Chapters (Paul Schrader, 1985, USA)
• Re-Animator (Stuart Gordon, 1985, USA)
• Shoah (Claude Lantzmann, 1985, France)
• My Beautiful Laundrette (Stephen Frears, 1985, England)
• Tampopo (Juzo Itami, 1985, Japan)
• Street of Crocodiles (Stephen & Timothy Quay, 1986, USA)
• The Fly (David Cronenberg, 1986, USA)
• Blue Velvet (David Lynch, 1986, USA)
• Raising Arizona (Joel Coen, 1987, USA)
• Withnail and I (Bruce Robinson, 1987, England)
• Robocop (Paul Verhoeven, 1987, USA)
• Superstar:  The Karen Carpenter Story (Todd Haynes, 1987, USA)
• The Princess Bride (Rob Reiner, 1987, USA)
• Story of Women (Claude Chabrol, 1988, France)
• Grave of the Fireflies (Isao Takahata, 1988, Japan)
• Who Framed Roger Rabbit (Robert Zemeckis, 1988, USA)
• Akira (Katsuhiro Otomo, 1988, Japan)
• The Thin Blue Line (Errol Morris, 1988, USA)
• Eight Men Out (John Sayles, 1988, USA)
• Drowning By Numbers (Peter Greenaway, 1988, England)
• Traffik (Alastair Reid, 1989, England)
• Do the Right Thing (Spike Lee, 1989, USA)
• Tetsuo:  The Iron Man (Shinya Tsukamoto, 1989, Japan)
• The Killer (John Woo, 1989, Hong Kong)
• sex, lies and videotape (Steven Soderbergh, 1989, USA)
• The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover (Peter Greenaway, 1989, England)
• The Decalogue (Krzysztof Kieslowski, 1989, Poland)
• Roger & Me (Michael Moore, 1989, USA)
• GoodFellas (Martin Scorsese, 1990, USA)
• The Civil War (Ken Burns, 1990, USA)
• The Grifters (Stephen Frears, 1990, USA)
• The Silence of the Lambs (Jonathan Demme, 1991, USA)
• Barton Fink (Joel Coen, 1991, USA)
• Beauty and the Beast (Gary Trousdale & Kirk Wise, 1991, USA)
• Hearts of Darkness:  A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse (Fax Bahr & George Hickenlooper, 1991, USA)
• Brother’s Keeper (Joe Berlinger & Bruce Sinofsky, 1992, USA)
• Man Bites Dog (Benoît Poelvoorde, André Bonzel & Rémy Belvaux, 1992, Belgium)
• Glengarry Glen Ross (James Foley, 1992, USA)
• Malcolm X (Spike Lee, 1992, USA)
• Bad Lieutenant (Abel Ferrara, 1992, USA)
• From the East (Chantal Akerman, 1993, Belgium)
• And the Band Played On (Roger Spottiswoode, 1993, USA)
• 32 Short Films About Glenn Gould (Francois Girard, 1993, USA)
• The Nightmare Before Christmas (Henry Selick, 1993, USA)
• The Wrong Trousers (Nick Park, 1993, England)
• Pulp Fiction (Quentin Tarantino, 1994, USA)
• Heavenly Creatures (Peter Jackson, 1994, New Zealand)
• Hoop Dreams (Steve James, 1994, USA)
• The Kingdom (Lars von Trier, 1994, Denmark)
• Crumb (Terry Zwigoff, 1995, USA)
• Dead Man (Jim Jarmusch, 1995, USA)
• Safe (Todd Haynes, 1995, USA)
• Babe (Chris Noonan, 1995, Australia)
• Institute Benjamenta, or This Dream That One Calls Human Life (Stephen & Timothy Quay, 1995, USA)
• Watch the K Foundation Burn a Million Quid (Gimpo, 1995, England)
• La Cérémonie (Claude Chabrol, 1995, France)
• Toy Story (John Lasseter, 1995, USA)
• When We Were Kings (Leon Gast, 1996, USA)
• Fargo (Joel Coen, 1996, USA)
• The Bloody Child (Nina Menkes, 1996, USA)
• Hype!  (Doug Pray, 1996, USA)
• 4 Little Girls (Spike Lee, 1997, USA)
• The Butcher Boy (Neil Jordan, 1997, Ireland)
• Starship Troopers (Paul Verhoeven, 1997, USA)
• The Big Lebowski (Joel Coen, 1998, USA)
• Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (Terry Gilliam, 1998, USA)
• After Life (Hirokazu Koreeda, 1998, Japan)
• The Thin Red Line (Terrence Malick, 1998, USA)
• The Iron Giant (Brad Bird, 1999, USA)
• Audition (Takashi Miike, 1999, Japan)
• The Limey (Steven Soderbergh, 1999, USA)
• Being John Malkovich (Spike Jonze, 1999, USA)
• American Movie (Chris Smith, 1999, USA)
• Amores Perros (Alejandro González Iñárritu, 2000, Mexico)
• La Commune [Paris, 1871] (Peter Watkins, 2000, France)
• Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (Ang Lee, 2000, Taiwan)
• Dark Days (Marc Singer, 2000, USA)
• Memento (Christopher Nolan, 2000, USA)
• In the Mood for Love (Wong Kar-Wai, 2000, Hong Kong)
• Battle Royale (Kinji Fukasaku, 2000, Japan)
• Mulholland Dr. (David Lynch, 2001, USA)
• Gerry (Gus van Sant, 2002, USA)
• Bloody Sunday (Paul Greengrass, 2002, England)
• Femme Fatale (Brian De Palma, 2002, France)
• City of God (Fernando Meirelles & Kátia Lund, 2002, Brazil)
• Russian Ark (Alexander Sokurov, 2002, Russia)
• 10 Minutes (Ahmed Imamovic, 2002, Bosnia)
• Adaptation. (Spike Jonze, 2002, USA)
• Dogville (Lars von Trier, 2003, Denmark)
• The Fog of War (Errol Morris, 2003, USA)
• Finding Nemo (Andrew Stanton & Lee Unkrich, 2003, USA)
• The Triplets of Belleville (Sylvain Chomet, 2003, France)
• Los Angeles Plays Itself (Thom Anderson, 2003, USA)
• The Saddest Music in the World (Guy Maddin, 2003, Canada)
• Lost in Translation (Sofia Coppola, 2003, USA)
• Time of the Wolf (Michael Haneke, 2003, France)
• Elephant (Gus van Sant, 2003, USA)
• Angels in America (Mike Nichols, 2003, USA)
• Oldboy (Chan-Wook Park, 2003, South Korea)
• Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (Michel Gondry, 2004, USA)
• Tropical Malady (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2004, Thailand)
• The Incredibles (Brad Bird, 2004, USA)
• Howl’s Moving Castle (Hayao Mikazaki, 2004, Japan)
• Brick (Rian Johnson, 2005, USA)
• Grizzly Man (Werner Herzog, 2005, USA)
• My Dad is 100 Years Old (Guy Maddin, 2005, USA)
• 49 Up (Michael Apted, 2005, England)
• The New World (Terrence Malick, 2005, USA)
• The Road to Guantánamo (Michael Winterbottom, 2006, England)
• A Scanner Darkly (Richard Linklater, 2006, USA)
• Manufactured Landscapes (Jennifer Balchwai, 2006, Canada)
• Zodiac (David Fincher, 2007, USA)
• Persepolis (Marjane Satrapi & Vincent Paronnaud, 2007, France)
• No Country for Old Men (Joel Coen, 2007, USA)
• There Will Be Blood (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2007, USA)
• Man on Wire (James Marsh, 2008, USA)
• Sita Sings the Blues (Nina Paley, 2008, USA)
• I’ve Loved You So Long (Philippe Claudel, 2008, France)
• WALL-E (Andrew Stanton, 2008, USA)
• The Headless Woman (Lucrecia Martel, 2008, Spain)
• Trouble the Water (Tia Lessin & Carl Deal, 2008, USA)
• Synecdoche, New York (Charlie Kaufman, 2008, USA)
• Red Riding (Tony Grisoni, 2009, England)
• Dogtooth (Yorgos Lanthimos, 2009, Greece)
• Carlos (Olivier Assayas, 2010, France)

So, there’s this:

And there’s nothing inherently wrong with the argument that big dumb summer blockbusters should be held to different critical standards than art films.  The thing is, though, the video short-circuits that argument, calling you a snobby effete hipster jackoff with a funny haircut for daring to equivocate that different types of art forms cannot be judged by the same set of critical rules. Check out the sniveling New York faggot-type who cringes that ballets, operas and Michael Bay movies aren’t really the same thing: I hope someone shoves THAT guy into a garbage can, right?

As to the meat of the matter, one could also argue whether or not Michael Bay works artfully within his own chosen framework — personally, I think his movies tend to fail even as big dumb blockbusters because he crams so much into to the field of vision that they come across as overstuffed and incoherent. (And you can certainly carry that argument over into other art forms — it’s a common criticism of Wagner, for example, or power metal.) I didn’t object to Green Lantern (to make this about someone other than Michael Bay) because it was a big loud CGI-stuffed superhero movie; I loved a lot about of the Iron Man, Spider-Man and X-Men franchises. I objected to it because it looked like a tiresome, boring, bloody mess.

But what really bugs me about it is something that’s been pointed out by plenty of other sharp cultural observers:  the allegedly anti-’snob’ pseudo-populism that acts like it’s scoring some valuable critical point by making fun of straw-man ‘hipsters’ who only like indie movies, or who refuse on perhaps shaky general principles to go see explosion-packed CGI action blockbusters. As has been noted time and time again, these people have already lost. They are a small minority, the movies they like rarely make any money, and nobody really cares what they think. They have almost no say in what anyone does, says or believes about the culture, and are largely talking only to themselves.

The kind of people who love blockbuster movies, conversely, have totally and completely won. The movies they like dominate the box office to a ridiculous degree. The studios put the majority of their talent and resources into making the movies they want to see. (I live in a city of two million people, and I have not been to see an art film in a theater here in four years, because they simply do not play here.) They get the movies they want with the actors they want by the directors they want, and they make so much money that they’ll get the sequels they want until they stop wanting them. The only thing they don’t get is the respect of ‘snobs’, so they’ve now made it their job to make those people out to be phonies and weaklings and cringing fools.

It’s a bullying cultural attitude. It’s a triumphalist mainstream movement grabbing for the throats of a tiny minority of dissenters just because they can. It’s like finding the nerdy kids in high school who get beaten up for liking role-playing games, and then beating them up some more for not liking sports. It reminds me of some of the uglier aspects of contemporary politics (and some of the more obnoxious on-line practitioners remind me of the folks who espouse some belief or another not because they really believe in the ideology, but simply to ‘piss off the liberals’). I know most of the movies and TV shows and music that I like are never going to be very popular; isn’t that enough? The Michael Bays of this world have already won; I accept that the filmmaking approach of him and people like him has become culturally, stylistically, and economically dominant. Do I have to like it, too? Isn’t it enough to have 90% of the public on your side, without having to belittle the 10% who would rather watch something else? It reminds me of these people who use accusations of snobbery against those who dislike Britney Spears or Garth Brooks or Billy Joel. Isn’t the massive success and cultural dominance of these musicians enough? Can’t they be happy that their flavor of shit has been shoveled all over the landscape — do they have to make everybody eat it with a smile?

To me, that’s the real snobbery, a sort of cultural eliminationalism. I don’t care if some two-bit self-absorbed artsy schmuck doesn’t want to watch Transformers; Transformers is going to do just fine without him. But when the people who support Transformers are not only seeing the movie make enough money to buy God a new summer home, take up every inch of landscape on the cultural horizon, and guarantee permanent employment to the people who made it, but also making sure that anyone who dares speak against it is mocked, derided or fired…well, that’s a lot uglier and more insecure than the guy who only watches foreign films, right?

It may not seem that way in Brooklyn, and people whose cultural perspective is formed by a steady diet of Pitchfork and the AV Club may have a skewed perspective of the cultural clout of the hipster/snob minority.  Out here in the heartland, though, reality couldn’t be more obvious. Like I said, art films simply don’t play here, despite this being one of the biggest cities in the one of the biggest states in America. Most good bands don’t play here, either; I’d like to attribute that to the fact that San Antonio is close to both Austin and Houston, but that’s not entirely it. Philadelphia is close to both New York and Boston, but bands don’t skip it; they know they’ll find an audience there, and they know they won’t here. Every day, I get to see the dominance of the mainstream culture in a way I never did when I lived in Chicago.

It’s easy to see that if you look at the world through a specific lens, it can seem like certain cultural tendencies are far bigger than they really are. (I myself have often been annoyed with critics who talk about indie bands with marginal sales numbers as if they’re far more culturally relevant than metal bands and hip-hop acts who outsell them by orders of magnitude.) But that’s an illusion. Michael Bay’s movies are far, far, far more successful than any movie made by a hipster darling like Bela Tarr or Apichatpong Weerasethakul will ever be. And you can make a pretty convincing argument that every dollar that goes to funding a Michael Bay movie is a dollar that doesn’t go to someone attempting a more thoughtful, ‘artsier’ film. There’s more of a leveling of taste in music today because the industry is in the toilet, and the gap between quality and popularity is surprisingly narrow in video games, but in most every other artistic medium — film and television especially, but also stand-up comedy, visual art, and even in relatively weak sectors like literature and theater — the difference between the popular mainstream stuff and the edgier indie stuff is vast.

And that’s fine — the market will out, and all that; I can’t change the general public’s taste, nor would I want to. Which is why I find it so infuriating that they want to change mine. I’m fine with knowing that TV shows I like are forever going to be on the cancellation bubble, while Two and a Half Men will run until its leads are skeletal. I just don’t want to have to be told to like it.

Terence Malick’s new film, Treee of Life, has debuted at Cannes, and as is drearily predictable, it’s already causing waves of controversy.  Booing, walkouts, endless vitriol, critics and viewers exchanging invective — the only difference between this and his other films is that now people are having the arguments on Twitter.  Every argument over Malick’s films has already been had, and it probably won’t do any good to rehash the arguments.  I am saying nothing original here, merely venting a personal frustration I have at some of the critical reaction to his work.  I haven’t seen Tree of Life, of course, and maybe it sucks.  But he’s never made anything close to a bad movie, as far as I’m concerned, and is one of the very few authentic geniuses in the medium America has ever produced.  His work is visually stunning to the point of being nearly unimpeachable; it has an emotional impact that belies its narrative simplicity; and it is willing to take chances that almost no one in the realm of commercial filmmaking would dare to take.  So there’s my bias, laid out right here at the beginning.

If people hate him, they hate him, and there’s not much I can do about that, but I think part of the problem is that he’s making movies that are trying to do things beyond — or at least on a different track from — what most movies are trying to do, so people are judging him by standards he’s not really trying to meet.  And that’s one of the reasons that so many critical assessments of his work seem pretentious or misguided or whatever; for a mainstream director, he’s perilously close to being an experimental filmmaker, and most critics both inside and outside of academia don’t really have the language to describe experimental film on its own terms.  It’s like Conrad Hall says — it’s hard to articulate a lot of the visual subtleties of film, because we lack the proper metaphors to convey their emotional impact.

Malick’s stuff is closer to poetry than to narrative, and closer to music than to poetry.  His sharpest thematic tool is portraying the immediacy and permanence of nature, and that’s something that’s devilishly hard to do with any kind of a traditional narrative (I think only Herzog has really been successful in that regard).  What kind of a story, what kind of a narrative can you shape that adequately delivers the emotional impact that nature has on people?  So you end up with comments like Andrew O’Hehir over at Salon; his review of Tree is mostly positive, but he says it doesn’t have anything close to a successful standard narrative, as if that’s a legitimate criticism.  It would be for, say, John Ford, or Martin Scorsese, or even the Coen Brothers.  But it doesn’t have anything to do with what Terence Malick is trying to do.  I can’t imagine anyone who understands him trying to apply that criticism to James Joyce, but people still throw it at Malick all the time; while I wouldn’t say that Malick has the same goals or concerns as Joyce did, I do think they’re equally placed in terms of trying to do something radically different with the media in which they work.

It’s frustrating to me when people who are obviously pushing back against the traditional constraints of a medium are judged as if they were required to play by the same roles as everyone else.  Intelligent critics stopped asking a long time ago why, say, Ornette Coleman wasn’t playing the same kind of jazz as everybody else; but they’re still wondering how come Terence Malick can’t tell a narrative story that doesn’t drift.  It’s because that’s not what he’s trying to do.  And fair enough if that doesn’t work for you; no one says you have to like stream-of-consciousness novels or free jazz or experimental film.  People are free to hate it as much as they want.  If it’s not for them, they can leave it alone, as do all audiences when selecting what they will watch and judge.  What they can’t do, at least if they are critics attempting to recognize what is essential in someone’s work, is to continue to judge it by a set of criteria that do not apply.  That’s a profound mistake of judgment, and nothing good can come of it.