The only thing more annoying than the annual “ten best” movie lists that critics start churning out around this time of year (and I’ll admit that I devour them, and would gladly write one myself if someone only asked) are the ever-so-pretentious lists of “the best movies that only I, the critic, was wise enough or privileged enough to see this year.” Here’s one such top ten, for instance, that offers up nine films I haven’t seen and one I have — and that one, Spartan, doesn’t exactly recommend the author’s taste in cinema.
Here’s his take: “In a year when fiction films were conspicuously silent about the political moment, David Mamet’s conspiracy thriller about a kidnapped first daughter was a bracing dose of studio-backed subversiveness.” (It’s true — the anti-Bush subtext in these two summer tentpole flicks was pretty well hidden, wasn’t it? God knows it was barely noticeable here.) The review goes on to praise Spartan as “a strange, existential meditation on duty, militarism, and moral choice,” and notes that while “the strange cadence of Mametese and the hermetic staginess can be alienating . . . they are crucial to the director’s efforts to push his movie into the abstract.”
Here’s my rule of thumb: Anytime a critic praises a director for pushing any movie — let alone a low-budget thriller — “into the abstract,” you know you’ve entered the realm of the lousy-but-pretentious, which is not a particularly fun place to spend a Saturday night. I promise you, folks, Spartan is bad — both in the way that only David Mamet can be bad and in a heap of others. The only thing that raises it to the level of “interesting pop culture artifact” is the sheer strangeness of its central conceit, which is almost bizarre enough to merit the price of the Blockbuster rental. I won’t spoil it — but suffice to say, David Mamet thinks Jenna and Barbara should be keeping a weather eye on their Dad . . .
Fortunately, TNR Online also has Chris Orr, my soon-to-be-former Atlantic superior (no conflicts of interest here, sir!), whose DVD reviews are diamonds in the online rough. (I’ve lauded his anti-Spiderman 2 sentiments elsewhere.) Why the deeply mediocre Manohla Dargis got the Times‘s critic gig when there was someone of Chris’s talents available, I’ll never understand. (If only his name were Ma-noh-laaaaaaa . . . light of my life, fire of my . . . whoops, sorry, tangent.)
— Ross
