New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd has her fans, but I am not one of them. Her pieces usually read to me like a series of drafts of alternate leads: She keeps trying out one-liners and fine-tuning her jokes, but seems uninterested in actually building an argument. Often she has her finger on the pulse of a narrow spectrum of Beltway (and, lately, Hollwood) insiders; she aggressively distances herself from her subjects via a barricade of wisecracks, but they seem to be the only stratum of society she is actually interested in.
Her piece
today on Soderbergh’s new “Full Frontal” (which I have not seen, but Stephanie Zacharek reviews here) is actually somewhat more linear than the norm for her; this time, the problem is that her argument — that “indie” does not necessarily equal “good,” or, as she says, “just because something is grainy doesn’t mean it’s cooler” — is about 30 years old. There is nothing novel or innovative in pointing out that being low-budget crude, or art-house obscure, does not in itself render a movie worthy of one’s attention or ticket dollar.
Pauline Kael established this essential critical stance early on in her career, and several generations of critics — myself very much included — grew up accepting it as a given. Cheap movies succeed or fail artistically in much the same ratio as expensive ones. There is no correlation between budget size and quality (or virtue). About the only indictment of big Hollywood movies that does not apply equally to small indie movies is that they squander huge sums of money and cultural attention. When an indie flops, the waste is less egregious.
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