Monthly Archives: July 2017

Everyone's a Critic, Thoughts

W2 exercise: referentiality and Baby Driver

Last week we pitched a 300-word critical review, to be written over the weekend and then workshopped in class. This is mine.

No film exists in a vacuum. All but the most experimental filmmakers weave a fabric of archetypes, narrative patterns and cultural touchstones into something that is — hopefully — new. The internet has opened up entire worlds of art for young practitioners to draw from in their own work, from vintage rock albums and arcane literature to obscure films that previous generations of artists could have enjoyed only rarely at repertory cinemas. As a result, we live in a time where there is no single dominant vector of influence, and never before has mass culture been so vast and varied in its sources of inspiration.

Baby Driver director Edgar Wright has made a career of invoking pop cultural history in his work, from Spaced’s litany of direct visual references to cinema history, to Scott Pilgrim vs The World aping the aesthetic of video games, to the “Three Flavours” trilogy’s collage of zombie/cop/sci-fi tropes. It’s as if Wright is attempting to personify Quentin Tarantino’s famous quip that “when people ask me if I went to film school I tell them no, I went to films.”

With Baby Driver, Wright has distilled referentiality into an art form of its own, where any deeper symbolic meaning is cast aside in favour of allusions, references, cameos and easter eggs. For audiences, the experience is a two-hour long game of spot-the-reference as much as it is anything else, and in this way the film is tailor-made for a generation of viewers raised with the history of human culture mere clicks away.

Wright is careful to ensure that the film is a high-octane thrill ride no matter how familiar the viewer is with the history of cinema, but there is a strange pleasure to be found in recognising the main character, Baby (Ansel Elgort), as a sort of millennial echo of Ryan O’Neal’s character from The Driver (whose director, Walter Hill, has a voice cameo in Baby Driver), or noting that the construction of scenes in which Doc (Kevin Spacey) briefs his criminal underlings on the plans for their next job, are reminiscent of another heist-gone-wrong film: Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs.

By under-serving deeper meaning and symbolism, Baby Driver opens itself up to the accusations that it is all sound and fury signifying nothing. But when the sound and fury is this enjoyable, does it matter?

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Everyone's a Critic, Reflections

Reviews vs criticism, constructive feedback

What’s the difference between review and criticism? To me it’s one of those “I’ll know it when I see it” things, where I recognise that there is a clear difference between a review and a piece of criticism, but the boundaries between the two can often be quite blurry and hard to identify.

Reviews:

  • Are generally less in-depth
  • Function as a consumer guide
  • Should describe the text
  • Have a responsibility not to spoil the text (assuming the reader is not familiar with the work being reviewed)
  • Are more prescriptive in terms of content/structure

Criticism:

  • Can be more in-depth
  • Is less prescriptive in terms of content/structure (i.e. criticism could be a personal essay, thematic response to the text, draw from a wider context, etc.)
  • Does not necessarily need to describe the text
  • Can assume the reader is familiar with the text

To illustrate this difference, this week we read two different critical responses to Tricky’s album Maxinquaye: one a short 300-word review in Rolling Stone, and one a much larger retrospective exploration of its themes and cultural impact by Mark Fisher. Reading two different critical evaluations of the same work was incredibly interesting, and I think everyone in the class got much more out of Fisher’s writing than the Rolling Stone review, which jibes with my own personal experience with longform criticism. With the space to really dive into a work and respond to its themes and preoccupations without needing to necessarily describe and evaluate it, readers can gain a much deeper and more considered understanding of a work of art. It also allows criticism to function as an art form itself.

On Wednesday we paired up in class to discuss a 300-word review of our own, and to give/receive feedback on our writing. Strangely, this is one of the only times in my life that I was actually really happy with a piece of my writing after the first draft. I wrote about Baby Driver and referentiality in Edgar Wright’s work, and my points seemed to flow out of my head in a very natural way as I was writing it, which has never happened to me before. I think it might be because I had very well-defined constraints, so by necessity I had to focus on just the one most important point I wanted to explore, and didn’t get bogged down in wondering how to begin and which points to make.

When it came time to receive feedback from a classmate I was worried that this might backfire on me, like perhaps although my writing came easily and made sense to me in the moment I was writing it, someone coming to it with fresh eyes would have no idea what I was rambling about.

I was paired with Katrina, who wrote a really great piece on the Mad Men series finale and how it ties together the threads that the show had been exploring over its eight seasons (namely, Don Draper’s discovery of his true self and the impact this has on those closest to him). Her thesis was very clearly expressed and the piece was well constructed, so the majority of my feedback was about relatively minor things like providing more context and keeping an eye on things like tenses, word choice and the passive voice. Kat’s feedback on my piece was really valuable — she pointed out a few areas where I’d left points implied rather than actually expressed, and had some good ideas for areas to expand, so I definitely think the article will be improved once I make those changes.

Receiving constructive criticism and feedback can be pretty daunting, but the way the critique session was framed in a positive way meant that it actually felt very collegiate and respectful. I’m really happy with how positively I responded to well-defined constraints, so that might be a trick I continue to try to impose on myself in the future. I’ve also had good experiences working with editors in the past, so I’m looking forward to having more of these critiquing sessions in the future. And of course most importantly, I’m going to try my best to keep writing as often as I possibly can.

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