It can be hard for criticism to cohere when it’s perforated by ambivalence. A rave coasts along, buoyed by enthusiasm. A pan serves up the dramatic tension on a platter: The people trying to sell you a book (or movie or play) insist that it’s great, and here’s why it’s unremittingly awful. Mixed feelings are trickier, and more vulnerable. They’re like unstable elements waiting to be pulled into a wishy-washy middle ground.
Reading “The Earth Dies Streaming,” a collection of film writing by A.S. Hamrah, you realize it doesn’t have to be this way. As the resident movie critic of the journal n+1, Hamrah is committed to his ambivalence, conveying it with a mixture of precision and conviction that will remind you how much more there is to be gleaned from a review than whether a movie is “good” or “bad” (even if it’s a movie you happen to deem very good or very bad indeed).
When he first started reviewing films, Hamrah was bothered by how easily his sentences could get sucked into the maw of the entertainment industry, and so he resolved “to never include anything in my writing that could be extracted and used for publicity.” Nothing that might become a blurb, that is, if he could help it. He decided to make his negative opinions unusable too, resistant to algorithm-driven cultural curation.
“Write so that Rotten Tomatoes cannot apprehend your work,” he suggests, “which will allow its meaning to be deformed to the point where studios will not know what to do with it.” This is perverse. It is also delightful. A review that begins with “Whit Stillman’s movies are like porn films with the sex scenes cut out” will entice a curious human and confound an aggregation machine.
Hamrah’s tenure at n+1 began in 2008, with an Oscars roundup that he literally phoned in because his day job kept him too busy. (For money and health insurance, he uses “semiotics to analyze television programming for a brand consultancy” — a postmodern occupation if there ever was one.) The riffs he dictated to his editor were terse and funny, with judgment slyly imparted through insinuation and association. He had this to say about “Atonement,” an adaptation of the Ian McEwan novel: “Everything McEwan writes ends up as a movie. Someday his shopping lists will be filmed.”
As clever as such lines are, they were recorded in another era. If you read “The Earth Dies Streaming” from beginning to end, and I suggest you do, you won’t get to that 2008 Oscars roundup until you’re almost finished with the book, which mostly proceeds in reverse chronological order. The first review meets us where we are right now, in Trump’s America. Hamrah describes “A Quiet Place,” a post-apocalyptic fantasy in which a nation of whiners is forced by noise-seeking monsters to stay silent, as “a horror movie for MAGA-ites.”
A political awareness imbues Hamrah’s criticism without weighing it down. He doesn’t succumb to a leaden moralizing because he pays close attention to the medium he’s writing about, alert to what he sees and hears. Gérard Depardieu in 2017 is “still half man, half wildebeest.” Anthony Hopkins, playing Alfred Hitchcock, is remembered for his prosthetic lips and his noisy slurping.
Steven Spielberg shows up periodically in these pages as a stand-in for a certain kind of Hollywood vision: so unquestionably talented and so exquisitely banal that even his vaunted liberalism can’t prevent him from churning out movies that often end up being fundamentally conservative, full of empty grandeur. Spielberg says how much he admires elders like Stanley Kubrick but then unwittingly botches the homage, using classic footage of Kubrick’s “The Shining” in “Ready Player One” only to deface it with what Hamrah calls “Scooby-Doo action.”
On the movies he likes, Hamrah is idiosyncratic, sometimes apparently surprised by his own surprise. “Flight,” starring Denzel Washington as a heroic pilot with an alcohol problem, “is so good, except for the syrupy last 10 minutes, that it is hard to believe Robert Zemeckis, who directed it, has spent the last 25 or so years since he made ‘Back to the Future’ directing the things he’s directed.” The quietly unnerving “First Reformed” prompts Hamrah to decide “it is time to admit that Ethan Hawke is the great survivor of his generation of male leads,” even if he “may play too nice sometimes.”
Every critic has a bugbear, and whenever you see the word “nice” in one of Hamrah’s reviews, you know he believes that something has gone awry — or maybe not awry enough. Nice is too comfortable and comforting to be trusted. It’s a gentrifying force, replacing whatever is “twisted and ugly” and singularly weird with an attractive sheen that might seem safer but ultimately isn’t. Like painter and critic Manny Farber, the subject of an incisive and moving essay in this volume, Hamrah is suspicious of anything that dulls the senses, lulling audiences into a false sense of security and therefore complacency.
Part of his vigilance extends to being attuned to the circumstances under which he watches movies. He contrasts the experience of sitting next to other critics at a press screening to watching a blurry bootleg video of “The Spiderwick Chronicles” in the crowded waiting room of a walk-in health clinic in Brooklyn. “As I sat there,” he writes, “in pain myself and barely able to focus, I realized that this was the future of moviegoing.”
Hollywood tries to be a dream factory, but real life inevitably intrudes. Hamrah misses a festival screening because of a therapy appointment. He slips in a conversation with his aunt, whose friend “sees a lot of movies for free” because “he knows people” through his job as a prison guard. Hamrah gets mistaken for Orson Welles, even though Hamrah doesn’t wear a hat or a cape and, unlike Welles, is very much alive.
Now that online streaming has made for a glut of unwanted DVDs, entire cinematic eras are being offered on the cheap. “I will never forget the time I saw a man in a parking lot scraping the snow off the windshield of his car with the DVD of ‘Independence Day’ he had just bought,” Hamrah writes. The image is so real and so vivid and so reflective of where we are now that my first thought was, “That ought to be in a movie.”
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Publication Notes:
“The Earth Dies Streaming: Film Writing, 2002-2018”
By A.S. Hamrah
452 pages. n+1 Books. $20.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.