The 3 R's Blog // Reading, 'Riting, and Randomness

At the movies: The Artist

2012-01-26T05:00:00.000-08:00

The Artist (official movie site)

Comedy/drama, 2011 (rated PG-13)

Starring: Jean Dujardin, Berenice Bejo

Written and directed by: Michel Hazanvicius

Synopsis, via RottenTomatoes.com:

Hollywood 1927. George Valentin (Jean Dujardin) is a silent movie superstar. The advent of the talkies will sound the death knell for his career and see him fall into oblivion. For young extra Peppy Miller (Berenice Bejo), it seems the sky's the limit - major movie stardom awaits. The Artist tells the story of their interlinked destinies. -- (C) Weinstein

One of the hottest buzzed-about films of the 2011/12 awards season is a black-and-white silent film with an international cast. The Artist snuck up on me, to be honest. A couple of months ago I knew almost nothing about it, but my interest was piqued after seeing Hugo, which shares some themes with it. Both films are valentines to the early days of motion pictures; in Hugo, they’re part of a central character’s history. In The Artist, they’re the central framework of the story.

A silent film really needs to draw on the maxim that “a picture is worth a thousand words” to tell its story. The moviemakers really did their homework, and make outstanding use of the film toolbox. The story is told visually, and the look of the film is perfect. It’s beautifully lit in crisp black-and-white and filmed in the proper scale for its time (that is, not in widescreen). The actors are wonderfully cast and skilled in the expressive balance of face and body that makes film acting unique.

However, the most important element in making this work as a film is using those pretty pictures in a compelling narrative context, and The Artist succeeds there as well. The story itself is fairly simple--a classic tale of fortunes lost and found in late 1920s/Depression-era Hollywood--and to go beyond the synopsis quoted above would stray into spoiler territory, so I won’t. The beauty of it isn’t just in the look, though; it’s in the telling. What’s conveyed through physical performance, some lip reading, and a few title cards is complete, often hilarious, and deeply touching.

The secondary theme of the relationship between a man and his dog grabbed me too, of course.

My husband is a movie buff, and here’s what he said about The Artist on Facebook: ‎”The Artist was amazing! If you love old movies, you have to see it! Beautiful film!” I can’t agree more--this is a wonderful film, suitable for all except the youngest children (who would probably be bored, sadly)--very, very recommended!

(Almost) everyone's a critic. Really.

2012-01-25T05:00:00.000-08:00

The adage that “everyone’s a critic” may never have been more true than it is these days, thanks to the Internet. We may prefer to call ourselves “reviewers” rather than “critics.” We may take a less formal, more personal approach than traditional criticism, discussing our subjective responses to a work rather than assessing it against objective criteria. And we may prefer not to “criticize” at all, choosing to discuss only works we feel positive about.

But that doesn’t mean that those of us who blog and tweet about product of all kinds--and that means books and movies and music just as much as it does food and fashion and travel, etc.--aren’t performing at least some of the traditional functions of the critic. On a recent Pop Culture Happy Hour podcast, Stephen Thompson identified those functions as “5 C’s:”

Curate
Consume
Cull
Contextualize
Care

As a writer and editor at NPR Music, these attributes factor into the “recommendation-based reviews” Thompson writes for the site. That term seems to describe what many of us are writing for our own sites. We probably do have more freedom than most professional reviewers to review only what we choose, and maybe only what we like, but the job may not be as different as we think it is...and I think those “5 Cs” are just as applicable.

Granted, professional reviewers don’t have to do so much of the job on their own; they usually have editors. I do freelance recommendation-based book reviews outside my blog as well, and I receive several galleys each month to consider for those. My editor has already sorted through many dozens more before sending out her picks to reviewers, and plenty don’t get that far. She has a method to let us know if there are any in the batches we get that she’s really like us to review, but the choices from that point on--further culling--are up to us. Once the reviews are submitted, they may be revised and further edited...and sometimes they may be edited so far they don't run at all, which is a form of curation as well, I suppose.

As non-professional reviewers, we bloggers perform some of those 5-C functions ourselves, and we may give some more weight than others. When we decide which review offers to accept, or galleys to request, or books to buy, we’re culling. Some of us don’t review every book we read, and in choosing which ones we think are worth talking about, we’re curating. Our eventual discussion of the book may include some consideration of its place in a larger context--perhaps within a genre, as part of a series, or in its overall theme. And ultimately, we find the most to say about the things we care about the most.

In the nearly five years I’ve blogged here, there’s only one book that I read for personal reasons that I finished and didn’t post about. (I just didn’t have much to say about it, and I was pressed for time with other commitments--ultimately, I didn’t care enough.) I’ve gotten much better at the culling-and-curating when it comes to accepting personal review copies and blog tours, so I’m less likely to end up with books I really don’t want to talk about, or wouldn’t care to recommend.

A survey of consumer purchasing behavior presented at the 2012 ABA Winter Institute had some interesting findings related to the power of recommendations in getting information about books:

“Readers find out about books mostly through personal recommendations (49.2%), bookstore staff recommendations (30.8%), advertising (24.4%), search engine searches (21.6%) and book reviews (18.9%). Much less important are online algorithms (16%), blogs (12.1%) and social networks (11.8%).”

I question those findings, because I think that in the current climate, there’s far more overlap between “personal recommendations,” “book reviews,” “blogs,” and “social networks” than these divisions reflect. If the Internet has allowed everyone to be a critic and has given rise to the non-professional review, the “personal recommendation” may just take different forms these days. I consider the reviews of just about every book blogger I read--and that’s a lot of book bloggers--as personal recommendations (positive or negative), and that totally mixes up those categories.

And when everyone's a critic, we have an additional job: culling and curating the criticism we consume, so that we end up with the recommendations we care about. It's one more thing to consider from a critical perspective, and personally, I think critical thinking is a critical skill. Maybe we should thank the Internet for giving us all the chance to be critics.

BEA and WBN: Two book events to talk about!

2012-01-24T05:00:00.000-08:00

I've just put one bookish event on my calendar...and will be taking another one off.

Is it too soon to ask about your plans for Book Expo America 2012?

The annual trade show will take place June 5-7 in New York City, and registration is already open! Bloggers may apply for non-editorial media badges or obtain a pass by registering to attend the Book Blogger Convention on June 4.

For the record, the BBC registration costs less than the three-day BEA pass and allows the same show access, but if it means you’d be in New York City for an extra day, it could end up costing you more overall. You and your personal budget are the only ones who can make that call.

I’ve been looking for announcements about the BBC programming, and haven’t seen any yet--if you have, please share any links! But I’ve known since I came back from BEA 2011 that I wanted to go again in 2012, so I registered this week.

Registering is the easy part, though--I have travel plans to make now, and that's where it gets interesting! Right now, I’m thinking that I’ll fly into New York on June 2 (the Saturday before) and have a free day on Sunday before BBC on Monday. I haven’t decided whether I’ll stay all the way through BEA or leave before Thursday. I also haven’t booked a hotel yet, and I’d really like to have a roommate this year--so as you make your plans, keep me in mind, and e-mail me if you’d consider that!

It's not too late to ask you about your plans for World Book Night.

You’ve probably heard about this already, but just in case you haven’t, the deadline to apply to be a book giver for World Book Night--to be held in the US and UK on April 23--is just a week away! WBN is looking for 50,000 volunteers to hand out books for the first time in the USA.

I love the idea of World Book Night. Each volunteer book giver will distribute 20 copies of one of 30 specially-selected books within his or her community, ideally to people who don’t read very much. The books are a mix of popular fiction, a few modern literary classics, accessible nonfiction, and young-adult favorites, and in keeping with the event’s mission, givers must have “read and loved” the title they are asking to hand out:

“World Book Night launched in the UK in 2011 and saw passionate readers across that beautiful country, give 1 million books to light or non readers to spread the joy and love of reading. Reading changes lives and at the heart of World Book Night lies the simplest of ideas and acts - that of putting a book into another person’s hand and saying ‘this one’s amazing, you have to read it’.”

Prospective givers list their first, second, and third giveaway choices on the application, and givers will be chosen based on “Where, to whom & why (they) want to give books away.”

And ultimately, those criteria are why I’ve decided not to apply to be a WBN book giver. I’ve started the application two or three times, and I may be overthinking things, but when the organization states that these are their selection criteria, I take them at their word. And it is painful to admit this, but I don’t have good answers for any of those questions. Besides that, the idea of physically handing a book to a non-book-loving stranger and telling him or her that they’ve got to read it is just a bit terrifying to this particular introvert; without solid motivation in the where/whom/why categories, it’s really hard to make a case for my doing this...aside from my aforementioned love of the idea, that is.

I’ll keep loving the idea, but I think it may be best to leave the execution of World Book Night to others. Have you applied to be a WBN book giver? What book do you want to give...and where, to whom, and why?

The 3 R's Blog // Reading, 'Riting, and Randomness

At the movies: *The Artist*

(Almost) everyone's a critic. Really.

BEA and WBN: Two book events to talk about!

At the movies: The Artist