Raving and Ranting and Rating

Dagens Nyheter is the only remaining Swedish newspaper to still shun movie ratings - even Sydsvenskan introduced it hesistantly a while back, much to the dismay of my Film International colleague Michael Tapper, who writes film reviews for them. Tapper, not a stranger to clashes with the DN culture section, sees DN's stubborn refusal as "typical" and self-centered, but they will have to bow down eventually, he thinks - Swedish film criticism today is at such a low point that even the big, respectable media giants will be forced to speak the language of the tabloids in order to stay interesting to the commercial forces that run this show: quick snippets, a 1-5 rating, something to prep the ads with. Personally, I don't really like ratings, and I hate using them myself, even if I often do (when participating in the CDDB project). There's something inherently impatient and unsympathetic about handing out 1-5 stars (or whatever outrageous rating system you may use, like the popular 1-100 point system used by Gabe, Derek and other confused young individuals). I see the point, and I'm not rambling (even though I am), so what the hell has this got to do with anything? I'm not really sure.

But I was going to mention an article (Swedish) in Dagens Nyheter by Kerstin Gezelius this past Saturday. Gezelius is as uneven a critic as most others at DN, but she has her moments. In the article, which technically is to be considered a book review of J-Ro's new book about film canon, Essential Cinema, she discusses both her own fascination and fears about film canon aswell as Rosenbaum's. While she agrees that canon is complicated and difficult to write books about - where do you start? Do you have to pay respect to convention? etc - she has a strange way of shifting between admiration and attack of the Chi-Reader critic.

Consider, for example, how she takes the time to identify the near impossibility of compiling (as J-Ro has) a top 1000 list of your favourite films - a feat so absurd that a book like Rosenbaum's can reasonably only be seen as a suggestion, an argument in the Big Forever-Ongoing Debate of Film Canon, wood for the fire - and then turns around and criticizes J-Ro for including this or that movie, like the "good" and "bad" movies are set in stone. This after explaining in length how she understands the complexities of canon! Think again. She complains that Rosenbaum includes the recent movies Spider, Femme Fatale, and Down with Love - "turkeys!" - and moans about how he didn't include Amores perros, Mystic River or City of God.

And what she does right there, and I get so tired of it that I'm gonna stop now, is that she, better than I ever could in this post, flagrantly displays her unwillingness to break free from the canon of cultural newspaper sensibilities, to look beyond what her friends at DN or at other rags around Sweden (Stockholm, to be exact) are thinking and writing and expressing on the subject of film. culture. today. And as long as critics like her refuse to see the merits of a Femme Fatale or a Down with Love - and keeps knee-jerkingly salute arthouse exotism like City of God or Tarantino derivates like Amores perros, Swedish film criticism will not progress one fucking bit.

You know what else? The article is riddled with typos. Suckas!