Rant, rant, rant. Just talking about mistakes in film reviews and articles. Don’t mind me.
I get really disappointed whenever I read reviews or critical analyses of movies where the critics make factual mistakes. It upsets me because I trust that they are professionals, that they know what they’re doing. But then they write things like the claim in this New Yorker review that Andrew from Chronicle was reading Schopenhauer. The writer interprets this factoid to suggest that Andrew is a Nazi sympathizer, or at least a channeler of Nazi ideology, when in fact, it was his cousin, Matt reading Schopenhauer, and it was a comment about how Matt is attempting to give himself an identity as an intellectual. I haven’t seen this movie since January, but I knew it was wrong right away, and they probably wrote this article, at most, a week or two after seeing the movie.
I see these kinds of mistakes in film journal articles too, and it freaks me out. Aren’t these people the authorities on film? Don’t their peers or editors catch these errors before articles get published? It just worries me because I wonder if grad school isn’t everything I imagine it to be when it comes to professionalism and strict, careful analysis.
