Why David Denby Is Wrong About Everything

David Denby is the New Yorker film critic who isn't Anthony Lane. It's usually wrong to dislike somebody you haven't met just because you disagree with their opinions, dislike their writing style, and disdain their continued employment at an otherwise unimpeachable publication. Fortunately, my old film teacher, a German documentarian with a sharp wit and a voice like a thousand cigarette burns, knew Denby and despised him. So I'm a hater-in-law.

Denby's not a bad guy, really; just a man who holds bland opinions, blessed with a bully good pulpit and cursed with the desire to use that pulpit to make an overwrought all-important Point. His latest essay about the modern romantic comedy, "A Fine Romance," hits on something important (the advancing dullness of female characters in movie romance), but dissolves into a fingershake to Judd Apatow. All movie reviews are, in a sense, the critics' roadmaps for how the movie could have been better - "Those who can't, teach," as my uncle Tom, a perpetually disappointed golfer, often says after describing everything wrong with my swing.

But Denby is so particularly humorless in his teaching, and so unconvincing in his grasp of the films themselves. Great film critics offer distinct personalities - Peter Travers at "Rolling Stone" is the caffeinated exciter, Anthony Lane the cocktail party wit, Roger Ebert the bemused raconteur. Denby just kind of whines: on "Knocked Up," he notes, "There's nothing in it that is comparable to the style of the classics - no magic in its settings, no reverberant sense of place..." What he is really saying is that the stoned LA suburbia of "Knocked Up" - painfully realistic, as men of a certain age and aimless temperament can assure you - is less interesting than the old-rich estates of classic comedies like "The Philadelphia Story" or "His Girl Friday." At times like this, Denby seems more like a sociologist reviewing the modern world through the cinema, or worse, a critic who fancies himself an historian of today.

Denby ties in several other movies into his grandiose theory of modern romance - the "slacker-striver" comedy, not exactly the catchiest subgenre title ever designed, ever - but his selections are so all over the map. I don't know of anyone who would describe "Old School," "Big Daddy," or "School of Rock" as romances. They involve romance, but so do "The Maltese Facon" and "Red River." He also throws in plenty of films that were just awful - "Failure to Launch," "You, Me and Dupree," "The Break-Up" - and it seems somewhat unfair to compare them to the absolute best of two earlier eras - "His Girl Friday" and "Annie Hall." And really, Denby just name checks most of the contemporary films - he spends half the piece ragging on Judd Apatow for everything he doesn't do in "Knocked Up."

Odd, because you could argue that the basic concept for "Knocked Up" - starting with sex and moving into love - is entirely original, and indeed, adds a sense of realism to the movie that's completely lacking in those earlier films. True, they had to deal with censorship, and so could only make veiled references to sex. But that's exactly why "Knocked Up" feels so uniquely topical, because it feels nothing at all like those old movies - we get all the awkwardness of the morning after the random hook-up, a scene that would have been unthinkable in the 1930s, which becomes one of the funniest parts of the movie. What Denby is dancing around, really, is that he likes the snappy patter that substituted for onscreen sexuality in those old movies. Denby reminds me a little bit of Uncle Charlie from "Shadow of a Doubt," yearning for a time that he barely even lived through.

True, Katharine Heigl isn't nearly as funny as any of the male characters in the film, but it seems odd to take Judd Apatow to task for ignoring his female characters when he gave his wife, Leslie Mann, such a showstopper of a role - a married mother of two who still likes to go clubbing and flirts shamelessly without any intention of cheating on her husband, who she loves but can no longer connect with. Denby shrugs off Mann's role in the film: "she's not a lover; she represents disillusion" is all that he musters, and that is patently untrue. True, she is disillusioned, but she changes during the movie - reconnecting with her husband, learning to understand if not love her sister's slacker boyfriend. The main storyline of "Knocked Up" is pure storybook romance - it is a fantasy, without thought of abortion, where the one-night stand turns out to be your true love - but like all good fantasies, it is dressed up with considerable reality, of both atmosphere and emotions. But the subplot - the married couple rediscovering each other - feels tremendously true.

It's not coincidence that snappy patter still exists in the world of broadcast TV - you can say and show more than in 40s Hollywood, but the medium lends itself more to Hawksian (or even Allenesque) dialogue. Really, all great TV couples - from Sam and Diane to Mulder and Scully to Jim and Pam - undress each other with their words, holding off the moment of actual consummation for as long as possible. Just as Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn waited to kiss until just before the credits - just as Shirley MacLaine and Jack Lemmon didn't even kiss, just smiled at each other and played cards - these romances try to juggle chemistry for as long as possible, and usually run out of steam when that teasing chemistry moves into an actual relationship (pray for "the Office.") Really, THESE are the modern romantic comedies. Perhaps it's simply out of Denby's purview as a film critic to notice.

Then again, maybe he's just too much of a nostalgia-elitist ponce to bother turning on his television. Denby recently wrote a fascinating, awful piece about the future of cinema called "Big Pictures." The vehicle recalls Thomas Friedman in its "you are there" inauthenticity - you know what I mean, that tiny personal anecdote which leads the writer to rampant conclusions about the world. "David Denby here, fingers on the pulse of America, reporting to you, live, from the modern age. I'm holding a video iPod and watching 'Pirates of the Caribbean,' and it's making me think a few very deep thoughts..."

The conclusions which Denby reaches are entirely familiar to anyone who has ever taken a film class or read an op-ed by a film critic about the state of modern cinema. The argument, such as it is, runs, "The modern cinema experience is shit. Watching movies on TV is no good, either. Movies are only meant to be seen on the big screen. You can never really understand (insert "2001," "Lawrence of Arabia," "Gone with the Wind," etc) until you've seen it on the big screen."

Denby hits every note. Rosy reminiscence of neighborhood theater leads to sober deconstruction of the urban multiplex; Hollywood used to make movies for adults, and now mostly makes movies for teenage boys; surround-sound systems in your home theater are more distracting than encouraging; etc, etc. Some of Denby's observations are true, but it doesn' t make them any less hackneyed. Really, the one unique thing about this whole essay is that it ends with a vision of hope: that is, the ArcLight theater on Sunset Boulevard, described by Denby with the sort of glowing comments bad critics usually reserve for bad movies: "The rest rooms are spotless, and the concession stand serves delicious coffee."

Denby doesn't't mention that tickets to the ArcLight cost more than any other theaters, or that the ArcLight is located in a particularly posh area of posh Hollywood, or that the atmosphere inside caters to yuppies. And it is odd, considering the casual experience that Denby praises from the movie theaters of his youth - "we avoided the stern whiteshoed matrons who patrolled the aisles; sometimes we arrived in the middle of the movie..." - that he concludes on such a happy note of tight regimentation - "All the seats are reserved... The steeply raked auditorium is dark, and insulated from the sound of the other theatres in the same multiplex." If you think it sounds odd to begin with nostalgia for a more casual theater environment and end with a new hope for ever-more controlled environments, then you are starting to realize why David Denby is wrong about everything.

Essentially, what Denby desires is a kind of Broadway-style aesthetic for movie theaters, which, in Denby's frame of mind, are as much about the environment as the films themselves. For Denby, the extra price is worth it, for the all-important Big Screen. "The small screen takes the emotion out of the landscape," he says. "In a theatre, you submit to a screen; you want to be mastered by it, not struggle to get cozy with it."

I used to agree with Denby - with all the old guard of film critics and teachers, really. Every time we watched a film in a film class, the professor always expressed a regret that we couldn't watch it on film, that it had to be projected in gloriously unfit DVD. Certainly, there is a true magic to the big screen - one of the best days of my life involved watching "The Third Man" in a tiny theater in Vienna. I would give anything to watch any film by Ennio Morricone, or Stanley Kubrick, or Federico Fellini, on the big screen.

And yet, I would never want to watch them on an iPod video. Whereas I love watching episodes of "30 Rock," or "Lost," over and over again. And that's why I think there's something to be said for the small screen. The basic presumption of Denby and the old guard has always been that the only way to truly enjoy a film is to see it on the big screen. I say, well no duh, you're going to like a film more when it's that big, when it dominates your entire line of sight. You ask me, the real challenge is making a film that still captures your imagination when it's not so all-encompassing. Maybe television, and the iPod video, is just a natural evolution - a way of shrinking movies down to size.

Because let's face it - I get more thrill out of watching a single episode of "The Sopranos" on TV then I get out of the entire filmography of Sergei Eisenstein - including the Odessa Steps sequence. More and more, television seems lovably unfussy in its visuals - "Lost" is beautiful at times, but there's none of the stoney-eyed Mother Nature navel-gazing that you find in Herzog or Malick, which plays so well on the big screen (watching "The New World" was my one true cinematic experience of 2006) and so unconvincingly on the small. "Lost" keeps you interested because of the genius of its writing - the way it juggles the personal and the epic, allegory and comedy, melodrama and realism, pure idiocy and sublime genius has much more in common with "Gone with the Wind" than any movie being made today.

I'm not saying that "Lost" is better than "Citizen Kane." It's just that people who work in TV have to convince you, constantly, to pay attention to them, to ignore innumerable distractions - the eternal propensity for changing the channel, and everything outside of the screen - while the people who worked in the classic days of Hollywood could be certain that, even if they made the worst film ever, people in the theater would, and could, only watch that film. It's like that old Joseph Heller line: "In an airplane there was absolutely no place in the world to go except to another part of the airplane." When you're watching a movie on the big screen, there's nothing else to watch except the movie. When you're watching a TV show, there's a million other things you can watch, not to mention, you know, DO.

It may be that the small screen does not lend itself to true artisty as well as the movies - though certainly there are stretches of "The Sopranos" that bear comparison to Antonioni, (except funnier) and Kubrick (except not so stilted). And yet, that seems beside the point: so much of what Denby is talking about, when he talks about the Big Screen, is a time when movies were THE popular art form. The ArcLight isn't a solution - it's the bourgeois alternative. "I only see film at the ArcLight," you can imagine some asshole saying.

"In a theater, you submit to the screen," Denby says (italics his). "The movie begins, and you are utterly lost in it." Like all film speak, this sounds both wonderful and dangerously psychotic. Television, it seems, makes you more of a shared partner - we experience lives and watch them change, as episodes and seasons pass. Why be lost, when you can be with "Lost"?