Headline
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
According to Alspector, movies that break taboos may be inherently valuable. Does this mean that the upcoming remake of Lolita, if indeed it shows sex with a minor, is guaranteed to be a great film because it borders on kiddie porn? If the only criteria that makes a film good is that it breaks taboos (and Alspector goes as far as to admit that this taboo-breaking is the only thing worthwhile about Love! Valour! Compassion!), then God help the future of film criticism. It is indeed a dark day if critics can excuse shoddy filmmaking because a film shows “even more penises than there were pubic shots…in Crash.” If the terrible and anticinematic The Lost World, which Alspector panned merely because the special effects looked unrealistic, had top-of-the-line digitally-enhanced penises, maybe it would garner a good review from her.
I find it interesting that Alspector uses this review as a way to attack David Cronenberg’s Crash, which is without a doubt one of the finest films of 1997 and a benchmark in Cronenberg’s already stellar career. Alspector falls into a trap, as many critics do when reviewing Cronenberg’s work, when she calls it hypocritical. Cronenberg is not required to fulfill any quota of shots showing genitals; rather he is merely required to make a film that expresses his personal point of view in cinematic terms, which he does brilliantly in Crash. Cronenberg as a heterosexual man is obviously more interested in female sexual organs than male sexual organs. The exclusion of male organs, even though Cronenberg depicts a gay sex scene in his film, is more a testament to his integrity and honesty, two of Cronenberg’s great strengths as filmmaker, than his hypocrisy.
Park Ridge
