Learn shorthand. Seriously, have you tried to read the notes a movie critic writes in the dark? My mother was right; I should have been a doctor.Don’t be so mean about the kiddie crud. Yes, Alvin and the Chipmunks and Bratz and Daddy Day Camp scrape the bottom of the corporate entertainment barrel. No, the target audience doesn’t care. (Most times neither do the parents, but that’s another story, and a more depressing one.) And part of me knows it makes no sense to shoot a mosquito with an elephant gun. Another, more cantankerous part, though, wonders why children shouldn’t deserve the same level of craft we demand from grown-up entertainments. “Unsophisticated” isn’t the same as “brainless,” last time I checked. Either way, I resolve to not let the relentless dimwittedness, craven commercialism, and sticky feel-good homilies of most “family movies” stick in my craw in 2008. (Expect this resolution to last until early March or the first appearance on film by Robin Williams.) Read at least one book that is not being adapted into a major motion picture. In 2007, I really enjoyed reading The Golden Compass, Atonement, No Country for Old Men, Persepolis and The Kite Runner (OK, the last one not so much). Was there anything else that came out last year? I’ll get around to The Omnivore’s Dilemma when Cate Blanchett is signed to star in it?Try not to lose patience with audiences who say they want challenging movies but flee in the opposite direction when they’re actually challenged. Educated, intelligent cineastes who consider it art if it has subtitles but don’t really want their convictions rattled. I heard a lot from these people about movies that didn’t play nice in 2007and wasn’t able to muster much sympathy.Look for interesting filmmaking in places it’s not supposed to be. On the Internet, handhelds, cellphones, the sides of buildings. Maybe even in movie theatres.Celebrate the small, the quiet, the slow, the carbon-based. This, in defiance of every impulse of our governing pop culture, which herds us like lemmings in the direction of the big, the noisy, the blitheringly fast, and the digital. The humanimated Beowulf came out in 3-D in 2007; the Boston Common is scheduled to get a commercial IMAX screen in 2008; both developments point toward the frenzied gigantism that is the future of Hollywood entertainment. In such a landscape there may be no more radical act than an extended, uncut, analog image of a human being. Next year, then, let a thousand low-rent movies bloom—warm-blooded mammals to run between the feet of the reigning dinosaurs.Continue to hope for the best every time the lights go down.-Ty Burr (NYT)
