High Sign returns! (almost)

The departure of movie critic David Edelstein from Slate has left a gaping hole in the publication’s critical line up. Admittedly, it’s a tough theater seat to fill: In many ways, Edelstein pioneered internet criticism, mixing the shifting lengths, irregular posting and smarmy remarks of the blog world with his incisive critical observations to create one of the most intelligent yet readable spaces for movie commentary either in print or on the web. Now, with Edelstein gone, Slate seems to be holding off on labeling anyone a permanent replacement. Stephen Metcalf has turned in a handful of articles, but he’s still listed only as “a Slate critic” – not quite Edelstein’s listing: “David Edelstein is Slate’s movie critic.”

And while that tagline is sadly a thing of the past, the good news is that New York Times 4^th string film reviewer and Slate TV critic (surely the best TV critic currently writing) Dana Stevens is getting a chance to opine on mega budget, high prestige cinema in a big league setting. Her New York Times articles are generally confined to 400 word summaries, plus a sly line or two and a summary judgment. But those of us who’ve been Stevens fans since her days as film-blogger extraordinaire at The High Sign know that her thousand word entries on both indie darlings and blockbuster spectacles deserve the largest possible audience. And if there were any doubt, she proves it again with this review of isolationist-nutso auteur Terrence Malick’s The New World.

The review is sharp, witty, and full of the blend of academic musing and comedic populist skepticism that made her THS work so endearing. Check out these gems:

The Thin Red Line (1998), Malick's return to filmmaking after 20 years, was generally received as a failure, but it was a fascinating one—a World War II epic that eschewed conventional plot and character in favor of endless nature shots and overlapping, dreamy voice-overs. "Why does nature contend with itself?" asked an off-screen Jim Caviezel in the opening frames, over an image of tree-suffocating vines. No doubt a less compelling question to most soldiers than, "Where's my body armor?" but that obliqueness was part of Malick's point—to step back from the immediacy of battle and ponder the strangeness of war itself.

[snip]

But the Smith/Pocahontas affair is like the erotic equivalent of the Thanksgiving story: It is true as a metaphor, a condensation of fantasies about colonization and first contact.

[snip]

Malick is obsessed with Eden or, perhaps more precisely, obsessed with America's obsession with it. All of his films contain these paradisiacal, usually erotic interludes. But even as the lovers cavort in their makeshift treehouses or smooch by the river, they realize that their idyll is fragile, threatened by the imminent reality of work, or winter, or war.

With luck, the editorial bigwigs at Slate will give Stevens a go at more prominent releases, but until then, check out her THS archive – and especially don’t miss her classic review of The Brown Bunny.