http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/11/movies/11scot.html
Exactly how much of a geek am I, you ask? (I’m sure it’s obvious, but humour me) The Toronto Film Fest is upcoming, and while many people hunt out the big stars around town, I secretly hope to bump into A.O. Scott. By far the best movie reviewer on the NYTimes’ staff, I love him for questions like this: “Do we expect too much from our movies, or do we settle for too little?” and for fantastically-written reviews and opinion pieces like today’s:
American reality is so complex, so ideologically fraught and so hard to separate from its media images as to defeat most attempts to capture it on screen. It’s a big country, after all, and studio executives in Los Angeles are likely to have as much trouble staying in touch with its needs and desires as politicians in Washington. There are, of course, always exceptions: recent movies like “Crash,” “Happy Endings” and “Junebug,” say, that build their narratives over the volatile social fault lines of race, class, sex, region and belief. Fair enough, but to some extent those exceptions prove the point. For one thing, they do feel exceptional; that each one was singled out by admirers for honesty and sensitivity suggests a default setting of dishonesty and insensitivity.