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| Sometimes it's difficult to judge in a objective way when you are blinded by your own love and passion, so it could be useful to read what other people had to say about John Cassavetes. What follows is not exactly a pleasant reading, especially for those who take everything very personally - like me. Sometimes you recognize the validity of the statements, sometimes you really wonder how can some people become a critic or a journalist. I hope that after twelve years, some of the person listed here have changed their mind. And if they have not, well..... but before we start a note from Jonathan Rosenbaum, a very well known critic: "Tragically but predictably, now that John Cassavetes is dead it's become possible, even fashionable, to like his movies again. Indeed, I suspect that the five-weeks retrospective starting tonight at the Music Box - encompassing all the feature Cassavetes owned - will be much better attended than was the Film Center's retrospective five years ago. With the exception of LOVE STREAMS, all of his major works are being shown, and there are no finer works in the American independent narrative cinema. This belated recognition means than his work is only a fraction of the size it could have been if the critics and audienced had been more attuned to what he was up to. Speaking for myself as well as for most of my calleagues, we were usually wrong about Cassavetes - even when we wrote in support of his work, which wasn't often enough. Admittedly, he didn't help us out much, being one of the least articulate of major filmmakers when it came to describing the methodology and meanings of his work; his lack of clarity or eloquance made him resemble one of his characters. But in general we were defeated by the task of verbalizing essentially nonverbal film experiences." - Chicago Reader, 20 September 1991 |
| This is just a little collection of the "good words" John Cassavetes received in his life. I was tempted to make a flip-side page just to show there were two or three people who cared, but let's use the "underdog style" one again, with feeling... |
| [...] The
film generally has many errors of continuity, tone, and
nuance. Ofter the crescendo of feelings seem disrupted...
The network of friendships arising in the band as a
community, and the creative theme, are assumed rather
then explored... The band's finale reconciliation... is
phoney in conception and weakened by the director's
attempt to restore authenticity by a laconic, sombre
style. The "shaped" story and the discursive
scene sometimes gell dissatisfyingly [...] R.E. Durgnat, Too Late Blues, Films and Filming, vol 8, n.3, nov/1961 [...] Its flaw is merely the familiar one of the artist too close to his own work to judge best where a sequence might be curtailed to advantage: thus, in portraying boredom for example, Cassavetes is now and then in danger of being just a bit of a bore [...] Gordon Gow, Faces, Films and Filming, vol 15, n.3, dec/1968 Husbands, directed by Cassavetes, extends the faults of his last film, Faces; one might even say that Husbands takes those faults into a new dimension. [...] We don't know what to react to: we can't sort out what we're meant to see from what we see. We know that the people around the table in the bar wouldn't sit there while these clowns bully them unless they were paid for it, but we also know that the sequence is supposed to reveal something that "ordinary" movies don't. But what does it reveal except the paralysis and humiliation of the bit players? [...] Pauline Kael, Magalomaniacs, The New Yorker, vol XLVI, n.46, 2/jan/1971 Minnie & Moskowitz is by far John Cassavetes' worst film, with none of the good touches of Faces, without even any of the pseudo inquiry of Husbands. guess what the theme is. Two lonely people! Misfits! Who find each other!! Even Chayefsky gave up this facile honestry twenty years ago [...] Stanley Kauffmann, From a Star to a Czar, The New Republic, vol66, n.4, 22/jan/1972 [...] He still prolongs shots to the point of embarrassment (and beyond). He does it deliberately, all right, but to what purpose? Acute discomfort sets in, and though some in audience will once again accept what is going on as raw, anguishing truth, most people will - rightly, I think - take their embarrassment as evidence of Cassavetes' self-righteous ineptitude [...] Pauline Kael, Dames, The New Yorker, vol L, n.43, 9/dec/1974 [...] But, admittedly, the film isn't really "about" anything... to me this film is utterly without interest or merit. It tries to establish its bona fides simply by existing: it's up there on the screen and is therefore to some degree incontrovertible. This might be argued for a documentary, where the film would be a mediacl record. Not here [...] Stanley Kauffmann, A Woman Under the Influence, The New Republic, vol 171, n.26 The films of John Cassavetes are, by and large, sterile actors' excercises. [...] They are doggedly pretentious and often of enormous duration; unless you are an actor, or a friend or relative of the director, you should find them quintessentially trivial and borong. [...] if Cassavetes is telling the truth, and he really writes this trash that postures as plot, characterization, and dialogue, he would be an even bigger simpleton that I take him to be [...] When not very bright or clever try to convey to the movie audience that someone or something is supposed to be dumb, they sink to levels of stupidity and ineptitude that strike people of normal intelligence as positively feeble-minded [...] John Simon, Technical Exercise-Exercise in Futility, New York Magazine, vol 9, n.9, 1/mar/1976 The Killing of a Chinese Bookie is a mess, as sloppy in concept as it is in execution, as pointless in thesis as it is in concept [...] Judith Crist, To Each His Everyman, Saturday Review, vol 3, n.13, 3/apr/1976 [...] They go on too long, they're often too private and self-indulgent, they never semm to come to the point, they're loosely plotted - certainly leagues away from the intricately constructed Hollywood formula film - they don't seem to show much care for roduction values, and they tend to be repetitive [...] James Monaco, Who's Talking? Cassavetes, Altman and Coppola, American Film Now, Oxford Universisty Press, 1979, pp. 295-312 [...] Unfortunately Phil has been saddled with such irritating baby-mucho lines as (to Gloria) "I'm the man! Im the man!" (He sounds like a tiny Cassavetes blowhard - he'll grow up to be Ben Gazzara) [...] David Denby, Gloria, New York Magazine, vol 13, n.40, 13/oct/1980 |
