Better Living Through Criticism

A.O. Scott is kind of a big deal. He's a film critic for the New York Times and has been at it long enough to be a recognizable name in the business. And so I assumed something along the lines of Stephen King's On Writing, a practical guide of sorts framed by personal anecdotes and a lifetime of experience. Instead it feels like a Philosophy of Criticism 101 class.

Freed from the shackles of having to review Tyler Perry's latest, or yet another Jurassic movie, he throws on the smoking jacket and settles in to mine the likes of Rilke, Shaw, Kant, Sontag and Baudelaire to ask the question, is criticism necessary?

And the answer for this and almost every other question posed in the book is yes and no. It's not looking for answers but instead content to excavate past philosophies. And here it veers back and forth from being incredibly smart and erudite, to sounding like the worst dinner guest imaginable - rambling in self important obliviousness.

I'm no philosophy buff so it was exciting to listen to Scott drop some knowledge, pulled from history's great thinkers, and consider the philosophy of art and criticism. He's my kind of wordy and it's just approachable enough that I could follow along, but tends to overstay its welcome. If nothing else I suppose he did just manage to write a mandatory textbook for the Film Studies Class he currently teaches.

The subtitle should have been “a history of” instead of “how to.”