Manny Farber is gone at 91. He was, is, one of the supreme critics of the young film medium as well as a painter of wide, mysterious canvases, dispersed yet full of dense, messy detail: impossible, like Manny, to pull together.

He was a marvelous man: prickly, but, at least in later years, generous-spirited and strangely, almost compulsively self-deprecating. He was by then in artist (not critic) mode, and spent most of his days brooding over his paintings in his Southern California studio, working beside his wonderful wife and partner, Patricia Patterson.

Fun! Fun! After nine years of anonymous fanboy attacks at Slate whenever I dared to criticize a masterwork like The Mummy Returns (“I only wish harm to you and your family”), I figured I’d finally escaped the rabid nerd hordes. But they seem to have arrived here en masse — maybe thanks to a Web headline somewhere branding me the author of “the first negative review of The Dark Knight.” (There have been other negative reviews since.) Comments below the review here and elsewhere have struck similar chords:

(1) I am “an idiot trying to make a name for himself” and get “hits for his site.”
(2) I am a pretentious prick.
(3) I am a fag.
(4) It's not New York, it's Chicago, fool.
(5) My reason for criticizing The Dark Knight is that it is “too dark” when everyone knows that Batman is supposed to be dark.
(6) The idea that Heath Ledger went to a bad place to play the Joker shows a dim understanding of actors’ craft.
(7) May God have mercy on my soul.

This is a revision of an earlier posting.

The new Pixar picture Wall-E is one for the ages, a masterpiece to be savored before or after the end of the world — assuming, like the title character, you’re still around when all the humans have taken off and have access to an old video player. Wall-E (that’s the name of the machine) is a trash compactor, the last of his kind from an age in which cleaning up garbage was mankind’s highest priority — before people threw in the towel (and broom) and apparently (no spoilers here!) rocketed away. Now, this squat, childlike robot with his pivoting goggle eyes resides in a metropolis surrounded by skyscrapers that turn out, on closer inspection, to be compressed trash bricks piled high into the soot-gray sky. The movie is a bit of a trash brick itself: Director Andrew Stanton and his Pixar collaborators have taken cultural detritus — bits and pieces from cherished film genres, pop icons, visionary sci-fi tropes, half-remembered bric-a-brac from childhood — and compacted it all into a sublime work of art.

Sydney Pollack’s death at 73 has robbed our cinema of one of its finest … actors. Yes, of course, he directed some terrific movies — Tootsie above all, but also (in descending order) The Way We Were, Three Days of the Condor, They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? and Absence of Malice. But he had a weakness for prestige middlebrow beanbags like Out of Africa (which won him his cherished Oscar), along with A-list money pits like Havana and The Firm and The Interpreter (and The Electric Horseman, and Sabrina, and …) In later years, Pollack had more life in front of the camera than behind it.

No mainstream filmmaker since Orson Welles can touch Steven Spielberg when it comes to camera movement and composition — or, more precisely, to composition that gets more vivid as the camera moves. We see that in an early shot in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Harrison Ford’s Indiana Jones is held at gunpoint by murderous Soviet soldiers led by an icy Cate Blanchett as a paranormal-research scientist named Irina Spalko. They’re in a top-secret warehouse near a nuclear test range, and Spalko orders Indy to locate a crate containing something strange and precious and highly magnetic. The shot is of Indy climbing crates: He’s in the foreground as the camera tracks back and up, and as it does the space opens up behind him and becomes more layered; we see Spalko and the soldiers gazing up while the warehouse — with its built-in obstacle course of boxes — spreads out in the background.

That’s it: nothing flashy, nothing to make film students cry, “Great shot!” But it tells you, simply and elegantly, everything you need to know about the height and depth of the setting, the threat, the sundry variables in play. It’s the work of a man with film storytelling in his blood. What a bummer when the story he has to tell is such a cosmic nothing.

After Lee Siegel was exposed and suspended for confronting nasty commenters on his New Republic blog under a pseudonym (“sock puppet”), I e-mailed him a condolence note to the effect that blogging is a pipeline to the id, and that some of us — the exhibitionist, the paranoid, the batshit-crazy — should approach such unmediated self-expression warily, if at all. It’s too bad that in his recent book (Against the Machine: Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob), he blamed the medium far more than the lesser part of his — our — nature. I’m not going to blame the medium for the dumb-ass stuff I wrote in my last blog entry. It was an unholy confluence of man and machine.

Now that the shock of Anthony Minghella’s sudden death has dissipated slightly, I think it’s less unseemly to say that this brilliant and soulful filmmaker died unfulfilled. Yes, The English Patient won a host of Academy Awards (one for Minghella), and many regard The Talented Mr. Ripley as an unqualified success. Even Cold Mountain has its lonely champions. But I found them all a disheartening falloff from his theatrical debut, Truly, Madly, Deeply (1990). And I can’t help thinking that what happened has something to do with someone whose name rhymes with Shmarvey Shmeinstein.

Do I have evidence? Peter Biskind’s chronicle of the indie movement, Down and Dirty Pictures, provides some. But I’m less interested in what happened behind the screen than in the compromises in front of it.

I’ve been derelict, for reasons of space (in the print mag) and post-Oscar fatigue, in clanging the bell for two hideously depressing but also enraging documentaries about unchecked growth and the collateral damage in its wake — i.e., the Earth and everyone on it. The Unforeseen is a poetic and high-minded meditation on American developers’ manifest destiny and the cancer it introduces into the natural world. Burning the Future: Coal in America, despite its generalized title, is firmly anchored in West Virginia, that Appalachian bastion of beauty and blight. The latter has the more visceral impact. All you need to see is mountaintops blown off, sludge pouring out of faucets, and little kids weeping every time it rains for fear their houses will be swept away by flash floods to conclude that the most fitting sentence for those responsible (among them George W. Bush, who, according to a sign in an industry flack’s office, [hearts] coal) is life without parole in the hills of West Virginia.

To: David Edelstein
Sent: Monday, February 25, 2008 3:11 PM
From: Lynda Obst
Subject: RE: No Country for Good Cheer

Dear David,

There was some love and some surprises that kept the night from becoming an utter snooze-fest, with way too many clips threatening to become one long clip of Cary Grant morphing into Cuba Gooding Jr. There was no real evidence that the writers were back: Aside from Jon Stewart’s lines and Jonah Hill and Seth Rogen’s hilarious turn as Oscar perennials Halle Berry and Dame Judy Dench (next year Hillary Swank and Helen Mirren), the content was more spliced-together than it was written. At one point, the producer/chef/host of my party cried out, “These are the worst Oscars since I was born!”

To: Lynda Obst
Sent: Monday, February 25, 2008 9:08 AM
From: David Edelstein
Subject: RE: No Country for Good Cheer

Hi Lynda,

Was that especially uneventful, Lynda, or will all Oscar ceremonies henceforth play as if they’d already happened once before in a galaxy far, far away? Not at all the Mardi Gras blowout I’d hoped for. Even Diablo Cody was simple, modest — everything her screenplay wasn’t. Is it that YouTube has made even exhibitionists more self-conscious in the knowledge that their gaffes will be replayed millions of times? I’m really reaching to say something of sociological interest … Maybe we should just blame producer Gil Cates, who makes the trains run on time at the expense of all spontaneity. It’s why I gave up on Saturday Night Live, the least “live” show imaginable, insofar as anyone who dares to depart from the script gets exiled to Siberia …

As Oscar night approaches, David Edelstein and Hollywood producer Lynda Obst are discussing the race. Check back here Monday morning for reactions.

To: David Edelstein
Sent: Saturday, February 23, 2008 5:08 PM
From: Lynda Obst
Subject: RE: No Country for Good Cheer

Dear David,

It is Oscar season after all: I saw George Clooney in the flesh and Harvey Weinstein in a suit that made him look like a villain in a Batman sequel, which was not pretty. George Clooney, though, was extraordinarily pretty. I don’t remember what he was wearing except for that smile, which should be patented. It dazzled more brightly than any lighting in Bryan Lourd’s packed atelier. George’s girlfriend patiently stood by as he complimented his admirers of each gender, as if he hadn’t had them at hello.

As Oscar night approaches, David Edelstein and Hollywood producer Lynda Obst are discussing the race. Check back here Saturday afternoon for Obst’s predictions and party reports.

To: Lynda Obst
Sent: Friday, February 22, 2008 9:08 AM
From: David Edelstein
Subject: RE: No Country for Good Cheer

Dear Lynda,

Your evocative post of Tuesday last — which suggested that you and your Hollywood colleagues have not recovered emotionally from the writers’ strike — bodes well for No Country for Old Men, which in another year might only have been the first choice of suicidal depressives. You also shamed me. Having had my critical say on the nominated films in this magazine, I was eager to talk Oscar politics and to snigger at Academy voters’ middlebrow taste, while you — the big-studio producer — insisted on addressing many of the nominees’ artistic merits and reminding me that there is, in fact, little difference this year between the critics’ favorites and the industry’s. Sure, I thought Atonement was weak tea and would have liked a little Best Picture love for The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. But even there the directing nod for Julian Schnabel suggests the votes were close. And Diving Bell is in French, and no one could tolerate a French picture (even with an American director and a Brit screenwriter) taking home the grand prize. (Has that ever happened?) I apologize for my condescension.

As Oscar night approaches, David Edelstein and Hollywood producer Lynda Obst are discussing the race. Check back here Friday morning for another round.

To: David Edelstein
Sent: Tuesday, February 19, 2008 12:38 PM
From: Lynda Obst
Subject: RE: No Country for Good Cheer

Dear David,

To say it’s been the winter of our discontent doesn’t overstate the despair that has gripped Hollywood since late October — as you know, having shared in the Hollywood bummer that was the writers' strike. Now that it’s over — having suffered through a party-less, drama-less, impoverished Globes season, not to mention that eight-week strike, which cost the local economy some $3 billion — we have arrived at something to celebrate. And what this town needs is a good bash: Half the place seems in the mood to get gussied up and let bygones by bygones, while the other half probably still feels like throwing a few back in a crew bar and having it out with their local studio head/agent/ producer/writer. Still, even Graydon Carter canceled his big party in favor of Chinese food in bed. The only option is to start the betting pool and declare it Pajama Oscar year.

As Oscar night approaches, David Edelstein and Hollywood producer Lynda Obst are discussing the race. Check back tonight for Obst's response, and on Friday morning for another round.

To: Lynda Obst
Sent: Tuesday, February 19, 2008 12:38 PM
From: David Edelstein
Subject: No Country for Good Cheer

Dear Lynda:

Well, well, well, we do get to talk about the Academy Awards this year. Despite the cancellation of the Golden Globes ceremony (quel agony!), there was no way that Hollywood could have gone without its annual orgy of self-congratulation — the best incentive from a public-relations standpoint to settle the strike. For moviegoers, a year without Oscar is unimaginable. So little in our culture has value on its own terms: Without the opening of the envelope, there is no climax, no catharsis.

The announcement of the Academy Award nominations is always the saddest day of the year, not because the voters’ choices are lousy (although they tend to be) but because so many worthy movies suddenly lose their luster. As long as the potential for a nomination exists, attention will be paid. Once the field dwindles, audiences desert the also-rans faster than you can say “Fred Thompson.” And it’s on to DVD…

Will there be a ceremony? I have no clue. Most of the talent will not cross a picket line, which would mean an Academy Award ceremony very much like the one in The Naked Gun 33 1/3: The Final Insult, hosted by Pia Zadora. (I suspect that O.J. would be available, too.) Can Hollywood possibly do without its annual ritual of self-pleasuring?

It has taken a giant monster to rouse this blog from its postholiday hibernation — which is more context, by the way, than you’ll get from Cloverfield. That title is the upshot of “viral” Internet marketing that generated so much buzz that producer J.J. Abrams chose a nondescript code name for the film, borrowed from a street near his Hollywood office. It means nothing, which fits.

Nothing can be scarier than something, though. The Blair Witch Project, shot with one video camera from the point of view of the character holding it, proved that when you eliminate the omniscient perspective — when you show the audience only what a single character sees and no more — you introduce a note of irrational terror that millions of dollars of computer-generated effects can’t touch. But Blair Witch was a ghost story, a genre in which less is always more. What, asked writer Drew Goddard, if you used the same singular, disoriented vantage for a giant-monster picture, a spectacle: Godzilla through the eyes — or lens — of a sap way down below trying not to get stomped?

Good year.

Enough commentary. Time for list-making.

1. The Diving Bell and Butterfly
2. Away From Her
3. There Will Be Blood
4. Sweeney Todd
5. The Savages
6. No Country for Old Men
7. No End in Sight
8. Michael Clayton
9. Ratatouille and Persepolis (Tie)
10. Grace Is Gone

Sticklers can stop here. Others should go on.

The one that I promised, in the new issue of the magazine, that you would find here? It’s on its way — and it will indeed go to eleven.

The Year in Movies [NYM]

It has been fascinating to read the polarized reviews of Todd Haynes’s I’m Not There, from A.O. Scott’s swooning but richly evocative celebration to Armond White’s frothing evisceration (of both the film and everything Haynes stands for). As someone in (about) the middle (here’s my review), I feel like a Man Without a Country. I even got a curt e-mail from producer Christine Vachon — with whom I wrote a book called Shooting to Kill — expressing her disappointment with me for not recognizing Haynes’s ambition. I’m so off her Christmas list.

It’s almost too late for Halloween movie recommendations, but I want to mention a few past and current DVD releases that will give you a good spooky night indoors. I’m currently working through a box of seminal silent horrors from Kino, among them the original haunted-house movie, The Cat and the Canary, The Man Who Laughed With Conrad Veidt (the deformed protagonist inspired Batman’s Joker), and John Barrymore’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde — notable because Barrymore transforms largely without the aid of the usual monster makeup and lap dissolves. Barrymore is over the top, but no Hyde has ever been more terrifyingly savage when beating a man to death with a walking stick.