You can’t Beat that sh*t! Oh, okay, turns out you can…
So, Takeshi Kitano wins another film award at an arty festival, along no doubt with a whole load of other unwatchable crap. There are a few specifically Beat Takeshi points worth making here, such as: if the judges just watched some Japanese TV before watching his films they would realise that meandering plots, lack of action, bizarre switches from drama to comedy and characters who don’t express their feelings are not fabulously avant garde film making tricks but available for you to watch, should you be M*, on any Japanese TV drama.
There is also a more important and generalised point to make about film critics. If you really want to read through their reviews and awards and find something you are going to like, you need to learn to predict what they are likely to enjoy.
Let’s analyse them together for a bit, shall we? The average movie critic spends most of their time watching hundreds and hundreds of movies in a cinema round the corner from their house, when quite often they would quite frankly rather be sitting on a hillside thinking about their own life or putting their backpack on and going somewhere new. So, when you read their review, as well as the possibility it is actually a masterpiece you will appreciate too you also have to take account of the possibility that they only like it because:
- So little happens that they do indeed get time to think about their own lives as if they were sitting on top of that hill (e.g. Hanabi)
- There are lots of references to other films that they like because it makes them seem so intelligent and makes all that time watching movies seem worthwhile, but us ordinary mortals will miss (any Tarantino film)
- There is a plot so fiendishly difficult and bizarre that even they can’t work out what is going to happen, but leaves the rest of us just confused (Memento)
- They get to see something else, maybe exotic, that they’ve never seen before (e.g. the Forbidden City in Last Emperor) but that the rest of us who are not trapped in a dark room would do much better just going and seeing in real life
- Because they don’t get time to read books they use subtitled films as a substitute
As I’ve said, the really difficult bit is not dismissing a review just because it does fit into one of those categories (I like one of the ones in brackets above), but I still find it helps me totally dismiss a good 70% of glowing reviews as something I am unlikely to enjoy.
Although I started this post mainly as an excuse to heap scorn upon “the man with two names involving Takeshi”, the same technique actually works as a rough and ready analysis of theories on how to teach a language. For example, if we look at the kinds of people who come up with wacky new ideas on how to teach English and those who then going around spreading the “good word”, we find that many of them have already been teaching for far too many years to be healthy. Of course they need something new to revitalise their classroom routines after 20 years, but it doesn’t mean the rest of us need it too… There are many examples of this, of which Scott Thornbury’s Dogme is probably the most obvious example of something only for people in the 40s or above.
We can then narrow the focus down to proponents of specific theories. For example, if you look into the dark past of many of the teachers who now preach TBA (the Task-based Approach), you will find they were once converts to a hard-core version of the Communicative Approach which involved no actual teaching of grammar at all. If you like that, might be worth a look. If not, you have to ask yourself why such people are so keen on it.
And for my final trick, I will narrow it down to one man. If you want to understand why the Lexical Approach has resulted in page after page of theoretically useful but painfully dull teaching material (e.g. the most unteachable parts, amongst many, of Cutting Edge), try looking at Michael Lewis’s earlier theories on how to teach grammar. Enthusing to a teacher (I was a believer too!), especially a logically-minded one, but totally unmotivating to the learners.
I rest my case**
* A fabulous “Japanese English” expression, meaning the “M” from “S&M”
** Yes, I see the pun on my name. So not funny!