Shelf Life — Scott Dickensheets: Butter the popcorn: It’s time for the movies

Friday, March 24, 2000 | 10:14 a.m.

Scott Dickensheets' books and magazines column appears Fridays. Reach him at dickens@vegas.com or 990-2446.

Shocking confession time: I have seen precisely none of the movies up for this year's best picture Oscar. Zero. Zip. Nada one. Somehow I have survived this, although my membership in the human race has been questioned because of it: "What kind of person ..."

Well, me. Movies just don't move me. Maybe it's my irrational fear of dark, people-crammed places; maybe it's that I hate having narrative forced on me at a pace I can't control; maybe it's that I feel short-changed at dropping seven clams to see Keanu Reeves practice osteoporosis as acting. Maybe it's that movies suck.

This is not a new sentiment, or limited to me. "It's the movies that kind of suck," Tom Shales quacked in Esquire in 1986, lamenting the diminishing of the art form. Even then, that wasn't a new sentiment, or limited to him. "Are Hollywood 'professionals' so engulfed in their 'profession' that they are incapable of seeing beyond the ends of their cameras?" James Agee snarked -- in 1943.

Clearly, while I'm not much for movies, I don't mind reading about them -- when I can find someone worth reading. Shales dubbed movie critics "spokesmodels with opinions," and spokesmodels have been trying to live down the comparison ever since. After years of reading the late Gene Siskel, I can remember just a single line of memorable insight he offered: "Boring boat chases abound" (about "Striking Distance," I believe). Everything else was thumbs up or down, a grading system best used to enlighten the children and furniture of intelligent adults.

There are a few writers worth their screening passes, though. Esquire's Tom Carson is up for a well-deserved National Magazine Award for his movie columns. Some of his strengths are on display in the April issue, in which he offers a sly batch of alternative movie awards: crisp, swinging writing; a nice against-the-grain viewpoint; and a resistance to hype.

Thus, in the category Best Proof that Critics are Suckers, he dismisses the praised-to-the-skies "American Beauty": "Director Sam Mendes' 'expose' of the aridity of suburban affluence is the same arty con job that's been wowing reviewers, under various titles, since around 1967." Then he settles "Magnolia's" hash.

In other categories, he nominates the Humvee from "Three Kings" and the lawnmower from "The Straight Story" for Best Supporting Performance by a Vehicle; David Morse ("The Green Mile") for Best Supporting Performance Nobody Noticed; and "The Sixth Sense" as Best Silk Purse From a Sow's Ear. "Topsy Turvy" -- a film about opera guys Gilbert and Sullivan -- gets his nod for movie of the year. So persuasive is he that I ended up agreeing, and I haven't even seen that movie.

Across the newsstand, the April Vanity Fair ("470 Star-Studded Pages! Our Biggest Issue Ever!") finds cultural critic James Wolcott engaged in a contrarian sortie of his own: extolling the enduring virtues of the Rock Hudson-Doris Day romantic comedies.

It sounds like a doomed effort -- he admits those movies ("Pillow Talk," "Lover Come Back") are considered "out of cultural sync." They were the last bubbles of sophisticated froth before the darker ambiguities of the sexual revolution. But Wolcott mounts a spirited defense, favorably comparing Rock and Doris to classic team-ups like William Powell/Myrna Loy and Spencer Tracy/Katharine Hepburn. "Doris and Rock seem to be more modern now than they did then -- they throw off more light, there's more to read in their relationship. I think they're the best romantic-comedy team ever." I would have voted for Mel Gibson and Danny Glover myself, but then I've never seen "Pillow Talk."

What Carson and Wolcott share is a sensibility too nuanced to be encapsulated in a directional thumb. Same goes for the great James Agee, whose movie criticism, penned mostly in the '40s, has been gathered in the new paperback "Agee on Film: Criticism and Comment on the Movies" (Modern Library, $14.95).

I picked it up because I'm interested in Agee, author of that meaty American classic, "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men," a hard, poetic documentary about the hard lives of Southern sharecroppers. That same concern for veracity enlivens the reviews in this book, even when he's writing about 50-year-old "moving pictures" you've never heard of. About some long-forgotten film he harrumphs:

Surely there are enough Mexican mothers in California to make unnecessary the use, for a Mexican mother, of a sexy young actress with flour all over her hair who can't even make the accent convincing.

Good thing he didn't live to see Kevin Costner play Robin Hood.

Agee is widely considered one of the American Century's best writers on film, and I, for one, would like to know what his hard lefty sensibilities would have made of such expensive flickers of light as "The Matrix" and "Star Wars." He preferred movies that were true to deep human experience and exhibited moral rigor. Faced with Reeves instead of actors and special effects instead of emotions, I wonder if he would have stayed home.

Reading matters

Goodbye: To no one's surprise and almost everyone's weary relief, Time-Warner-AOL-Everything has pulled the plug on Life magazine. It was a mercy killing: Life had long stopped showing any signs of, well, life -- when's the last time you did more than idly leaf through a copy in the checkstand?

Perhaps more surprising, Conde Nast has killed Details, its young urban male magazine (the May issue will be the last). It seems young urban males were staying away in droves. It's surprising because last year the publisher had, with a big publicity splash, lured away Mark Golin, the editor of Maxim, to revitalize Details. He was supposedly given two years.

Unfortunately for him, the magazine never found a new direction, yet continued to leak red ink, and after just one year. Golin's time was up. And, let's face it, the thing sucked. Under Golin, good writing found its way into Details only by accident. Conde Nast plans to relaunch Details in October as a fashion magazine, as if another one of those is needed.

Hello: To no one's surprise and almost everyone's weary Yeah, whatever, the monthly Us magazine has become Us Weekly. Now you can get four times the celebrity lapdogging! In the first issue, Editor in Chief Terry McDonell (who in his time has edited Rolling Stone, Esquire and Men's Journal) finds himself promising to give us news, not hype.

He had his fingers crossed.

Sure, there are some newsy stories -- notably one listing lawsuits involving movies based on true stories that jiggered with the truth -- but this is mostly celebrity-friendly pap, lovingly presented. They got the magazine's name wrong -- it's not about Us, it's all about Them. I'm sure it'll be a smashing success.