A few years ago, Stanley Kauffmann was first recommended to me by one of my writing professors at Knox, Robin Metz, as a film critic I need to read. Until recently, all his reviews were for 'members only' or subscribers of the
The New Republic magazine. Robin described him as a 90 yr old film critic still crackin' away at films with writing as brilliant as ever. Kauffmann just reviewed a film called
A Very British Gangster, a documentary about an openly gay yet Godfather-esque gangster, and he commented on something obvious regarding our enjoyment of film that I never considered.
Food for thought:
"A Very British Gangster proves yet again that one great asset of film is vicarious participation in crime. Sex is OK, adventure and fantasy and even horror are OK, but crime lets us sneer at the laws we must live by, lets us relish evil and come out unscathed. Paradoxically, we feel as if we have stepped for a while into the real world underneath the laws and proprieties, a world that generously tolerates the conventions prettily laced above it." - for 8.13.08 issue of TNR
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