I'm Teaching Arts Reviewing in the Spring: A Nice Exercise from the Last Time I Taught It

I Think They Call This a Teaching Moment

Those who think I hung the moon and subdivided the stars (with some arbitrage in there somewhere) recall that my students chose Vicky Cristina Barcelona, written and directed by Mr. Woody Allen, as the movie to review in my Arts Reporting and Reviewing class. I have not begun to grade the reviews yet, so in all innocence I asked Ricky what he thought of the movie.

Well, he said, I watched it in Italian.

Ah, I said.

And then he explained in some detail why this was the only version available at the last minute from Netflix. I did not fully understand the explanation, but students have long since learned the reward for intricate, perhaps impenetrable, explanations presented to teacher (like a cat presenting a dead mouse to its patron) is the teacher's inevitable exhausted retreat from further inquiry into circumstance and contingency.

With subtitles? I said, dead game to the last.

No, he said.

But you speak Italian? I said.

No, he said.

Well, there you go, I said. That's a clever angle from which to compose a review, I said, always supportive, particularly when the conversation turns surreal, perhaps Allen-esque, though perhaps more Perlman-esque, and thus in any case blogworthy.

My Arts Reporting and Reviewing Class is Reviewing Vicky Cristina Barcelona

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Image by austinevan via Flickr

Which I had not seen until tonight. I was anticipating Girls Gone Wild but instead got Girls Gone to Europe, by which I mean the movie registers with me in the spirit of James "Portrait of a Lady" and Forster's "Room with A View," though in the latter it's really British Girls Gone to Italy.

But whoever said the British were really European?

This is a reductionist and retrograde approach, I'm sure, to reduce Woody Allen's film to that old chestnut, two varieties of American inhibition getting warmed up by the sun and the sun-in-the-blood of Spain and walking away sadder and perhaps wiser, secure not in who they are but in who they aren't.

But it is *a* way of looking at the film, and that's all a reviewer needs.