Next, the New York Press‘s Godfrey Cheshire rakes New Yorker film critic Anthony Lane over the coals for his review of the attention-getting film Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. “As a piece of prose, Lane’s polite
rave for Ang Lee’s film is competent enough, if typically gaseous and cute. But as film criticism it’s
something far less innocuous, a riot of errors and absurdities that would make the shoddiest
webzine blush. What’s at issue here has nothing to do with ‘opinion,’ or whether one likes or dislikes Crouching
Tiger. It has to do with the critic’s basic grasp of his subject…” Cheshire apparently had alot of fun writing this one. Our rootless, decontextualized, global-market entertainment industry provides fertile ground for this kind of thing, with the multiple layers of cultural dissonance arising when a reviewer trying to import London sensibilities to the New Yorker writes about a hybrid of an art film and the Chinese martial arts genre by an expatriate Asian director working in the American film industry but eschewing Hollywood…