Steve Sailer's review of Get Low is up

at Taki's Mag.

Too Hollywood for its own good?

The one thing you shouldn’t do in filming this tale is leave out all the Appalachian absurdity to render it tasteful, subdued, bittersweet, quasi-tragic Oscar-bait. Unfortunately, that’s exactly what first time director Aaron Schneider and the various screenwriters attempt.

The 79-year-old Duvall is being talked up for a second Oscar, based, apparently, on the Commutative Property of Film Appreciation. See, last year Jeff Bridges got his first Oscar in Crazy Heart, another ornery coot movie in which Duvall played the best friend. So, this must be Duvall’s turn, right? He might indeed win for Get Low, because Duvall here delivers Acting for the Sake of Acting in the tradition of Al Pacino in Scent of a Woman.

If you read beyond the critics’ blurbs, though, you’ll notice the strain of talking themselves into liking Get Low. Reviewing movies—making the basic Thumbs Up or Thumbs Down call—isn’t a terribly difficult trade … because making good movies is. Compare the execution of the last two Christopher Nolan movies, Inception and The Dark Knight, to M. Night Shyamalan’s The Last Airbender and The Happening. You may not understand what’s going on in Nolan’s movies, but you’re obviously in more capable hands.

Therefore, when reviewers uniformly overrate a film, it’s typically due to either politics—as with the mediocre lesbian sitcom The Kids Are All Right, which critics praised as if it were the second coming of It’s a Wonderful Life to heroically stand up to the Mormon Media Juggernaut—or respect and nostalgia. Get Low fails like a recent Shyamalan movie at the basic blocking and tackling of putting the camera in the right place, cutting shots at the right moment, and swelling the right chords.

If the movie presented a more faithful depiction of life in the South, even if the story is full of absurdities, would it have been better? What would mainstream critics then think?