Duncan Shepherd

Duncan Shepherd, a longtime film critic, wrote a weekly column for the alternative weekly the San Diego Reader from 1972 until November 2010, when he announced that he was retiring the column.

Shepherd's pithy, incisive, and very often negative reviews have sparked strong reactions from readers.[1]

Shepherd attended Columbia University ("a school chosen solely for the number of proximate movie theaters in New York City," according to the critic[2]) and received a Master's degree from the University of California, San Diego. His thesis, entitled "Scratching the surface: a speculation into the importance of the image in a movie and the neglect of the image in movie criticism," was published in 1974.

At UCSD he took film classes from Manny Farber (Negative Space), a noted film critic and painter. Shepherd, in fact, was a "sounding board" for a 1971 Farber essay on director Raoul Walsh ("He Used to Be a Big Shot"),[2] found in Farber's book (originally published in Artforum magazine).

At the San Diego Reader, Shepherd awarded a "priority" to movies from one to five stars, with "antipathies" receiving a black spot. Five-star reviews became rare: only three movies since 2000 have received the highest rating: Mystic River (2003), Stevie (2002), and A Serious Man (2010). Fewer than 100 films were listed as 5-star films, while nearly 2,000 have had the black spot bestowed upon them.[3]

Favorite directors with a number of five-star films include Alain Resnais[4] and Akira Kurosawa.[5] Among contemporary directors, Shepherd praises perhaps the Coen brothers and Clint Eastwood the highest.[6]

Not surprisingly many of the directors and producers Farber championed in Negative Space are favored by Shepherd as well, including Val Lewton (Curse of the Cat People, a 5-star rated film), Preston Sturges, Jean-Luc Godard (Alphaville, Contempt), Luis Buñuel (The Exterminating Angel) and Nicholas Roeg (Cold Heaven). Also, the "long-neglected" action directors found in Farber's famous "Underground Films" essay from 1957: e.g., Raoul Walsh, William Wellman, Robert Wise ("a sometime member of the underground"), John Farrow (The Big Clock, 5 stars) and Robert Aldrich (Kiss Me Deadly and Ulzana's Raid, both 5 stars).

A chief concern of Shepherd's is cinematography, which he frequently commented on in his column using descriptive language (he did not care for the "dingy, dungeony image" of the Academy Award-winning Chicago, for example.[7]) Nor does he much appreciate digital video, which he typically finds blurry and fuzzy. Even the state-of-the-art digital video found in George Lucas's Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones is "somewhat overcast, monotoned, seemingly covered in a sort of pinkish-complected skin, like an unboiled wiener."[8]

In a September 1996 response to critics of his star ratings, Shepherd asserted that readers too often misunderstand his intent ("The context is everything"). A one-star rating does not mean "terrible" and a two-star rating, he suggests, is "a bit more cordial than the back of a hand."[9]

References

  1. ^ See, for example, this or this letter, where Shepherd is criticized for his "trademark cynicism" and "scathing, elitist" reviews. Shepherd's writing style and attitudes toward film are displayed best in articles where he has freer rein, such as year-in-review articles, where he excoriates much of modern filmmaking and -makers (see Light into Darkness and Month of the Dead); Duncan Shepherd Replies, where he makes repeated remarks about some of his readers' incompetence at reading while standing strong for tough standards of film and film criticism; and Debt, his homage and retrospective to critic Manny Farber.
  2. ^ a b Debt. San Diego Reader. May 25, 2006.
  3. ^ Search Shepherd's reviews by rating.
  4. ^ Including Muriel [1], The War Is Over [2], Je t'aime, je t'aime [3], and Providence [4].
  5. ^ Including Yojimbo [5], High and Low [6], and Dersu Uzala [7].
  6. ^ Only the Coen brothers' first movie, Blood Simple, received as few as two stars. Seven straight Coen brothers movies received either four or five stars, a rating particularly rare for (approximately) post-Star Wars movies. As Shepherd wrote here about the Coen brothers, "Nobody in the past fifteen years has made me laugh like they have." About Eastwood, Shepherd has said, "Eastwood has become one of those select filmmakers, so far above the pack, to be measured only against himself."
  7. ^ Review of Chicago in the Reader.
  8. ^ Review of Attack of the Clones in the Reader.
  9. ^ Duncan Shepherd Replies!. San Diego Reader. September 19, 1996.

External links