On the New Yorker movie blog, Richard Brody tears into “Neo-Neo Realism,” A. O. Scott’s piece in the Sunday New York Times Magazine about the new crop of American independent films, saying it “rests on questionable premises and reaches dubious conclusions.”
What Scott praises is, in effect, granola cinema, abstemious films that are made to look good for you but are no less sweetened than mass-market products, that cut off a wide range of aesthetic possibilities and experiences on ostensible grounds of virtue. It’s not new; it’s self-consciously, fashionably old-fashioned. Many of these films have a whiff of the sermon about them. “Gran Torino,” in which Clint Eastwood portrays an old bastard who becomes something of a liberal despite—not in the absence of—his worst prejudices and most bilious emotions—is far more politically sophisticated and daring than any of the films Scott names.