The film critic Joel Siegel died on Friday. Roger Ebert has a valiant tribute to him, pointing out how Siegel persevered as a critic for ten years despite being diagnosed with colon cancer and that he was a better writer than his television appearances gave him credit for. One of the last times Siegel made it into the headlines was when he walked out of a screening of Clerks II, causing the filmmaker Kevin Smith to don him “a dick with a mustache” and go into over-the-top histrionics on a radio show, cutting Siegel no slack whatsoever. Smith’s most recent entry on his blog has him urging you to see Live Free or Die Hard. But there is no mention of Siegel’s passing.
I always felt Siegel to be far more effusive about mediocre movies than he needed to be. But given the choice between a film critic who maintained his cool when a hypersensitive filmmaker tried to sandbag him on a radio show and that same hypersensitive filmmaker urging his audience to fill up Hollywood’s coffers, I’ll choose the former, if only because Siegel kept mostly silent about his personal hangups and had no personal stake in what he did other than expressing his enthusiasm.
[UPDATE: This afternoon, Smith has updated his blog, where he calls out one "George Prager," who left multiple comments on this Hollywood Elsewhere thread, and writes the following: "More than that, I don’t know what was expected of me: Joel and I had a blow-up, it went away, a year later, he died. No reason to write a blog about it, really; I tend to eulogize relatives only."]
The Call by Yannick Murphy: The always interesting author of Here They Come and Signed, Mata Hari returns with a novel that whips up a worldview from a rather quirky set of limitations: namely, the call logs that a veterinarian maintains as his son is unexpectedly put into a coma and an unforgiving economy denies him work. What emerges is a surprisingly optimistic, often funny, and very moving account on how one family uses acceptance and forgiveness as a way to atone for hard knocks. (
Birds of Paradise by Diana Abu-Jaber: Forget Franzen and Eugenides. If you're looking for a social novel that counts, Diana Abu-Jaber is the author you're looking for. Building from the free-form exploration of consciousness and identity in Crescent and the gripping procedural structure of Origin, Abu-Jaber's latest novel is her finest, equally fluent with gutterpunk culture and smarmy real estate men. It has been suggested by The Washington Post's Ron Charles that you will likely gain some pounds while reading this novel. This is certainly true. Abu-Jaber's description of food is so precise that it often made me want to do more cooking. But I very much admired the way in which Abu-Jaber presents all her characters as unwitting victims of rough capitalism, which permits them some dignity even as they perform terrible acts.
The Last of the Live Nude Girls by Sheila McClear: This memoir isn't so much about the decline of the Times Square peepshow, as it is about one young woman's efforts to pull herself up by by her bootstraps when presented with few economic options. Filled with self-introspective candor and a quiet dignity, McClear's story is one that might befall any of us in these volatile times. While McClear does get back on her feet, her book leads one contemplating the terrible fates of other young women now moving to New York and falling into deadlier vocations. (
That Kevin Smith-Joel Siegel debacle was lame. Ambushing a guy on live radio because he SPEAKS during your movie and storms out—a distraction lasting ten seconds—equals pantywaisted-ness to the nth. So you ambush him on live radio surrounded by your pals and whine like a little baby. All without revealing who you really are. What a puss, and as his website reveals, a SHILL. I never read Joel Siegel’s reviews, unfortunately. I briefly saw a story about him on the news last night but didn’t register its meaning. Sad deal.
P.S. If you read Kevin Smith’s blog entries—I read the series dedicated to Jason Mewes’ heroin troubles—you’ll see that, prose-wise, he’s a truly inept writer. Solid on the dialogue, I suppose, but stick to that, S.B.
At least Smith’s self-aware enough to post on his blog now about the blowup and that he feels like ass over it. And he’s right about the obits; it’s odious to insert a minor incident into a man’s life story because it happened within the last year.
The question is, does that say anything about Siegel’s effectiveness as a critic? If an obit writer decided not to write about the “Clerks II” blowup, what would have replaced it?
Harry Shearer on Joel Siegel
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/harry-shearer/joel-siegel_b_54482.html