The John Simon Thread

This is the John Simon thread.

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I have a few thoughts on Roger Ebert.

Thread Police called for the first time in years to save-a-"great"-populist-TV-personality

yes that's what happened

I must admit I've managed to avoid him up until now but from what I can gather from sources in the right sort of circles I'm afraid he seems to be some kind of disingenuous put-on artist.

thumbs up! save me the aisle seat

xp

http://internetfm.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/johnsimon.jpg

Different guy...?

good album, great producer

Ha, I have been thinking of putting him on WRONG DUDE

One Sunday in 1971 The New York Times devoted acreage in the Arts & Leisure section to a mano-a-mano between Mr. Simon and Mr. Sarris. Mr. Simon’s pen came acid dipped, and his disdain for auteurism, which he believed devalued narrative, was fairly overwhelming. “Perversity is certainly the most saving grace of Sarris’s criticism,” he wrote, “the humor being mostly unintentional.”

To which Mr. Sarris later rejoined, “Simon is the greatest film critic of the 19th century.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/12/movies/12powe.html?_r=0

loves abortion, hates To the Wonder

http://uncensoredsimon.blogspot.com/2013/04/logic-malick.html

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BRaHYW4DnN8

John Simon is a despicable cunt who has had a lot of nice things to say about actresses:

On Catherine Burns (Oscar winner, 1969): "Insuperable homely... looks like a pink beach ball with a few limbs painted on it."

On Mimsy Farmer: "During the nude gambols Mimsy displays a small and flaccid enough bosom and a large and square enough bottom to make the toughest mome rates outgrabe on the spot."

On Angela Lansbury: "She is, in fact, common; and her mugging, rattling-off or steamrollering across her lines, and camping around make her into that most degraded thing an outré actress can decline into: a fag hag."

On Angelica Huston: "...has the face of an exhausted gnu, the voice of an unstrung tennis racket, and a figure of no describable shape."

On Elizabeth Taylor: "How garish her commonplace accent, squeakily shrill voice, and the childish petulance with which she delivers her lines"

On Barbra Streisand: "What has not been stressed sufficiently is the repulsiveness of the star... so pronouncedly ugly... a full-face closeup of Miss Streisand is a truly terrifying experience... a cross between an aardvark and an albino rat..."

On Corinne Clery: "Rather swaybacked and has breasts lacking in absolute firmness."

On Shelley Duvall: "The worst and homeliest thing to hit the movies since Liza Minnelli."

On Glenda Jackson: "So homely all over."

On Lily Tomlin: "Horse-faced."

On Liza Minnelli: "Plain, ludicrously rather than pathetically plain, is what Miss Minnelli is. That turnipy nose overhanging a forward-gaping mouth and hastily retreating chin, that bulbous cranium with eyes as big (and as inexpressive) as saucers; those are the appurtenances of a clown."

On Glenda Jackson: "Frighteningly plain. Her features are heavy and somehow malevolent in their irregularity; her body is like an uncarved stone except for her much-revealed breasts, shaped like collapsing gourds"

On Sally Kirkland: "Shapeless-bodied and sick-faced."

On Essy Persson: " ...has an ugly face, squat body, unsightly bosom, bad legs, stubby fingers..."

On Vanessa Redgrave: "No breasts to speak of"

On Brenda Vaccaro: "With the exception of Sandy Dennis, there is no more irritatingly unfeminine actress around these days than Miss Vaccaro, a cube-shaped creature who comes across as a dikey Kewpie doll."

On Anne Wiazemsky: "It's hard to say whether that lopsided face is a plucked chicken's or a skinned rabbit's; it is, in any case, absolutely sexless..."

On Meryl Streep: "...she actually looks like a sickly, unpleasantly sharp-featured, homely boy"

He makes sense on abortion and Terrence Malik, though.

Malick

he doesn't know how to spell "dykey" either. xxp

Catherine Burns was only nominated, btw

"Dikey" - yeah, that was a verbatim quote... I just let it go.

Re: Catherine Burns - ah, right... that's the year it was a tie between Katherine Hepburn and the aardvark/albino rat.

Actually, Catherine Burns lost to Goldie Hawn in 1969... sorry, I'm really tired, it's 4:25 am.

Nothing to do with John Simon, but Peter Bogdanovich sure does sound pompous calling somebody else pompous. Pomposity of a different sort--"I know Orson and you don't" rather than "I've read more books than you"--but there nonetheless.

Also meant to say how jarring it is seeing Capra turn up in that clip (I just skipped around a bit, so I didn't know he was on the panel). That's a decade-plus after Pocketful of Miracles--I wonder if he was still trying to get projects off the ground at that point.

I think so... You don't wanna read that big McBride bio of Capra if you wanna think well of him.

John Simon called a play I wrote "a slice of life crying out for butter, cheese, or meat." Badge of honor in off-Broadway circles.

well E, he doesn't like Mozart either.

this is my favorite thread

the first half i mean

nothing against the second half at all i just meant the first half

^^ no breasts to speak of

whether you find them funny or not (i don't, though 'the voice of an unstrung tennis racket' is a good phrase), it's striking how completely devoid of insight those insult-lines from simon are. like, compare it to this out-of-nowhere spasm of actress-hate from manny farber, by far the meanest thing in his book:

An even worse example of the megalomaniac star who can make the simplest action have as many syllables as her name is Rita Tushingham. The myth that a director breaks or makes a film is regularly disproved by this actress who does a sort of Body Unpleasant act of turning herself into a Duck Bill Blabberpuff ... and carrying on a war of nerves against the other actors. In a somewhat gentler vein (The Knack), she adds a gratuitous spookiness, which makes every gag seem to last forever. While this film has been accused of having too many jokes, the fact is that the actress smothers every joke with a goonish nasality and by peering overlong at the grown-ups.

Similarly, it is not the director's fault if she Tushingham's everything up with her particular brand of pathology: being sullen when she should have been airy, simulating the fevers of lust with a wooden body. ... Tossing her head about like a basketball and nasally, toothily spewing scorn at her high school teacher, she seems a cross between an adolescent Maggie Jiggs and a delinquent Orphan Annie.

it goes on like that. and on and on. i think there's even another piece in the book where he complains about her.

yeah this stuff seems v rex reedy.

the simon stuff.

yeah just to clarify i find the farber excerpt i just posted to be really insightful and hilarious and imaginative, unlike the simon quotes (and i love rita tushingham).

laughing so hard at "tushinghams everything up" though. jesus.

the piece is called, i kid you not, 'pish-tush.'

lol

Thanks to this thread, I checked Sheep From Goats, a collection of his litcrit from the sixties to the late eighties, from the library. It is...unexpectedly sympathetic! And smart, perhaps because the burden of staring at unstrung tennis rackets and sharp noses. I read a useful essay evaluating how O'Neill and Williams complement each other as world-class dramatists, a shrewd one on Gore Vidal's comic talents, and a totally surprising review of Oscar Wilde's letters, which he uses as an excuse to evaluate Oscar as one of the supreme geniuses of the last 100 years. This is a guy who spared no time making a fag joke yet understood, as the review makes clear, how comedy is intensely serious.

John Simon called a play I wrote "a slice of life crying out for butter, cheese, or meat." Badge of honor in off-Broadway circles.

― cougars and sneezers (Eazy), Tuesday, April 30, 2013 9:14 AM (10 hours ago) Bookmark

haha awesome

No, I don't think Simon is a homophobe, just a nasty jokester... He knows a lot about Noel Coward too.

manny farber is fucking hilarious a lot of the time. often his sentences are just a blast to read, in terms of alliteration and puns and assonances and other wordplay. sometimes he's mean. sometimes he's kind of inscrutable. his paintings are really cool too btw, and often a brilliant extension of his film criticism. there's one "about" budd boetticher's westerns that i've been trying to find a big print of forever.

He makes sense on abortion and Terrence Malik, though.

― Josefa, Tuesday, April 30, 2013 2:58 AM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Malick

― Josefa, Tuesday, April 30, 2013 2:59 AM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

the malicks are of lebanese origin and "malik" would have been the likely old-world spelling so you're not so wrong!

^Cool!

Yeah, I agree with all that other stuff - ("manny farber is fucking hilarious" etc). I have three of his books and dip into them frequently. He has a screw loose when he talks about actresses, but when no one is offending his beauty standards he comes off as a totally different, smarter writer. I like how he reps really hard for Ingmar Bergman.

Btw it would be interesting to identify the actresses he totally and consistently approves of. Jane Fonda and Liv Ullmann come to mind.

I like reading John Simon and John Derbyshire for much the same reasons, mostly because they sometimes reach the level of witty wordplay they're aspiring to. They're entertaining and awful. I imagine they had a schoolteacher along the lines of that one profiled in the New Yorker a few weeks ago.

happy 88th, Big Pimp!

John Simon and Yogi Berra born on the same day? That's just too perfect.

We're lost, but we're making good time.

You can observe a lot just by watching... like the fact that Barbra Streisand is both knock-kneed and ankleless, short-waisted and shapeless, scrag-toothed and has a horse face centering on a nose that looks like Brancusi's Rooster cast in liverwurst.

I'm trying to figure out which of the last two posts is a Simon quote, and which one is Yogi.

mine is both

All the love and affection for John Simon on this board will surely deepen.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ky9-eIlHzAE

john simon is completely useless human being. or at least a completely useless public figure.

that said, how many of you can claim this: "he was born in Subotica, Bačka, Bačka Oblast, the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes"

(although that whole segment makes everybody look bad, it's the sort of stupid false dichotomy thing to get ratings)

"amateurist was born in chicago, cook oblast, illinois, the kingdom of the dweebs, doofuses, and dickheads"

I agree with Simon and S&E about Star Wars tbh

Take the case of Terrence Malick. The pleonastic second R in Terrence can be blamed on his parents, but what about the rest?

http://uncensoredsimon.blogspot.com/2013/04/logic-malick.html

god, this guy is insufferable, and his sycophants are even worse.

it helps to picture him at the mission on skid row furiously handwriting his next blog in the last pew.

and by "handwriting his next blog," i mean...

iirc i started this thread because of a tangent on the ebert thread that included that clip

best part is when he suggests ze children see tender mercies instead

Checked back, and the Nightline clip was linked to--just a link, not embedded, so I missed it at the time.

best part is when he suggests ze children see tender mercies instead

― da croupier, Tuesday, November 26, 2013 6:49 PM (16 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

LOL

he reminds me of j. rosenbaum in "if only the masses were _aware_ of abbas kiarostami, they'd be flocking to his films instead of iron man!" mode.

best part is when he suggests ze children see tender mercies instead

which is a better film than Return of the Jedi, right?

They both suck.

I don't see a great deal of difference between Simon's dislike of Star Wars and Kael's dislike. Find it odd to be making fun of Simon's accent, too. Accents are accents.

This is the guy who thinks Shadows is better than Citizen Kane, right?

(sorry, just realized that I was thinking of Ray Carney.)

I don't see a great deal of difference between Simon's dislike of Star Wars and Kael's dislike

who said anything critical of his dislike, let alone contrasted it with Kael's? I prob agree more with him than s&e on the film's quality, I just acknowledged the absurdity of his choice of alternative children's entertainment (and yeah, cheaply contextualized it with a "ze," sorry).

I haven't seen Tender Mercies in ages--bored me at the time--so I'm sure it's a poor choice. The way he frames it--a kid's one of the main characters, so maybe a kid could relate--makes sense to me, but a better alternate pick, sure.

tender mercies isn't a bad film! but that's not really the issue. nor is his hatred of star wars.

it's his cartoonishly pompous, intellectually vacant persona. he seems to have stepped right out of some movie where his character is named "pretentious asshole at party"

he reminds me of that instructor from that manhattan school (the one who sexually abused his students) from that long NYT article back earlier this year (?). not the sexual abuse stuff, but the über-intellectual, Nitzschean pose that actually seems to have fooled a number of people.

new yorker article

90 tomorrow... recent blog posts reveal he thinks Melville was a bad writer (cept for "Bartleby") and that many famous Swedes have hung out with him.

rest in death

https://workersbravo.wordpress.com/2012/12/29/sixteen-bitchy-comments-from-john-simons-movies-into-film-criticism-1967-1970/

Can't believe there isn't a single mention of the AIDS comment in this thread.

Streisand rejoices.

Liza giggles cackles phlegmatically.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=07Mx07zyS6w

One of my favorite headlines was on his NY Mag review of Michael Moriarty's Richard III: "Come Back, Al Pacino! All Is Forgiven."

— Deirdre Wyeth (@DWyeth) November 25, 2019

https://workersbravo.wordpress.com/2012/12/29/sixteen-bitchy-comments-from-john-simons-movies-into-film-criticism-1967-1970/

I knew that quote about Cathy Burns would make the list (love her performance in Last Summer).

As a kid that was the first book of film criticism I ever read outside of Ebert's (or Maltin's). Surprised with that start I ever ended up liking movies at all. Fortunately his influence on me didn't last more than a month or so...but that was long enough for me to also read the book of Wertmuller screenplays for which he wrote an introduction.

Miserable Nazi.

Pretty good piece tho: https://www.vulture.com/2019/11/obituary-critic-john-simon-1925-2019.html

Another good one from a colleague:

https://www.americantheatre.org/2019/11/26/the-tragedy-of-john-simon/

not going to reveal which "insupportable" quotes made me chuckle

They all do.

don't do me like that

You are, to use the lingo of nonsense faggots, that bitch.

now what'd i do?

Relax, just pointing out that you hate everything in a fun, catty way. Nothing more.

no, i just hate most things KJB likes

Never in the history of art

Another good one from a colleague:

https://www.americantheatre.org/2019/11/26/the-tragedy-of-john-simon🕸/