Andrew Sarris

And I, I went to Columbia.

There was a critic called Andrew Sarris who was, like, one of the great critics of the time, and he, he and André Bazin, you know, I think invented the auteur theory, and huge influence on the whole great generation of Coppola and Bogdanovich and Spielberg and Scorsese.

And he would just come into class, and he was half drunk on Ozu, and he would just talk with great love about the movies he loved.

And I got the bug.

You know, there was Vincent Canby at the New York Times who was reliably sober-sighted and pretty good in general.

There was Andrew Sarris at the Village Voice, who was an acolyte of the new wave and the politique des auteurs and all that stuff.

And he knew his business, absolutely.

I took his class at Columbia on silent movies.

I'm kind of interested, but I'm...

Between Two Stools, I don't really know if I want to see it.

Is it going to bum me out? Is it going to bore me stupid? And so what I do is I read Vincent Canby, and I read Andrew Sarris, and I read Pauline Kael, and I kind of triangulate between them.

I know that Pauline Kael resists anything kind of European, especially, or avant-garde or anything like that.

Well, it's also so funny you mentioned the villain.

Naming the villain after Andrew Sarris is just...

That's a real inside baseball joke, but it gets me every time.

But I think I was reading Roger Ebert's review of this from Christmas Eve 99, I think, is when it came out.

And later, he was a lot more complimentary.

Andrew Sarris, one of the good critics at the New York Observer in 2001 said, I frankly don't know if I would wish this psychic experience on children ever.

And as a marginally certified adult, I am still grappling with the task of explaining exactly how AI has managed to push the envelope of cinematic expression so far beyond what we have been conditioned to expect as family entertainment over the past century.

He called it a deeply subversive, ambitious and misunderstood masterpiece.

If there are freaks on display here, they are not the versatile performers to whom the title seems to allude, which I think is a great way of putting it.

And Andrew Sarris, who is the guy who brought auteur theory to America by translating all the French New Wave people writing about it.

Oh.

I also won a scholarship in his name when I was at Columbia.