Outside Counsel

I was never a huge fan of "At the Movies", but I'm not really a fan of much television. Come to think of it, I'm no movie buff either. In a good year I'll have seen one or two of the films nominated for Best Picture, and maybe something with a super hero in it, but for the most part my movie viewing is done at home, and largely consists of what most people would consider "old stuff". In some ways this makes me an unlikely person to teach the class I'm finishing up next week. Actually, I've never really liked lawyer movies for the most part-- they always seemed either grotesquely unrealistic, like, say, "...And Justice For All", or a bit too close to the bone. In spite of these prejudices teaching "Lawyers in Movies" has been a real pleasure. The students have been fun to spend time with, and I have found that the focus that teaching a movie provides makes watching these movies a lot more enjoyable than I would have thought. Along the way I started reading the reviews archived at Rotten Tomatoes, on the theory that seeing how a movie was received at the time of its release might supply some insight. What I found in those reviews seldom made it into my lectures, but Roger Ebert, who I had seldom read up until now, proved to be a revelation. This guy loves movies, and his warmth and affection for what he is writing about comes shining through again and again. This is a valuable quality, I think. It is easy enough to snark about a movie you don't like; and it isn't even that difficult to be funny doing it. It is a harder thing to write something that takes the work on its own terms and fairly evaluates it. Ebert has been writing a series of reminiscences on his site, a kind of valedictory, I suppose, and the most recent is about television and movie critics, his experiences, and his observations about television film criticism. Recommended. (I found this via Byzantium's Shores)