My Heart Can't Go On

Two weeks ago, in my first post for Nothing Sacred, my Nextbook movie blog, I complained that a brilliant filmmaker like Roman Polanski had no business visiting Auschwitz, the site of his mother's death, with a filmmaker as crummy as Brett Ratner. I wanted to believe that a genuine artist would want nothing to do with a young hack whose films happen to have earned more than a billion dollars. But now I'm eating my words. (And not because Ratner's uncle seems to have left me a comment.)

In an interview last year with The A.V. Club, Ratner told the story of how Polanski came to appear in Ratner's Rush Hour 3:

After I did Rush Hour, I got three calls: Jonathan Demme, Warren Beatty, and Roman Polanski. I was like, "Wait a second, I thought I just made a contemporary version of Beverly Hills Cop." But the fact is that directors aren't snobs. After meeting them and talking to them, they appreciate a good movie, it doesn't matter what the genre. They know how hard it is; even if it's a comedy, an action-comedy, they know how hard it is to make a movie that's good, no matter what kind of movie it is. Roman became my friend. He called me, I went to Paris and visited him, and he was like, "Oh man, you don't understand, I love Rush Hour."

Roman Polanski loves Rush Hour. Has the world gone mad?

Reinforcing this cognitive dissonance is a passage in a book I happen to be reading right now, Carl Wilson's brilliant Let's Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste. It's his attempt to discern why millions of people love Céline Dion's music while millions more, apparently, hate it. Noting that Phil Spector "regards Céline as every bit the singer, indeed the artist, that she's made out to be," Wilson adds: "And he's not alone. Elle magazine reported in 2007 that Prince had been to her Vegas show three times, joining the likes of Rick Rubin." With admirable understatement, Wilson concludes, "It's not uncommon for musicians to bypass taste categories when they hear technical achievement, and Céline seems to be such a case."

In his opening chapter, Wilson (who detests Dion's music) admits, "Much of this book is about reasonable people carting around cultural assumptions that make them assholes to millions of strangers." Speaking for myself re Ratner: guilty as charged.

Comments

[Rob]

Another important literary figure (like yourself) recommended the same book to me mere days ago -- it must be essential reading. Certainly the title pun alone suggests a healthy sense of the absurd.