Gunshots at the Guggenheim

Thanks to Life Without Buildings, for the heads up on The International, a new movie which apparently features a little gunfire in the Guggenheim. (The NY Guggenheim, by Frank Lloyd Wright, that is.) Cool. Follow this link for images and a peak at the movie trailer.

Writing Reviews

According to Deadline Hollywood Daily, famed movie critic Roger Ebert is coming under fire for writing a movie review after only watching the first 8 minutes of a 99-minute movie (story here, review here). In his opinion, it was so bad that after watching 8 minutes, he knew it was a stinker and walked out (or, um, stopped the DVD). Here's the part that bothers me, though: he then partly based his review on information found on imdb.com and only made it clear that he hadn't really watched the whole thing until the last sentence of the review.

From my point of view as a book reviewer, I have not done this so far, but I can understand hating a book so much that you just can't bear to go on. For example, I remember reading Devourer of Book's review for a book so bad she had to give up. But she admits this in the very first line of her review. Regarding Ebert's movie review, on his blog, Ebert writes that his own editor told him "Your original review is clever and well-written but I think morally dishonest because you conceal your MO until the very end." Ebert's response is that the logical flow of the review didn't require him to admit that he hadn't seen the movie until the end.

I'm interested in your take on this. As a reviewer (of books or movies), are we obligated to finish the whole thing? If not, is it valid to write a review of something we haven't finished?

Update: Thanks to Ali for pointing out that Ebert went back, watched the whole movie and wrote a new review. Definitely the right thing to do.

As an aside, here's a line that popped out for me, as a book reviewer, from his blog post about writing a new review:

In even my negative reviews, I try to give some sense of why you might want to see a film even if I didn't admire it.

Rem Koolhaas & Howard Roark

The Seattle Times has an interview with Rem Koolhaas, who designed the Seattle Public Library, which opened four years ago. Its a great building, but that's not why I am posting the interview. My favorite part of the interview is this exchange:

Q: It was a large project to undertake when you had so much skepticism.

A: Yes, but of course we were not alone. And I think that is kind of actually one of the difficult and distorting things at the current moment, is that basically some architects are seen as kind of almost bullfighters who somehow have to kill an animal, but you're part of a much larger enterprise.

Q: I think there's a reason for that: too many people have read "The Fountainhead" and it's ruined them for life.

A: Yeah, exactly, exactly. And I think that's actually extremely inconvenient, because there was Deborah (L. Jacobs, former City Librarian), of course, and there was also a board, and we had a lot of bonding in the beginning. So it's definitely not an ego thing, you know, and it's definitely not where you kind of are looking for morons or ever think that somebody — you realize that some of the criticism is unfounded or naive or not particularly kind of ... benevolent, but it really comes with the territory and it's not something that you kind of respond to in egotistical terms.

Don't get me wrong -- The Fountainhead is a great book. But, as alluded in my review of Loving Frank, it is a very particular view of architects and the act of building. It is, also, a very incorrect view. If even Rem Koolhaas -- who is probably (with, maybe, Frank Gehry) the closest thing we have in this day to Frank Lloyd Wright or Howard Roark -- thinks the idea of the "hero-architect" is a fallacy, I assure you the rest of us think its total B.S. It is fun to read, though.