"The Critics Agree—"

Ever notice how often the critics agree? Ever notice how often they're unperceptive, obtuse, or just plain wrong? Do you get frustrated when they fawn over a film like Forrest Gump, then ignore or make clever fun of films you can't stop recommending to your friends?

LiP's reviewers understand how to watch movies, and how to interpret their visual metaphors instead of blindly listening to dialogue. We take movies as seriously and read them as closely as literary critics do books. Our editors make one promise: After reading our reviews, you'll want to watch the films we review. If you've already seen them, you'll want to watch them a second time, and you won't see them the same way.

"Anyone can involve the audience emotionally," complained George Lucas, who would know. "Just show them a kitten, then wring its neck." Film tends to be an authoritarian medium, ingratiating and manipulative, appealing to the emotions and going for the uncritical response. Like the rest of LiP, our film reviews will resist the authoritarian impulse. We'll be focusing instead on films that respect their audience, that expect us to meet them halfway and actively engage with them as works of art: in short, films that take some interpretative effort to understand.

Of course, they'll have to beguile us into making that effort; that is, they have to be intriguing, beautiful, and fun enough to make us want to see them again and try to figure them out. (The only thing worse than a bad Hollywood blockbuster is a bad independent film—you know the kind—that arrogantly demands that you try harder to understand it while boring you to the point of fury. We will have none of this.) We may also occasionally direct our interpretive methods against films that might prefer to be taken at face value, to expose their hidden agendas and propagandistic messages.

But we're primarily interested in films that, like the great works of literature before them, take on the urgent social issues of their time, specifically the sorts of politically touchy and unmarketable issues that most commercial entertainment takes pains to avoid acknowledging at all—wealth, class, race, gender—the very issues LiP is dedicated to exploring. Which is not to say we'll only review films whose "message" we endorse, or use them as excuses to grind our ideological axes, or bend over backwards to "find" the same predictable agenda in everything. It's not like we're a bunch of dogmatic assholes. But we will be showing you the surprising and subversive political subtexts of films—all the things the critics agreed to ignore.

Submissions from writers who share our critical methods and philosophy are welcome. We're interested in new insights into old films as well as alternative readings of current ones. Reviews should be around 2000 words in length. Send reviews to Rob Content at rcontent@erols.com .

—May 7, 2001, Rob Content, Tim Kreider, Boyd White