Heckler (2008) -

An odd, dispiriting exploration of the critical impulse and the damage it can do (and does do) to the creative spirit. Comedian/actor/filmmaker Jamie Kennedy's style is comparatively direct: by collecting observations and insights from a broad array of comedians, as well as a smattering of other performers (athletes, singers, directors, actors, authors, etc) and a handful of hecklers (comedy club hecklers, print critics/reviewers, bloggers/web-critics), Kennedy examines the ways in which criticism is a burden and nuisance for the real work of art-making. The basic argument of the film informs the film's structure. Kennedy is suggesting that all critics are basically "hecklers" -- the arrogant, no-talent, attention-craving yahoos who ruin the show for everyone else because they're so sure they know the artist's not doing his job right. This core premise informs the structure of the film, as Kennedy's many very smart and very funny talking heads craft an analysis of the heckler's action. (In this collective theorization, the heckler wants to both snag a part of the glow of attention while also asserting their own importance within the performance event. In this conceptualization, men do this because they're losers who can't get laid; women do this because they're drunk and possibly horny.) Building from the location of the comedy club, and the core dynamic of the various strategies a comedian might use in dealing with a heckling member of the audience, the film next moves outward, first to print/broadcast critics and then to internet critics (bloggers and web-writers mostly). The film becomes progressively less interesting as it moves away from the comedy club heckler, and Kennedy's frustration with the idea of criticism of any kind becomes increasingly annoyed and defensive as his focus moves away from the concentrated dynamic of the heckler-comic. One of the most entertaining and interesting aspects of the film is its portrait of the various ways professional comedians have for "winning" battles with hecklers. And Kennedy himself seems often quite adept in doing just that -- shutting down the heckler in a comedy club. And, as the film moves away from the dynamic liveness of the comic-heckler dyad, it seems Kennedy is also exploring how various folks "shut down" such hecklers when they're not in the same room, but writing in a magazine or snarking on a teevee show or blathering on a blog. The film begins powerfully -- smart, funny, intense -- but by the end (when Kennedy is basically picking fights with white guys who gave his 2003 movie Malibu's Most Wanted really mean reviews in regional weekly papers or glossy snark rags) the enterprise of the documentary just feels petty and defensive. All the familiar screeds against criticism ("who are these people and are they any good at doing this thing they're criticizing me for?") are mixed in with easy internet cliches ("probably a [insert disparaging reference to age, body type or sexual inexperience] loser writing in his mother's basement") so that Kennedy, however consciously or inadvertently, replicates the action he most judges the critic for: tearing people down just because he can, just because he has the access and technology to do so. (You can sorta tell the moment when the film starts losing the clarity of its intelligence when we stop hearing much about female hecklers and, by extension, female critics.) What's unfortunate in this is that the exchange between audience and performer -- the very dynamic that the heckler so poisonously exploits -- is lost as Kennedy's film moves along, and as Kennedy's conception of criticism and commentary becomes increasingly about defending his own rights not to be criticized. Which just stops making sense after a while. Several interesting routes of inquiry -- the rise of snark, the proliferation of opinion, the spectacle of artist abuse -- are left unexplored, while Uwe Boll's notorious beatdown of several "critics" is depicted in detail. It's too bad that Kennedy's genuinely interesting premise -- use of heckling as a model for explaining the complicated ways in which criticism and creativity are often uncomfortably conjoined -- devolves so into a confusing/confused defensive rant.