I hate Charles Taylor.

I hate Charles Taylor.

A film critic for Salon.com, Taylor's insane diatribes disguised as reviews are a glaring flaw at an otherwise stellar website. Maybe someday I'll go into his strange habits of using his reviews to attack movies completely unrelated to the one he's talking about (like his swipe at Blade Runner in his review of Hulk), or his tendency to blame the audience for not liking something he does, or even just not liking it in the way he does. I always know I'm going to hate everything he writes, so I try to avoid his reviews at all costs.

Every once in a while, though, I read one of his pieces, just to torture myself, apparently. Today, I did it again. It's not a movie review this time, but a ""defense"" of Gwyneth Paltrow. (As always, the extra punctuation is to indicate the bitchy sarcastic air-quotes I'm making.) What's so unintentionally hilarious and simultaneously infuriating about his defense is that it's more hurtful than an attack.

He spends the first few paragraphs detailing why everyone hates Paltrow. And quite honestly, I was unaware that there was such hatred for her. So thanks for bringing that to my attention. And frankly, in listing all those things, he makes a pretty good case for hating her. Score one for Taylor!

Then, in composing his defense, he proceeds to rip her apart. Talking about her new movie, Sky Captain Etc. Etc., he says,

But like every other element of the movie, the actors, including Paltrow, exist only to fulfill some iconic function and are part of an enormous, sustained conception that sits on the screen without ever coming alive.

A ringing endorsement!

He liked her "blasé" performance in Flesh and Bone, but then adds, "The trouble was, that same blasé affect defined her other work from the period." Referring to a play he saw her in at the time, he says,

It wasn't a good performance. Wan and resigned where Nina is tormented and lyric, Paltrow moped through the role, her flat, nasal voice finding none of the pathos or sad comedy of Chekhov's lines.

I have come not to praise Gwyneth, but to bury her!

Talking of Hard Eight, he says it made good use of "her zonked, bruised quality", which, at this point in the article, I don't even know, that might be a compliment. He adds,

But other times she just seemed dissociated from the pictures she was in, a promising actress who needed some training to refine her potential (and especially to bring some variety to her voice).

Again with the voice!

Saying that she's "only sometimes the actress she can be," he continues on to her "prestige outings," such as Emma, in which he says she "seemed wholly inauthentic". Still waiting for the defense, Charles. Ah, here it comes: Paltrow is "much more enjoyable in throwaway pictures". I'm gonna go out on a limb here, and say that Paltrow would not be flattered by the description of any of her films as "throwaway," but I don't know, maybe that's just me.

The first "throwaway" picture he names: A Perfect Murder.

My colleague Stephanie Zacharek described what a fetching clotheshorse Paltrow made in the tepid "A Perfect Murder."

Clotheshorse? Tepid? Again: this is praise?

Then, after strangely finding nothing negative to say about Sliding Doors, he goes on to A View from the Top. After saying "The picture was a trifle" and describing it as a "silly comed[y]" (which, in any other context, would not sound quite so condescending), he chastises her for not liking the movie. "[An Entertainment Weekly] interview reveals one unattractive movie-star habit -- that of distancing yourself from your failures." So, she's to blame for not embracing the film he just called a trifle and a failure? Nice.

"Paltrow's priding herself on her honesty suggests that she's not the best judge of her work," he says in the same paragraph. So 1) it's bad to be honest ("sometimes telling a lie is simply a matter of being gracious to the people you work with" -- which probably is true when the film is current, to help the box office, but not in an interview years later), and 2) Paltrow can't tell the good from the bad in her work... so how she became one of the most successful and critically-acclaimed actresses in the world is apparently a complete mystery.

Taylor finally goes on to actual praise of some of Paltrow's films, but in doing so, he reveals another of my long-standing reasons for hating him: his overpraising of films the world at large recognizes as mediocre-to-crappy. I've got no real beef with his mentioning Great Expectations or Possession -- neither of which I despised, but neither of which amounted to much of anything, either, except in Taylor's eyes. But then, he goes on to lavish attention on Paltrow's "most affecting performance" (aside from Shakespeare in Love) (I think):

Shallow Hal.

Yes, according to Taylor, Shallow Hal is "one of the loveliest, most affecting, and most emotionally satisfying of American film comedies." No, really. He actually spends the last four paragraphs of this article, the culmination of his defense, the crux of his thesis, arguing that Paltrow should be loved and embraced for Shallow Goddam Hal. He interprets its "message". He refutes other critics who dared not to love it. He says things like,

As Rosemary, Paltrow expresses emotion that has the force of the elemental.... There's no distance between what Rosemary feels and what Paltrow makes us feel.

In the final paragraph, he even seems to lose track of who he's talking about, going on about the Farrelly brothers and their "radical humanism", their "deeply inclusionary movies" like Shallow Goddam Frickin' Hal and Stuck on You. He concludes with the dopey, preachy, pat, condescending, judgmental, and, considering he's spent the last few thousand words deriding Paltrow more than he's praised her, patently ridiculous statement:

Of course "Shallow Hal" is red meat to Paltrow haters, because it says judgments based on surfaces are the ugliest thing imaginable. A simple idea her most fervent detractors have yet to grasp.

Oh, snap! Take that, Paltrow haters! You just can't grasp how wonderful Gwyneth is because you just don't get the genius of her performance in Shallow Hal!

What has he even accomplished with this article? He set out to prove Paltrow doesn't deserve to be hated, then, after shredding her on his own, he finally offered up three of her weakest roles as his evidence. You know what I think: I think Taylor secretly hates Gwyneth Paltrow himself. And I think he wrote this article to passive-aggressively express his hate toward her. It's certainly one of the more damning things ever written about her, intentionally or not.

It's either that, or Charles Taylor is a goddam lunatic. And really, when I think about it: can't it be both?