Is "populism" killing popular film criticism?

more alarming in that piece was michael wilmington getting shafted at the chicago tribune! he's a pretty good critic!

Like Nabisco I am not sure I would use the word "populism", as i am not sure that is what it is. The deluge of films does not help either, combined with the multiplexisation of distribution (ten films might be released a week, but only three of those - and possibly the three least interesting - will be availible to most of your readers). Star ratings also help make these crude comparison even worse.

Should a review tell me if
a) the reviewer liked it
b) if I'll like it
c) if it is interesting in any way (liking stuff is so over-rated).

Kehr is a marvelous critic, I hope he's making a living writing for the NYT. He started at the UofChicago paper, then moved to the Reader (where I first read him), then the Tribune, then the D.N., now the NYT. I think he was fired from the D.N. for writing too many negative reviews. I believe he left the Tribune of his own accord. But I'm not certain.

many years ago I interviewed for a music critic job at the NYDN. after several preliminary chats that seemed to go well I met with a senior editor who interrupted one of my careful answers to ask a more pertinent question. "How long have you lived in New York?" she said with AUDIBLE contempt. "Nine years now." DEALBREAKER.

"They seem to have only one idea, and that surprisingly banal—that there is a zeitgeist and films reflect it."

that's not the idea, though: the ideas part is when the 'zeitgeist' -- or 'history', really -- is related to the films.

and he needs to qualify what he means by 'approximately true'. at one point he mentions facts, but the facts are not the truth.

I'm with him until he starts making a distinction between "insights" and "ideas" that's never fully clarified.

Facty things we could be told about film that I would quite like to know:
a) Technical: Average shot length, standard deviation of shot length, proportion of close, mid, long range shots. Editing: on or off the beat. Static/moving/shakey cam
b) Aesthetic: To what extend the film sets out its stall and then delivers. Simple mechanistic plot, or open ended. Ideology (on sleeve or implied), diversity of of character stock and so therefore who it is aimed at. And if there is an idea of who it is aimed at, does it hit (happy to read reviews from inside and outside the fold).
And
c) I would like to actually see reviews that take in everything - ie the PR, the ads, "the buzz" (real or otherwise). Certainly for you M:I:3's of this world, baby Cruise/Holmes and the films having similar release dates are important. I think Idiot Bradshaw claimed that Katie Holmes and Michelle Monaghan were lookalikees! Has he seen either of them?

those are sort of interesting, but you're immediately in theoretical territory when you start talking about them -- i don't think the viewer actually registers 'mid-shots' most of the time, for example. i hear el bordo is getting into cognitive psychology these days as it goes, but that would seem to go against all this facty stuff.

This resonates most from Bordwell: "As I get older, I’m less interested in opinions, whoever holds them, and more interested in ideas and information."

The notion that a living can be made as a professional film critic is what's killing film criticism.

But one used to have a fighting chance, yes? There have always been the Rex Reeds who live way too long, but thinking filmcrix seemed a lot more common in dailies/weeklies even a decade ago. Look at that Rosenbaum global DVD piece on the CinemaScope site -- is there even an alt-weekly that would put that in print anymore? The MSM wants 'reviewers' (that's what they are) to approach their job as a luckly member of the public, any use of theory or probing of aesthetics heartily discouraged. THUMBS UP from Mr Roeper!

the really big problem the way i see it is the very lack of opinion -- perhaps of facts and stuff too -- but for example if i go through imdb's 'external reviews' thing, it's amazing how one line on a film gets replicated over and over. maybe this is a function of the wordcount wars -- you're federally mandated to mention the plot and who stars in it, by which time you have not all that much space to get into their use of offscreen space or whatever.

weeklies, maybe. but dailies? with the exception of occasional outliers in a handful of major cities, when have dailies ever had much by way of thinking film critics? i admit to only being exposed to the dailies in the places i've lived, but since they've all been owned by major chains i'm guessing they're not unusual. most daily criticism is plot synopsis/i liked it/i didn't like it, with the very occasional bit of useful cultural or aesthetic context. if anything, daily criticism is probably better than it was several decades ago. i'll take a.o. scott and manohla dargis over vincent canby and janet maslin. (and any of them over bosley crowther.) roger ebert is probably the most influential daily critic of his generation, and his influence has not been bad on the whole.

i'm not arguing with kehr's central complaints (and i really like kehr's writing), just with the idea that there was some golden age of mass-market american criticism.

That said, even worse writing about television...

But I couldn't disagree more about Ebert, a not-dumb man whose uncritical taste can't be taken seriously.

Agreed. And the two dailies in my area – The Miami Herald and Ft Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel – have literate film critics working in a market that's quite hostile to smaller films.

his taste, no, but he writes well and i think he engages with movies on a personal level and in a fairly honest way (i.e. i almost never feel like he likes or dislikes something because he's supposed to). which to whatever extent he's been influential is mostly to the good.

and "serious" movies still get serious reviews in the mainstream press (at least, when they manage to get distribution outside the 10 biggest cities). not necessarily any better-written or more useful than the reviews of unserious movies, but it's not like they're ignored. do some mrqe searches for, say, wong kar-wai films, and you'll find reviews from all over.

Interview with Walter Chaw (new to me) of FilmFreakCentral.net which touches on some of this:

http://mattzollerseitz.blogspot.com/2006/05/keep-up-or-get-out-of-way-interview_16.html

"[Internet critics are] all just mosquitoes dive-bombing Hollywood, man. Unless you’re Ebert, and then you can manipulate the middlebrow as their most-beloved enabler and mouthpiece and then go on to influence the Oscars. The function of film criticism seems now more than ever—-if you’re genuine about what you do-—to just be on the record when the wind changes and we move away again (if we ever do) from all this consumer reportage of bankable product. I’m not concerned about anything other than putting on paper what my reaction is to a film within the context of my personal experience and prejudices: strengths and shortcomings. Pauline Kael was asked once why she didn’t write an autobiography, and she pointed back on all of her reviews and said that she already had. I believe in that. Good film criticism, any good criticism, is 1% savvy, 99% auto-psychoanalysis. I don’t like Kael, by the way. I think she was a brilliant writer, but a mean person, a borderline personality, and a shaky critic. She did have a way of articulating ephemera like performance and fashion, though. But ultimately, I’m not certain her bully tactics and popularization of film criticism did anybody any favors."

Yeah, I realize it's difficult to rate BO stats on something like Braun against something like Amelie, not only because of inflation but also multiplexation. But I was sort of under the impression that it was one of the top-grossing foreign films of its era.

i.e. what might also be killing popular film criticism is the fact that popular films and those who attend them, um, don't give a shit about film criticism. And why should they, given the fact that they'd probably find their taste being repeatedly excoriated on a weekly basis?

http://www.chicagoreader.com/movies/archives/2000/1100/001117.html

the age old trick of attacking the process rather than leading on it

I think in this instance that's perhaps what B. is doing, although I'd defend against this charge in general, a charge I do think applies to a great number of folks in film studies. (Viz. the long tradition of "calling for" some theoretical reorientation without demonstration its value.) As an exmaple: his new book on Hollywood isn't the greatest, but he does do pretty much what you ask, that is, compiles a lot of data (quantitative and qualitative) and (to a certain extent) asseses films on the basis of a (by film-studies standards) rigorous notion of plot construction . Although assessment isn't the primary goal of the book, more like description.

Most orthodox criticism overdoes opinions, which create the critic’s professional persona. Soon opinions crystallize into tastes, and the persona overshadows the films.

I think this perhaps what Nabisco was complaining about on some Christgau thread (one of many) from this or last year: that the critic's persona, his "taste," frequently overwhelms the descriptive, informative capacity of his criticism.

http://www.gazellebookservices.co.uk/ImagesMaster/W150/1556524544.jpg

I hope that makes sense.

Actually I think Rosenbaum isn't too naïve about that. I think he recognizes that Kiarostami or whoever is not going to have a mass audience. But I think he's been validated in his basic worries by the recent NYT article on the state of foreign-film distribution in the US. The problem is that despite writing about this situation at length he doesn't seem to have brought us any closer to understanding the why's and how's of this phenomenon. I think it would take someone a little less, uh, prejudiced by intellectual habit against capitalism to do the required digging.

Also: the Dardennes are very accessible, and successful, as foreign-language filmmakers go! I can actually see them with a pretty wide audience. Wider than I might expect for, say, Haneke, whose Caché has been doing very well this year.

(And an addendum: the $20,000 question here is whether [sorry Bordwell] the "zeitgeist" or some facet thereof has anything to do with the diminished value of foreign films on the market. I think there's probably some generalize cultural backlash or something feeding into this situation, but I'd reserve that explanation for last, after all the grubby details of consolidation and corporatization and the economics of exhibition and striking prints and exchange rates etc. etc. etc. are waded through.)

another x-post

I haven't seen The Child but I liked The Son. Presumably The Fetus will be their next project?

Ding ding ding. I haven't read the book, but I get the impression that it operates under the premise that wide swaths of Americans would be clamoring for Kiarostami films if only they knew about them and had access to them. Umm, yeah.

re the Dardennes-like stuff [Eric -- awful? are you going to write about this?], the indifference to critical reception extends below the mallplex waterline now. A more-or-less genre movie like Kekexili gets generally fine reviews, is produced by Columbia Pictures Asia, and its US gross in 5 weeks? $100,000, never playing more than ten theaters nationwide.

xpost

Man, Italian cinema sure had it rough stateside in the days of De Sica and Fellini, huh? ;)

the Dardennes-like stuff [Eric -- awful? are you going to write about this?]

I doubt it. I have nothing really further to add. If I did write a review, it would probably be a fake one a la Outlaw Vern.

x-post: yeah, I only used it as an example, though, of how people came to expect certain qualities from foreign films that made shopping for them a case of fulfilling certain quotas on their "foreignness."

... I have no idea what I just wrote there.

The recent assigning arthouse screens to some US multiplexes is clearly a reaction to last year everyone getting it wrong, and money going down. it is a financially led industry which doesn't often look at its books that closely. Thus it is not surprising that sometimes the application of theory or general film discussion is so loose when the quality of the discourse inside the industry is equally poor (even when there are things which are easily quanitfiable).

Amateurist: don't get me wrong, Bordwell is easily one of the most interesting people writing about film at the moment, particularly because he is aware of this malaise and is trying to react personally.

http://zeroforconduct.com/2008/04/09/fireworks.aspx

don't want to agree with this rly.

he uses some big words :(

shhh

By evolution or design (I'd vote for the latter), we're much stupider now than we were 40 or 80 years ago, a simple fact that can be proven to any fool by a comparison between 1968 and today, by way of the two eras' political speech rhetoric, song lyrics, movie content, fiction bestsellers, primetime TV programming, magazine syntax, school curricula, so on and so on. If we as a culture couldn't find the interest and patience for, say, A.J. Leibling or H.L. Mencken or George Santayana or Rebecca West or Bertrand Russell or George Orwell — and, if they were writing today, no interest or patience would be expended upon them at all — then paying talented writers a staff wage nowadays makes no practical sense.

this is maybe the trickiest part. god knows how you compare 80 years ago and now -- i'm pretty sure having a massively larger graduate population could be called an index of 'us' being smarter, though obviously {oh fuck it insert you're own zing}.

like, c. 1928, about 1,000 copies of woolf's novels or eliot's collected poems were published. about 400 copies of the criterion were sold each quarter. as for bertrand russell -- i don't think he was so well known outside the tiny and practically exclusively upper-middle-class ranks of the university-educated. ten years later orwell was not doing much better.

so 80 years ago, nah. 40 years ago, though -- i don't know.

the 40/80 thing is just... what? where is the proof behind this same stupid assertion bitter ppl in every generation make?

1968 Academy Awards

Best Picture: "Oliver!"
Best Director: Carol Reed ... "Oliver!"
Best Actor: Cliff Robertson ... "Charly"
Best Actress: Barbra Streisand ... "Funny Girl"

Fiction
1."Airport" Arthur Hailey. Doubleday
2."Couples"...John Updike. Knopf
3."The Salzburg Connection"... Helen MacInnes. Harcourt, Brace
& World
4."A Small Town in Germany"...John Le Carre. CowardMcCann
5."Testimony of Two Men" ...Taylor Caldwell. Doubleday
6."Preserve and Protect"...Allen Drury. Doubleday
7."Myra Breckinridge" ...Gore Vidal. Little, Brown
8."Vanished" ...Fletcher Knebel. Doubleday
9."Christy"...Catherine Marshall. McGraw-Hill
10. "The Tower of Babel"...Morris L. West. Morrow

airport would just SAIL over people's heads today

what about 1938, 1948, 1958, & 1978?

4."A Small Town in Germany"...John Le Carre.

reminds me i gots read this.

ie hes just cheaply using a sacred cow to defend a dumb point

I'll summarize. Atkinson says "hey, it's no big deal to have gotten the axe; it was my own fault for treating it like a FT gig when it should never have been such," all in an effort to appease himself of the layoff blues.

And then he talks about the American Film Critic "Night of the Long Knives."

So it's both not a big deal and also a carefully organized cultural bloodbath.

"Airport" the novel was at least two elementary school grades more literate than the film, to be fair.

i'm pretty sure having a massively larger graduate population could be called an index of 'us' being smarter, though obviously {oh fuck it insert you're own zing}

auto-zing

i think it's suckage that even alt papers use syndicated copy and nathan lee got hardsonned -- at the same time i'm like damn, you even had all that stuff. the uk doesn't.

xpost

totally meant it, it was a meta gag

i was saying to morbz the other week that if i were a newspaper managing editor having to choose between a f/t film critic and a f/t statehouse reporter, the critic wouldn't stand a chance. it really is kind of a luxury item. (unfortunately of course what's happening is they're firing both.)

a steakhouse reporter?

i'm a film critic AND a steakhouse reporter! so i'd be fine.

is "populism" killing steak criticism?

the privileged glaze

moovelle vague

steak tartan

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