Variety asks the question. Four people answer it. What d'ya think?
As a recovering film critic myself I'd have to say that I often avoid reading reviews by other critics, especially the ones I respect, until after I've seen a film. Which is why, ultimately, I read very few critics these days because only a handful of them -- Dargis, Hoberman, Rosenbaum et al -- are every really worth reading after one has already seen the film. Most people who write about film for the major dailies and an increasing number of weeklies aren't critics with a serious knowledge of film history or aeshtetics. They're just journalists on the film review beat. They could be reassigned to writing about power tools without missing a beat. And why would I want to read a plot synopsis, dully written at that, after I've seen the film?
I tend to agree, then, that the kind of journalist who's cranking out quickie, yay or nay, write ups week-in-week out is a dying breed what with so many other ways for people to get the word on this or that film from their actual peers. That said, two minutes browsing You Tube or any of the movie download sites, always leaves me longing for the return of the cultural Gatekeeper who sifts through all the dross and applies a discerning, historically informed sense of taste to what's out there.
All of which leads me to ask you guys who your favorite critics going (or not going) are. Of critics past, no one beats Manny Farber in my opinion. Does anyone read Andrew Sarris anymore?
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12 comments:
Guy Debord writes:
"Art criticism is second-degree spectacle. The critic is someone who makes a spectacle out of his very condition as spectator, expressing his ideas and feelings about a work in which he does not really participate. He re-presents, restages, his own nonintervention in the spectacle. The weakness of random and largely arbitrary fragmentary judgments concerning spectacles that do not really concern us is imposed upon all of us in many banal discussions in private life. But the art critic makes a show of this kind of weakness, presenting it as EXEMPLARY."
So if art criticism is so minor, then why does Debord get so exercised by it? His comment smacks of, "Those who can do; those can't criticize/teach/etc."
I don't read a lot of film criticism actually, as I don't have much time. I remember liking Owen Gleiberman and Lisa Schwarzbaum in Entertainment Weekly of all places. Manohla Dargis and John Powers used to write good criticism for the Weekly but they're both gone, replaced by quite lesser lights.
You know, Roger Ebert used to actually be good, until he got lost in jamming his thumb in whatever direction. He's actually won a Pulitzer for his criticism.
With regard to my first comment: case in point, Scott Foundas. The borderline between film criticism and the concessions stand has never been murkier.
RK, our dislike of Scott Foundas is mutual. (Sorry, Paul!) He is one of the lesser lights at the Weekly who I referred to in my comment. I'm no great fan of Ella Taylor either.
Foundas has never seemed to have any coherent approach to critiquing cinema. He adores Lucas for creating some new digital film language, yet considers Peter Jackson a threat to cinema's very life. His recent remark that Rodriguez's half of Grindhouse had some "cautionary message" about militarism smacks of a movie geek who desperately wants to sound erudite enough to make "Planet Terror" meaningful.
But I'm not ready to relegate him to the popcorn line. Even if I find him dullish in his remarks, I will say that at least he's trying. He's not a critic-cum-press agent trying to get his name in the ads, and he's not someone who will throw a hissy fit about any film that has intellectual content at all (cf. the SF Chronicle's Mick LaSalle, who thinks the height of cinema last year was Bobby). LaSalle and his ilk are the ones who want to reduce genuine film criticism to a populist echo chamber.
Foundas, on the other hand, aggravates so much because he disappoints. He reminds me of a former student, who knew a little but more about theory and criticism than his fellow classmates, but had no real idea about how to apply it, and his papers wound up being incoherent.
And, incidentally, what is it with the Weekly's "GO!"-designated movies? It seems that almost half - and maybe more - of the movies in release are movies to which I should "GO!", at least according to the Weekly.
I've noticed that. It seems like I should be "GOing" to everything ...
Perhaps the new owners of the Weekly want to their reviews to seem positive. I do get happy when a film I like or want to see gets the "GO!" tag and want to kick Scott Foundas's ass when a film that I hate or looks stupid gets one. But I'm emotional that way.
If the question is whether film critics are really needed anymore, I think the answer is yes, of course they are. I think that you who actually study movies are somewhat jaded in your analysis of film critics. Film critics -- even the ones writing for smarter publications -- are not writing for an audience with PhDs in various film disciplines. They are writing for people, like me, who have an interest, even an avid interest, in films but don't have the training, time or talent to experience them in the light of someone who does have that training, time and talent. Personally, law school has so warped my mind to thinking in nothing but logical syllogisms that I appreciate a little help from a film critic now and then who can assist me in a more abstract understanding of the movie I just watched. Additionally, I don't have the time to watch the full canon to catch references or understand how one film fits contextually in film history. For those of us who don't have this background, critics provide a valuable service.
Also, if not for film critics, the irresistible force of the Hollywood blockbuster would have even more of a hegemonic hold over the theaters than it already does. If not for film critics, what are the chances that I would have heard of "Lives of Others" or "Children of Men" or any other film that didn't have the full force of a Hollywood media blitz?
I admit that film critics singly can be silly, obtuse in their writing, and are often just wrong. But taken as a whole, film critics serve an important function in fostering and promoting quality films.
One final thing, you should hesitate complaining too much about the LA Times film critics. Check out the Indianapolis Star sometime if you want to see how truly bad a critic can be. The critic who reviewed "Zodiac" for the Star complained that it didn't have any closure.
I'm not convinced.
1. One way of thinking about the status of film criticism today would be to relate it to what I'm doing now (what we're all doing at Retinal Damage): posting a comment.
2. Print media film critics remain bound within the "expert paradigm" that the internet has challenged.
3. The critics I read most are the "user comments" on imdb or netflix.
Has the internet really challenged the "expert paradigm" of the MSM? I know that is the CW, but I don't buy it. I only know this from the sphere of political reporting, but most of the major political bloggers are either current or former political writers and insiders, or, at the very least, have a political expertise. While the internet may fuel the direction of the covering of a story and give outlet to additional information that the MSM, because of size limitations or otherwise, do not present, the idea that non-experts, (i.e., those who don't have the training or talent to pursue any given discipline as a career) is a more valuable source for ideas and discussion is mad.
The reason I read this blog is because the contributors have an expertise about movies that I, like the "reviewers" on Netflix and IMDB, do not possess. While there is the occasional cogent review on Netflix, they are so massively overwhelmed by this-movie-is-boring and the-acting-was-good reviews that it becomes pointless to even start to read them.
Glenn Reynolds, of Instapundit fame, wrote a book called "An Army of Davids" making the same bloggers challenge the MSM argument. However, someone, I don't remember who, made the observation that the title of his book is telling. David wasn't like everyone else -- he was special. The fact is that we can't all be an expert on everything. What the internet actually shows is not an army of Davids, but the masses showing their ignorance and a few trained and talented individuals demonstrating expertise. Just like the MSM.
This from my "Literary Quote of the Day" widget: “Romanticism has never been properly judged. Who was there to judge it? The critics!” A. Rimbaud.
I suspect Rimbaud would have been with Rob here, preferring to read the user comments on his poetry to the critics's assaults.
Hey, has Dogme ever been judged properly? I don't know.
But the original Variety question was prompted i think by the points Rob raises. Posting a review of a film here, at RD, or a comment at IMDB or Netflix or anywhere else, has certainly challenged the place of officially sanctioned critics in the cultural hierarchy.
On one level blogs and chat threads have only made manifest the word of mouth networks that have always made those surprise sleeper indie/foreign hits or kept people away from that surefire popcorn flick -- despite what the critics thinks. So social networks that have always existed have been amplified exponentially by the internet. Has that translated into more interesting work getting a larger audience? Check out the Netflix Top 100. WTF is Crash doing at number 1? With the rest of the list a fairly predictable run of Hollywood stuff.
How much has the internet also made manifest what Debord describes as "The weakness of random judgments concerning spectacles" which is "imposed upon all of us in many banal discussions in private life"? Someone fill me in. Would Debord have been as pleased as say Rimbaud might have been (and here I'm totally speculating) with the rise of the People as critic? Doesn't sound like it.
The rise of the internet critic and the chat thread preceded and paved the way for user produced content sites like You Tube. Once the people seized the reigns of criticism for themselves, it's only natural they would move on to claim production for themselves. And You Tube makes manifest what all us avid movie goers have known forever and secretly hoped to suppress: There's just way too much out there to ever hope we could see it all, or even the majority of what we think we should see. There's nothiing to make one yearn for the glory days of the gatekeeper like browsing through You Tube for something, anything, worth watching for even 30 seconds ...
One of the problems here, I think, is that the print media film critic is, almost of necessity, a generalist. What, for instance, is Owen Geiberman's special area of interest? Scott Foundas's? I'm sure they have them, but, in practice, this has to be subsumed beneath their role as arbiters of taste, singular (as opposed to tastes, plural). As such, their textually constructed audience is necessarily also a general one ("people who are interested in film"). Two related consequences:
* Film reviews are normative to the extent that any review implies a general consensus of what constitutes a generally good movie.
* They are spectacularly useless for addressing niche audiences or variant tastes. (Take, e.g., a movie like Hostel, which Mookie has referred to before: a bad review of this film within the print media wouldn't have dissuaded anyone interested in seeing this film from actually seeing it. The simple reason: the normative taste community constructed in the press rarely overlaps with the taste community of slasher movie afficionados.)
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