Has the modern Film Critic slipped through the interwebs cracks?
February 24, 2009 2:05 PM   Subscribe

Film criticism is an odd place. It seems the dichotomy between "serious" and "populist" has become insurmountable. Is there hope? Has Ebert's recent prolific and insightful work done enough to rectify his image in terms of his TV laziness? Meanwhile, I'd hope to submit that this guy is the future of popular film criticism (in a good way).

What is happening in Film criticism? It seems... in flux. gone are the days of Kael and cashiers du cinema (at least in terms of relevance).

Sure there are the heralds like the New Yorker's Anthony Lane, who has really seemed to languish in boredom lately. And if he represents the populist of the "serious" film criticism crowd, then you're talking about a group that seems to have lost track of what to do with popular cinema at large. Sometimes they lash out. Granted, people like to lash out right back.

The internet was supposed to be the great equalizer. The AICN approach was for some reason seen as revolutionary, but the utter lack of literacy or focus seriously undermines any good intentions. Meanwhile the AV Club comes off like a hipster's guide to hating movies: educated, yet youthfully indignant and inclined to hate just about everything.

Submitter sees two rays of light 1) Roger Ebert at least seems to have really stepped up his writing in the wake of his surgeries and health problems (honestly, the TV show made his approach far too lazy to be as effective). And 2) I've been following the writing for years now, and what I've seen has wowed me. Writing for a smaller genre-based website Devin Faraci has really turned in some exceptional work. His style is a nice amalgamation of educated and accessible. He has a great way of mixing intellectual theory with crude humor. I thought of all of this, because of his watchmen review; which I can say blows every critic I've seen thus far out of the water in terms of "getting it."
posted by Lacking Subtlety (28 comments total)

This post was deleted for the following reason: It looks like you put a lot of work into this, but it really reads like a personal blog post more than something that makes sense as a post to Metafilter. -- cortex



 
Do the people who are the target demo of 'populist' movies read movie criticism?? Seems to me Ebert writes for the 'serious' crowd. Most movie goers function on a 'wow that preview was awesome' or 'oh, angelina jolie's boobies!!' level, no?
posted by spicynuts at 2:10 PM on February 24, 2009


Let's consider it "populist criticism readers" not necessarily "populist movie goers." I'd suggest Ebert is a bridge between the two. His reviews and television show were rather popular and he had a nice way of dealing with films on their own terms, whereas something like the new yorker asks "what does this mean to movies at large?"... which can often be counterproductive.
posted by Lacking Subtlety at 2:20 PM on February 24, 2009


Aw dammit. I just saw the post on new yorker films below. Too similar? The amounts of links to post in this thing were a b****.
posted by Lacking Subtlety at 2:22 PM on February 24, 2009


Good for Devin but the reason there aren't many Watchmen reviews out there is because there's an embargo.
posted by muckster at 2:22 PM on February 24, 2009


This editorial comment is posing as an FPP. Two thumbs down.
posted by crossoverman at 2:23 PM on February 24, 2009


While Ebert's certainly been on a roll lately, his writing's been excellent for many years. I suspect that his departure from TV has cast light on just how good his written reviews have been, rather than being a catalyst for a major change in his style.

The Onion AV Club is the new Cahiers. They have a number of smart, witty writers with a broad grasp of both "serious art" and "pop culture".
posted by eschatfische at 2:25 PM on February 24, 2009 [2 favorites]


I'm not so sure about labeling the Onion AV Club as haters. I actually find their reviews to align pretty closely with my own, and I'm a fairly forgiving person when it comes to my ten bucks (well, $12.75 in Manhattan). Some recent quick grades from them:

Coraline: A
Slumdog Millionaire: A-
The Wrestler: B+
Inkheart: B
He's Just Not That Into You: C

Seems about right to me. If you really want pretentious twaddle drenched in Haterade, look up Armond White in the New York Press.
posted by Amanojaku at 2:30 PM on February 24, 2009


Or what eschatfische said.
posted by Amanojaku at 2:31 PM on February 24, 2009


"cashiers du cinema" - deliberate, or a typo? the linked page correctly uses "cahiers," notebooks.
posted by mwhybark at 2:31 PM on February 24, 2009


I'd say there's a middle ground - people who want to read well-thought prose on movies, yet also enjoy seeing pop films. Sometimes pop films disappear upon dissection, and sometimes they hold up.

My question to Devin Faraci - what was so great in the 1970s? "It's the sort of movie that major studios are simply not supposed to be making now that the 1970s are over." What were those pinnacles of the 1970s and before that are lacking equivalents in the later decades?
posted by filthy light thief at 2:33 PM on February 24, 2009


I'm not so sure about labeling the Onion AV Club as haters.

Me either. Sounds like someone's upset they said mean things about his favourite movies.

AV Club also do some nice retrospectives, and things like their "Flops" features are really interesting.
posted by rodgerd at 2:34 PM on February 24, 2009


It seems the dichotomy between "serious" and "populist" has become insurmountable.

ok, first things first. when you make a statement like this, link to something that mirrors or clarifies this statement, otherwise this reads like an excellent entry for your own blog, not metafilter.

Has Ebert's recent prolific and insightful work done enough to rectify his image in terms of his TV laziness?

what are you talking about? why is there no link for a gigantic snark bait sentence like this to explain what you're talking about? again, this reads like your blog.

Meanwhile, I'd hope to submit that this guy is the future of popular film criticism (in a good way).

Is this guy the subject of your fpp? oh wait. maybe not, because there's all kinds of stuff under the fold that has nothing to do with him. what on earth, then, is the big link of this fpp? surely it's not nytimes.com/arts and aintitcool.

What is happening in Film criticism?

I don't know. Are you asking us because you would like us to tell you? not to sound like a broken record, but: your blog again.

Submitter sees two rays of light 1) Roger Ebert at least seems to have really stepped up his writing in the wake of his surgeries and health problems (honestly, the TV show made his approach far too lazy to be as effective).

ah, here's the Ebert thing you were talking about. but the link is literally just to his blog.

so the main problems with your post are as follows:

1. you're rambling a lot. you're not really giving us a nugget of insight into things, so much as you're wikipedia-style linking to proper nouns during a little diatribe of your opinion.

2. highly editorial. metafilter is not where you let us know what you think and then find links to pad it out. metafilter is where you show us a cool link and then you can discuss it in the resulting thread if you want. but the link comes first. which brings me to...

3. your links are crap. you're just linking to the ny times, or aintitcool or roger ebert. when you've found something you think is best of the web, put that front and center and let it be the subject of your post. it can stand on its own, or with a few well chosen supplemental links. but just linking to any critic you mention or website you reference is not good linkage.

4. aintitcool sucks. do not legitimize it by pretending it has a place in legit movie criticism, populist or otherwise.

I hope this helps explain why your post will likely be deleted. Chances are you can make a decent film criticism fpp, but this isn't doing the job just yet.
posted by shmegegge at 2:35 PM on February 24, 2009 [1 favorite]


Sometime last year I gave up on reading movie reviews, after my girlfriend and I had decided against seeing that Rashomon-type movie with Dennis Quaid and Matthew Fox and Forest Whitaker, where the president gets shot in Spain or something (I'm feeling way too lazy to IMDB the title). It got bad reviews, so we decided not to see it, but then a friend told us she loved it, so we went to see it anyway. We enjoyed it, and considered seeing it an afternoon fairly well spent. And we wouldn't have gone to see it if we had listened to the reviewers, who seemed to have more interest in showing how ostentatiously jaded they were with cinema in general to actually watch the movie.

I dunno. Not every movie has to be the best movie ever, y'know?

What I hate about most AICN reviews is that (a) very few of the reviewers seem to have the slightest clue when it comes to written communications, and (b) there's a lot of extraneous bullshit that has nothing to do with the movie. I seriously don't care how you got special advance tickets. Just tell me whether I can see Dr. Manhattan's dick.

What I hate about the AV Club is that (as mentioned in the OP) every writer they have is like a cross between Dwight Schrute and the audience at a Malkmus show: I've seen all this shit that your ass never even heard of, and all of it sucks. Stephanie Zacharek at Salon pulls the same shit.

Devin Faraci is pretty funny, and I generally find myself in agreement with his reviews, but again, he spends a lot of time characterizing himself by what he hates. Recently he seems to have this weird "the new Star Trek movie sucks because I loved the original series as a kid" trope going on, which is a fanboy trait I find particularly irritating; I mean, just because Gus Van Sant made a mildly shitty remake of Psycho doesn't mean we've burned all the copies of the original Hitchcock movie. Hollywood is constantly going to reinvent properties whether the geeks like them or not; if you don't like it, ignore it.

(Yes, I realize there's a big difference between movie reviews and film crit. Also, I realize I went on a bit of a tear here. Have a nice day.)
posted by hifiparasol at 2:35 PM on February 24, 2009 [1 favorite]


Anthony Lane can be fun to read (his review of Star Wars Episode 3, previously on MetaFilter, as a case in point), but he's too damn predictable: if he's reviewing a movie I've heard of, he doesn't like it; if he's reviewing a movie I haven't heard of, he does like it.

I really enjoy Roger Ebert's reviews (minor exception being those of any movie relating to Charlie Kaufman, because his serious crush on the guy gets in the way of his objectivity a little) as well as David Denby's for the New Yorker. I find them both more predictive of my personal view of the movie than Anthony Lane's--plus, I sometimes feel like I'm actually learning to be a more attentive movie-watcher (Ebert doesn't exactly hide his didactic aims).
posted by goingonit at 2:36 PM on February 24, 2009 [1 favorite]


(Also, that Watchmen review is less a piece of criticism and more like a languid blowjob.)
posted by rodgerd at 2:36 PM on February 24, 2009


What is happening in film criticism? Well, let's see -- tons of people have lost their jobs while all over the web, a diverse & fascinating world of film blogs has been taking shape, from the obsessively obscure to some very successful "populist" ones. Day for day, David Hudson's IFC Daily provides the most comprehensive overview. Other good places to start:

GreenCine Daily
Indie Eye
Movie City Indie
Salon: Beyond the Multiplex
Some Came Running
The Projectionist
Bright Lights Film Journal
Chained to the Cinematheque
davekehr.com
Film Experience Blog
Filmmaker Magazine
girish
Invisible Cinema
Jonathan Rosenbaum.com
Lessons of Darkness
Like Anna Karina's Sweater
Lost in the Frame
Observations on film art
Shooting Down Pictures
Slant Magazine
Spout
Thanks for the Use of the Hall
The Auteur's Notebook
Twitch
Vinyl is Heavy
Pullquote

and of course, The House Next Door as well as my own humble efforts.
posted by muckster at 2:40 PM on February 24, 2009 [5 favorites]


My AV Club comment was less to do with their actual grading and more with their approach.
posted by Lacking Subtlety at 2:40 PM on February 24, 2009


What were those pinnacles of the 1970s and before that are lacking equivalents in the later decades?

The Godfather, Star Wars, Taxi Driver, Harold and Maude, Midnight Cowboy, The Last Detail, The French Connection, Jaws... lots of stuff.

The 70s were arguably the most important years in the development of American cinema. Lots of the good stuff you see today is possible because the auters of the 70s helped turn film from "stage plays captured on camera" to a truly unique art form.
posted by hifiparasol at 2:44 PM on February 24, 2009 [2 favorites]


I dunno. Not every movie has to be the best movie ever, y'know?

This, for me, is the main thing I like about Ebert - he generally seems to distinguish between "This isn't a very good film considered against the grand sweep of cinematic history, but is a fun little film that does what it set out to achieve", as opposed to "This is a pile of crap and fails on every level."
posted by rodgerd at 2:50 PM on February 24, 2009 [1 favorite]


What were those pinnacles of the 1970s and before that are lacking equivalents in the later decades?

Also it was the era in which the studios literally transferred the power of financial decision making at large over to the directors in the wake of their tremendous auteur-based success.
posted by Lacking Subtlety at 2:50 PM on February 24, 2009


Umm....one wonders about the depth of knowledge/experience reflected in the FPP. I haven't had any serious film classes since '98, but I'm pretty sure Film Threat which began publication back in '84 as a 'zine still exists (aannd.....yep.) To play off the typo in the OP, there's Cashiers du Cinemart. That's just off the top of my rather out-of-practice and away-from-the-scene head. I'd imagine there's a huge blogosphere that covers the 'popular' vs. 'professional' spectrum the OP presents as a dichotomy, but I haven't really gone looking for it.

Also, Kael isn't the be all and end all of film criticism, by a long shot.

Some of my aging favorites (shout out to those of you who recognize the syllabus:)

Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan -- Robin Wood (great Marxist film crit)
The Women Who Knew Too Much -- Tania Modleski ( this is Mulvey applied to Hitchcock)

Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis -- Barbara Creed (heavy on the Kristeva)

Alien Zone: Cultural Theory and Contemporary Science Fiction -- Annette Kuhn

Sixguns and Society: A Structural Study of the Western -- Will Wright

I'd be curious about what more active and current people are reading now, in terms of articles, journals, anthologies, less formal magazines, etc.

On preview: a nod to what was said above re: transition to electronic formats, proliferation of less prominent sources vs decline in positions in print media (generally), etc.
posted by snuffleupagus at 2:54 PM on February 24, 2009


oops: The Women Who Knew Too Much
posted by snuffleupagus at 2:55 PM on February 24, 2009


I fucking hate the world "hipster." Stop being lazy and actually SAY whatever it is you fucking mean. Who is a hipster? Why are the critics of the avclub "hipsters"? Because they have opinions and taste?
posted by jcruelty at 2:56 PM on February 24, 2009


Oh, I should also note that one of the big problems with these fan-journalism film sites like CHUD and AICN is that, in a lot of cases, the reporters seem to trade good coverage, and sometimes good reviews, for access. I don't think CHUD does this nearly as often as some of the others (I suspect the hipster contrarianism of some of the writers is a subconscious defense against this kind of charge; whereas Harry Knowles gave the US version of Godzilla a good review because, I dunno, he got free tickets) but Devin Faraci has been spending a lot of time on the set and talking to Zack Snyder.

Not that this is always intentional, mind you; every movie set I've ever been on has wowed the shit out of me, and when you're a movie nut it's probably hard to compartmentalize that shit. Hell, I almost buttered my Dockers because I got to see the set of A Series of Unfortunate Events. So I understand how this kind of stuff could happen.
posted by hifiparasol at 2:57 PM on February 24, 2009


whoops, sorry jcruelty :)
posted by hifiparasol at 2:59 PM on February 24, 2009


I fucking hate the world "hipster." Stop being lazy and actually SAY whatever it is you fucking mean. Who is a hipster? Why are the critics of the avclub "hipsters"? Because they have opinions and taste?

Christ, what a hipster.
posted by snuffleupagus at 3:02 PM on February 24, 2009


They're hipsters because they drink expensive coffee, wear black turtlenecks made by kids in Bangladesh and interact sexually through text messaging and furtive semi-masturbatory episodes. They have better teeth, better hair, better music collections and are far more attractive than you -- and they know it, and aren't afraid to say so.

In short, they're the arrogant Zeds, and they're not going away.
Funny thing, though: today's tweens are going to kick their asses.
posted by seanmpuckett at 3:05 PM on February 24, 2009


This is a terrible post for all the reasons shmegegge cites, but I want to register my fervent agreement with Amanojaku:

If you really want pretentious twaddle drenched in Haterade, look up Armond White in the New York Press.

I can't believe that guy still has a job. I (along with half the cineliterate population of NYC) was trashing him in the letter columns of the Press twenty years ago, and I really thought he'd be shipped back to Detroit within the year. Instead, here is is, still bloviating. I mean, sure, you can be an asshole if you're smart and can write well, or you can get by as a dumbass if you charm everyone into submission, but this guy fails on all counts.
posted by languagehat at 3:06 PM on February 24, 2009 [1 favorite]


« Older The One That Got Away   |   Filed under: he said what now? Newer »


This thread has been archived and is closed to new comments