comment #1

Hickenlooper says ...

The slow death of serious film criticism has been happening over the last two decades. It was discussed extensively in my book REEL CONVERSATIONS back in 1991 when I interviewed Andrew Sarris and Roger Ebert. The reality is that we become more and more of a semi-literate society with every passing generation. At the same time, we've become far more consumer oriented in every way possible. Capitalism used to be about fulfilling a need, now it is only about creating a need -- a need where everyone is in a rush to quantify, judge, digest and spit out information as quickly as possible for the sake of I don't know what. In our ever increasing sound bite, multi-tasking culture, everyone is in a race to quickly sniff out, pass judgement, and then consume everything in sight, including films, in a race to I don't know where for I don't know what. We truly have become the serpent devouring itself. Consequently, film critics and journalists are in a race to fuel the frenzied bonfire of consumer need to know now. As a result the level of true insight and the art of film criticism from the glory days of Andre Bazin and the folks at Cahier du Cinema has diminished to something I like to cynically call "consumer guide reviewing." There is no time or room left for thoughtful insight or critical thinking because everyone, from reader to writer, is in just too much of a damn hurry to get to where I don't know where -- ? To get to there there...

comment #2

filmfestivalgeek says ...

Just wanted to applaud Hickenlooper for his astute coments and Jeff for tracking these changing developments in these changing times. That's why I come to this site, 4-6 times a day.

comment #3

Jay T. says ...

It always kind of bugs me when Matt Drudge is referred to as a blogger...

comment #4

CinemaPhreek says ...

My two favorite sections of this idiotic (I know, it's Goldstein so I guess that was redundant) is the part where he has his 9 year old son talk about criticism of a video game and that "Gee, thanks for that breaking news item" section with Courtney Lear. In the case of the first, so glad he clued us in that 9 year olds have turned away from critics. You know, like back in our youths when between stick ball games in front of our tenements we would race down to the corner to get the afternoon papers to see what new Atari game the reviewers were raving about.

As to the latter one with Ms. Lear - wow, that is a new development. Because until now, NO ONE ever had thought to keep buying music from a group whose last album you loved.

comment #5

K. Bowen says ...

I wrote about this on the blog this morning. Sometimes I think film critics mistake the state of film reviewing with their job security.

Cahiers du Cinema did wonders for film criticism in the 1950s, but I also think that the elitist tendency in films and film reviewing is an eventual dead end if all we have is that alone. Intellectual monasticism has killed literature by turning it into an elitist activity. We should be thankful that film still operates as a popular art in which popular opinion still counts. That tug of war between brainiacs and Joe Blow is the reason it remains vibrant.

The nine-year-old thing was very funny. Imagine. Word of mouth exists. Also funny is the idea that average Americans were paying attention to Paulene Kael thrity years ago.

comment #6

Hickenlooper says ...

Cinema Phreek, I don't know if I agree with your argument for a kind of relativism. Elitism in art is a good thing. Without it the arts tend towards enfantilization. They become decadent and wallow in depravity. Look how far our standards have fallen. It the 1930s and 40s mainstream movies were made by folks like Lubitsch, Wilder, Ford, Welles with contributions by Faulker, Hecht, Chandler. Because there were standards back then, those were the heights both filmmakers and critics alike reached for. Elitism was good. Even as late of the 1970s our standards remained high when we had Ashby, Hellman, Rafelson, Bogdanvich, Burtolucci, Bergman, Antonioni. With your argument for aesthetic relativism and that the cinema doesn't need elitist critics, are you really going to try to tell me that constant chatter about Brian Singer, Judd Aptow, George Clooney, and Lindsay Lohan is a true reflection that the cinema is as vibrant today as it was even thirty years ago. Give me a break. It's all gone to shit and everyone knows it.

comment #7

MAGGA says ...

Everything has always been going to shit if we judge by the opinions of the times. Always. The old philosophers wrote about the youth of the day with didain. It's as predictable as the sun rising in the morning. Things change, and change is scary. It seems to me that more people are more cine-litterate now than at any previous time, that the preception that everyone used to read specific critics in the past is false, and that the yearning for an elite bunch of thinkers that tell us all what to think screams herd mentality more than anything. I live in Scandinavia, where the "elites" decided what films should be made, screened and discussed until recently. Apart from Bergman it's done our art little good.

comment #8

K. Bowen says ...

I'm not arguing against elite critics. They're damn important. At the same time, if all you have are elite critical voices making highly intellectualized points, the art ends up stagnating. As I think MAGGA is trying to get at. If all you have is elite critical opinion, you end up thinking My Dinner WIth Andre is one for the ages long after people have stopped watching The Terminator. You end up watching Taste of Cherry unable to admit that it's boring the shit out of you.

comment #9

bdboudreaux says ...

I think a big problem, on a whole, with modern film criticism is that it has turned away from the art of filmmaking and has focused more on what the story is about. What's the message? How is this social commentary? etc. How often do you read a review, even in high brow places like Film Comment, where terms like mise en scene, chiaroscuro, or montage are used? The artistry of filmmaking is being lost because of this. A prime example of this: A few years back a buddy of mine submitted an article to Film Comment for the thirtieth anniversary of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre that took the position that through the use of mese en scene that the true villains of the film were the kids, not leather face and his brood. Film Comment rejected it on the grounds that it was "to academic for them." To academic for Film Comment, the Texas Chainsaw Massacre, really? But that's the state of affairs. I also don't understand fanboys who get there underoos in a twist over spoilers, maybe it's just me but I get a bigger kick from seeing how a filmmaker pulls something off rather than what they're pulling off.

comment #10

Rich S. says ...

I enjoyed George's analysis, but there is something he touches upon that I think deserves greater scrutiny. That is the effect of the selling out of AICN and sites like it. The early days of the Internet were populated by guerrilla film sites with their spies and moles. For the first time ever, film fans could gain insight on what was happening with a film while it was actually being made. Rumors of this nature had existed before, but never to this extent.

AICN exploited this by creating a fanboy "us v. them" mentality by reviewing movies not based on the content of the film itself (which hadn't come out yet) but on the component parts that were going into it. If you were upset that McG was scheduled to direct the latest Superman flick, you had an outlet to vent your frustration. In a way, it democratized film criticism because the bottleneck created by newspapers and magazines was gone. As long as people enjoyed the way you wrote, and you could give them this "inside information," you could get an audience.

But the studios took notice. And reviewers and critics that were not beholden to the ethics and restrictions of journalism were suddenly showered with gifts, from DVD screeners to intimate access to productions. The outsider was now an insider, though he claimed to remain an outsider.

And that crud continued to creep. Even if there wasn't any payola going on, a lot of critics seemed to come at films with a peculiar axe to grind. Tendencies of this nature may have always been there, but suddenly people began to wonder whether there wasn't something going on under the table.

So now people have developed fairly sophisticated filters. And these filters will exclude a great amount of opinion. If there's no market, there's no need for critics.

Again, I think that's just one part of equation George hints at, but it's an important one.

comment #11

bill weber says ...

If A Taste of Cherry is boring the shit out of you, learn to watch films.

How do these "elite critics" influence what filmmakers create? I guess there are elite filmmakers too -- the ones who can't get their films distributed in the US?

comment #12

Richardson says ...

"It the 1930s and 40s mainstream movies were made by folks like Lubitsch, Wilder, Ford, Welles with contributions by Faulker, Hecht, Chandler. Because there were standards back then, those were the heights both filmmakers and critics alike reached for. Elitism was good. Even as late of the 1970s our standards remained high when we had Ashby, Hellman, Rafelson, Bogdanvich, Burtolucci, Bergman, Antonioni. With your argument for aesthetic relativism and that the cinema doesn't need elitist critics, are you really going to try to tell me that constant chatter about Brian Singer, Judd Aptow, George Clooney, and Lindsay Lohan is a true reflection that the cinema is as vibrant today as it was even thirty years ago."

Not only is that list is cherry-picked to the point of absurdity, but I've never heard a defintion of mainstream success that would include Welles, Bergman, Rafelson, or Antonioni. Even Lubitsch is on the fence -- his movies were popular with filmmakers, but never really hit with the general public (like Preston Sturges).

Should Brian singer be compared to Hal Ashby, a cult director who focuses on actors who had a few mid-level hits in the '70's? No. Should he be compared to John Sturges, a mainstream successful director of action movies with strong character work from the '60's? Yes.

comment #13

CinemaPhreek says ...

Hickenlooper - one can assume that you were confusing my post with K Bowen's which followed. Not that I disagree with her points. Also, you DID cherry pick your filmmakers to try to make your point about the "golden age." Try sitting through the other 80% of what got released those years. Start with the campy serials - yeah, the Flash Gordons and Bat Man ones are fun, but there were dozens of others that are simply jaw-dropping bad.

K.Bowen - I had intended to make a separate entry to make the exact point you did. What is really amusingly ironic about many of film elites is that they seem to forget the most fundamental aspect of cinema: it is very personal art form. They and their brethren read something into a particular work based in large part on their specialized and incestuous training. At the end of the day, it's still largely just an opinion they all share.

Which is what makes the "retirements" of so many of these critics like Ansen such a loss - the more successful of the lot could bridge that divide between an academic appreciation and popular film.

comment #14

Hickenlooper says ...

Uhm, cherry picked? Convenient jargon, my friend. Ernst Lubitch's 'Trouble In Paradise' was a mainstream smash and if you watch it again you will be floored by its literacy. Overall, the aesthetic standards and levels of literacy were much higher back then even up until the early 1980s. Everything fell off the chart in the wake of 'Jaws' and 'Star Wars.' And to compare Singer to Sturges? Are you joking? There's more nuance and depth in the little pinky of McQueen's Cooler King than in anything remotely human in any of Singer's films, including 'Public Access.' Yes, you can compare them in terms of box office, but then you remain a servant to the pervading chorus of our time that qauntity equals quality, that box office numbers somehow reflect an aesthetic virtue of a motion picture. The obsession with quantifying everything in numbers is a symptom of the sickness that is slowly eroding everything and anything of meaning or beauty in the popular arts. We've descended into a postmodern shit-hole where we wallow in our genitals and poop (an no 'Factory Girl' jokes please) because by titillating ourselves in the loins rather than the mind we are succumbing to the material, to the buck, to the dollar, than to anything that is of the mind or spiritual or ineffable because we simply can't quantify it and that leaves us vulnerable to the unknown. And this is the core flaw of the American character that goes back to the days of the Wild West when we were living on the frontier, afraid of being slaughtered by the Comanche. This kind of base, survival Wild West mentality has reemerged from the primal core of who we are and now rears it's ugly head in the 21st century in almost everything we look at and do. It's ugly and it's base and it's ultimately a bore which future generations will glance over with disinterest and say "Gee, there was a generation of naval gazing Visagoths." And by the way, to compare Singer to Sturges is an insult to the memory of a great Hollywood pop director.

comment #15

Arizona Joe says ...

"Wisdom of the community" may or may not be the same thing that used to be called "mob rule."

Peer group opinions I have always discounted. I hope these college kids are cynical about MBAs, suits, and marketing machines.

I saw Rupert Murdoch fielding questions from media savvy students at Georgetown Univ. the other day on C-Span. Those kids were very bright and impressive.

Then again, that's a small demographic, and does not include the unwashed masses who think all opinions are equal.

comment #16

K. Bowen says ...

Yep, guilty. Taste of Cherry bored the hell out of me, But I love Terrence Malick and Tarkovsky, so slow-moving artsy flicks are actually my taste.

How did we get to the Commanches again?

comment #17

K. Bowen says ...

LIteracy stops in the eighties? Then why were the nineties such a fruitful era of filmmaking? Things come and go in cycles. If we're in a down cycle now, things will eventually shift.

comment #18

Jay T. says ...

K. Bowen hit the nail on the head... The mid-to-late 90's were a fantastic era for film, and you'll notice this happened during a period when, generally speaking, things were good (economy, etc.). Since 9/11 and the war in Iraq, I think most people would agree that the quality of your average movie has been down, likely because audiences shift towards more light-hearted and brainless entertainment when the world around them sucks. I'm sure in the next several years things will begin to look up and the quality of films will get better.