Not that I use the term “influencers” with any regularity, but the pink fringe lampshade dude (or woman) below will henceforth be the image that comes to mind whenever the subject arises. A Barbie worshipper, obviously, but also a quintessential image of an alpha–current, favor–currying gladhander and movie–invite whore.
As for Manuela Lazic’s 8.1 Guardian piece about an increasing publicist tendency to invite social-media influencers to screenings more while diminishing as much as politically possible the access of serious, seasoned critics when it comes to expensive studio product…well, that’s been the deal for roughly five or six years, right? (Launched in 2016, TikTok exploded in ‘18.)
And when you eliminate the obsequious, finger-to-the-wind go-alongers (the reigning critic fraternity since feature-length films were born in 1915) and the legions of big-city critics who decided around the advent of #Oscarssowhite and #MeToo (‘16 to ‘18) and certainly after the George Floyd riots of May ‘20 that becoming political–crusade wokesters was the safest approach going forward, the ranks of truly engaged, worth-reading, alive-on-the-planet-earth film critics & columnists have been dramatically thinned, to put it mildly.
In shorter terms, whore critics have been the leaders of the pack for over a century, and then a whole new breed of politically progressive virtue signallers came along about five or six years ago. Add this community to social-media influencers and the game is 98% rigged. Clear-light critics and columnists (numbering very few in this country, maybe 25 or 30** including contrarians like myself) are the last carriers of the integrity torch, and most people reading this sentence (including the HE pissheads) will snort derisively at such a notion.
** a random few off the top of my head — Owen Gleiberman, Sasha Stone, Jordan Ruimy, Jeff Sneider, Todd McCarthy, Armond White, Peter Bradshaw, Boston Herald’s Jim Verniere, Mark Kermode, Mark Harris, Maitland McDonaugh, Janet Maslin, Paul Schrader, Ella Taylor, Peter Howell…who else?
