You may have heard that most many film critics are politically subservient cowards and whores…obsequious lapdogs…damp-finger-to-the-wind weather vanes…dweebs who write within an elitist, self-regarding bubble and pretty much for each other…they wouldn’t dare admit to an honest Joe or Jane Popcorn emotion about anything.
Jacob Savage has conveyed all this and more in a 1.29.24 Tablet piece called “The Unbearable Fakeness of Film Reviews“.
“Popular film and television criticism once functioned primarily as an engine of recommendation and secondarily as a means of social and artistic commentary,” Savage writeds. “Increasingly it serves as neither. Lacking secure jobs or professional stature, and existing at the whims of politicized online mobs, today’s movie critics are the opposite of tart-tongued predecessors like Pauline Kael, Vincent Canby and Janet Maslin. Instead of priding themselves on their willingness to stand up for art against the variable tastes of consumers and studios alike, they surrender to the pack.”
