David Carr in the NYT weighs in on the case of the disappearing film critics. Given the oceans of film writing available on the internets these days, he moves quickly beyond the weepiness to get to a more interesting issue:

Given that movie blogs are strewn about the Web like popcorn on a theater floor, there are those who say that movie criticism is not going away, it’s just appearing on a different platform. And no one would argue that fewer critics and the adjectives they hurl would imperil the opening of “Iron Man” in May. But for a certain kind of movie, critical accolades can mean the difference between relevance and obscurity, not to mention box office success or failure.

That’s a fair point—in the context of the traditional model of the art-house favorite playing in the hip theatres in just a few top-tier cities. But that model, too, is changing. As film and DVD day-and-date approaches, new publicity models will be available to distributors as well, through Netflix, the iTunes store and other digital movie providers.

Indeed, it’s incontrovertible that, despite the downbeat tone of most of the folks Carr speaks to, there are more good movies available more easily to film-lovers today than there were ten or 15 years ago—more by possibly an order of magnitude. The real issue here is slightly different.

Consider what Music City News‘ David Poland says:

Poland […] said he likes reading serious printed criticism as much as the next movie fanatic, but films intended for adults have far bigger problems—namely, too many movies on too few screens—than the number of people teasing them apart. “Losing critics for serious film is like taking away the padding on the crutches of a very sick man with two broken legs and one working eye,” he wrote in an e-mail message. “It’s not going to keep it from limping along, but yeah, it hurts like hell.”

Unfortunately, the real issue is that here is a more limited public interest in certain movies than what you or I might like. In too many mediums there’s always a romantic notion that a little more press, or a few more theaters, will create a Nirvana where Gus Van Sant or Hou Hsiao-hsien beat out the Michael Bays of the world. We don’t live there.