That’s Tina Brown, of course, and what could that be the hedline of but another Howard Kurtz tongue bath of another media celebrity—another blonde female media celebrity.

The piece treads lightly around Brown’s decade of failures since she left her plum New Yorker post in 1998. Instead, Kurtz lets Brown’s self-serving view of the world predominate. Says Brown: “I’ve always liked the high-low mixture, and it seemed to me that was missing from a lot of the sites.”

Yeah, you don’t see that mixture much on the web!

We see Brown intrepidly overseeing the posting of a video on the internet, a talent that many kindergarteners have. (The onetime email-averse Brown spent months, Kurtz tells us, mastering “the tools of the Net.”) With similar perspicacity, she asks her staff what “hot movies” are coming out that week.

Kurtz blandly says that the site got 1.1 million unique vistors its first month. It is one of the skills of the professional puff-piece writer not to ask questions that might produce off-message facts. Alexa isn’t the best indicator of traffic, but if you look at its ranking of the Daily Beast you can see Brown’s site has been trending downward ever since that launch.

Kurtz doesn’t mention this, either, but you can get a taste of Brown’s skanky editorial standards in this Beast piece, by former Chicago Rep. Dan Rostenkowski, about corruption in Illinois politics. It begins with a sentence that would make most Chicagoans chortle:

During my career as a public official, I always tried to steer away from the minority of my colleagues who viewed public service as a potential commercial enterprise.

Rostenkowski, a cheap crook, “steered away” from people like that only because he didn’t want them getting near his own rackets. The former congressman refers obliquely in the piece to having been “disciplined for breaking the rules.” But nowhere in the piece is an unknowing reader told what he or she would have learned from any other reputable journalism site, that he’s a felon who ripped off hundreds of thousands of dollars from taxpayers.

Leno moves to prime time, blocking out the 10 p.m. slot Monday through Friday. He gets breathless stories all week. (The Times has been covering it almost daily.) As with so much writing on the doings of the networks, it’s hard to rectify the coverage with the actual viewership of the show.

Leno gets roughly 4.5 million viewers a night, or 1.5 percent of the population, roughly. Two million of them, or a lot less than half, are younger than 55.  People older than 55 a) are not particularly sought after by advertisers and b) don’t much like change when it comes to TV watching.

Here’s what I don’t understand about the move. You had to give NBC credit for gritting its teeth and bumping Leno out of his slot and bringing Conan O’Brien in; I think O’Brien isn’t very funny and will suffer against Letterman, but he’s a brand and part of the network’s long-term plan, and Letterman’s not going to be there forever. The trouble with most TV networks is calcification, not revolution, so there’s nothing wrong with taking the PR hit as you proceed with some creative destruction.

But what are the costs of giving Leno a prime time show? The network’s position seems to be that 10 p.m. weeknights were a loss in any case, so why not position Leno there for a few years so he couldn’t run to ABC? (Beyond that, the costs of Leno’s show are minuscule by prime time standards.)

That’s the line the papers are taking in their coverage. The trouble is that this is a triage move, not a programming one. Won’t dropping down the oldest-skewing of all the late night shows into prime time age that audience further?

Indeed, the Week in Review (!) story today on the move comes from the point of view of a self-described baby boomer who says he’s glad the show’s going to be on earlier … because he’s been having trouble staying up to watch Jay of late. The story reminds us that “baby boomer” is now synonymous with what used to be called “senior citizens”:

Anyone of a certain age who has struggled lately to watch late-night TV knows that to succeed you have to get through the midnight dead zone, when there’s often a six-minute commercial break that feels like eternity. You yawn, you stretch, you weigh the channel clicker in your hand, you decide to “rest your eyes” just for a moment. And then, hours later, you wake yourself with a snort, wondering where on earth you are. It’s like coming back from the dead.

Now that’s entertainment!

And hasn’t that guy heard of Tivo? The Times story on Saturday stressed the supposed unique nature of the show’s blanket position, but in recent years we’ve seen both ABC and Fox do something close to that as they held onto the tail of a dragon of a game-changing franchise. In the end “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire” became an almost crack-like problem for ABC, of course, but Fox seems to have learned from that and has “American Idol” under control. (It may never be a gargantuan ratings-getter again, but it’s not going to tank Fox if it disappears tomorrow and it made the network enormous amounts of money. And talk about cheap!)

Leno’s viewership will rise in the earlier slot, but it’s hard to imagine him becoming a franchise like either of those; in the meantime, he’s going to knock the network’s average age up, and it’s hard to imagine the teen blockbuster movie of the moment clamoring to get ads before his audience.

And isn’t it portentous that NBC is relieved it can dispense with a third of its weekday programing chores by means of a show with so little upside? I mean, why not run four hours of Today in the a.m., and three of Jay at night? (It would certainly solve the network’s Ben Silverman problem.) In the end, the move may come to be seen as a watershed, where the networks’ retreat became plain.

Not good:

Radio advertising was down 10 percent last month from October 2007, according to the Radio Advertising Bureau, the 18th consecutive month of declines.

And the third-quarter numbers are dismal. CBS Radio reported a revenue drop of 12 percent. Citadel Broadcasting’s revenue dropped by 10.9 percent. CC Media Holdings, which owns Clear Channel Communications, said radio revenue was down 7 percent. Cox Radio revenue fell 6.2 percent; Emmis Communications’ radio revenue decreased 1.5 percent; and Radio One revenue was down 2 percent.

Jeepers! What happened?

Problems in the radio industry have been piling up for years, said Marci L. Ryvicker, an analyst at Wachovia Capital Markets. In the 1990s, radio companies consolidated, then began increasing the ad time available. “They started to fight for share, instead of being proactive and thinking of new ways to generate revenue,” Ms. Ryvicker said.

“Increasing the ad time available, incidentally, means “shoving more and more ads down listeners’ throats.” Ms. Ryvicker could also have said that the companies in many cases let stations lose connection to their local audience.

There’s an interesting factoid in the story, however: The sole glimmer of hope, according to the story, is overall listening numbers, which have begun to reverse their slide. Read closely however, and you see the percentage increase is about one and a third percent, or maybe a sliver above population increases. Still, this should be seen within the context of ever-growing competition for terrestrial radio, so it could be worse.

The good news is that Chinese Democracy outsold expectations last week. The prospects were dismal; Billboard had a source saying Guns N’ Roses’ comeback album was going to sell only 250,000 to 260,000 copies its first week out.

It was a little hard to believe; AC/DC and the Eagles, two oldster bands of comparable notoriety (and with whom Guns shares some sales records), had recently done about 750,000 and a million, respectively; the Gunners are a full generation younger, arguably hipper, and had a leader in Axl Rose who still retained some of his lethality.

So, if the band’s comeback could manage only a third or a quarter of their competitors, well … Axl should just hang up his kilt.

As I said, the good news is that the band beat expectations.

The bad news is that Chinese Democracy did … 261,000.

The worse news is that the release is a poster child for as bad a kickoff to the holiday sales season as can be imagined. Ed Christman and Cortney Harding of Billboard report that while sales for the year have been off a not-unexpected 13.6 percent, sales the last two weeks of November were off 17.4 percent.

But there’s some optimism out there—or at least at “Hot Poop”:

Other stores say that an older client base is likely to take them through the season.

“Thank God working adults don’t know how to download music,” says Jim McGuinn, owner of Hot Poop in Walla Walla, Wash., pointing out that his biggest sellers have been Enya, Il Divo and the album “Two Men With the Blues” by Wynton Marsalis and Willie Nelson.

Fortunately, the industry is looking at the big picture, and taking strong action to deal with this situation.

p.s.: One of the factors that contributed to Guns’ dismal sales is Rose’s choice of Best Buy as his retail sales buddy. Best Buy isn’t as big as Wal-Mart, which could sell its Eagles exclusive (a two-CD set) for $12; nor does it have a clientele on which it could jack up the price of the product, which is what Starbucks did for its Paul McCartney exclusive.  Now, for Rose, the alliance worked on one level because he’s getting a royalty much higher than he would have from Geffen back in the day. (That’s why all of these artists do the exclusives.)

But since everyone involved is trafficking in novelty, this isn’t a well an individual artist can go back to. The next Axl project will definitely not be sold in the same place. The Best Buy deal can now be seen as part of the trend I predicted last year:

What is down market, in the end, is these artists’ ever-more-limited options when it comes to selling actual records. … I said above that selling the next Eagles CD through one retailer probably won’t make sense. When Wal-Mart inevitably passes, however, there may be another, slightly grimier outlet looking for a little buzz to liven its image: K-Mart, say, or possibly Linen ‘n’ Things, or maybe 7-Eleven. I hope I live to see the day the new Eagles album is offered for sale exclusively at the Cracker Barrel.

Next release: Axl Rose plays ‘Chinese Democracy’ Live —available exclusive at Hot Topic!

The NYT has a feature today on Rod Lurie’s new film, which is called Nothing But the Truth and is about a reporter who goes to jail after refusing to divulge sources in a case involving the outing of a female spy. The Times story is mostly about how the movie isn’t really about Judith Miller, and will probably be an infuriating read to anyone who followed that case.*

I’m more interested in a different question. How did Rod Lurie get to direct this movie? The most notice he’s gotten recently is as the creator of Commander-in-Chief, the D-level, poor man’s West Wing about a female U.S. president, who was played by Geena Davis. “You can smell the history,” one of her aides intoned in the premiere. The show barely made it through one season. That wasn’t history, sparky.

Lurie’s last film was Resurrecting the Champ, about a reporter who meets a homeless guy who says he was once a championship boxer. The reporter writes the story, basks in the attention, and then finds out that—get this—the crazy homeless guy he met wasn’t telling the truth. In Lurie’s movie, this was all told with great import, as if great ethical questions were being examined.

Actually, as I wrote at the time, there weren’t any actual ethical implications in the film. This wasn’t a Jayson Blair-like story of deliberate falsification. The reporters and his editors were just … stupid. It was basically about incompetence, I guess. The reporter’s editor never actually said, in the film, “Don’t bother checking that story out, let’s just print what a crazy guy told you as fact!”, but that’s basically what happens.

It gets worse, too, but that’s all in the original thing I wrote about it. Lurie was trying to get some attention by trying to play into the idea of the press as morally and ethically compromised. (The real-life events he based the film on featured the much-less-interesting fact that the reporter found out the guy wasn’t telling the truth in the normal course of reporting the story.) Anyway, here’s the punchline. Resurrecting the Champ—which starred Samuel Jackson and Josh Hartnett—was such a huge flop last year that people didn’t really notice it was a flop. According to Box Office Mojo, it grossed $3 million total, more than half of that its opening weekend. (In other words, it grossed $1.6 million in wide release its first three days out.) Within a week and a half it had a per-screen average of $37.

Few went to see Shattered Glass, Billy Ray’s quite respectable look at the Stephen Glass case and the gold standard of recent movies about the press. How did Rod Lurie get to make another movie about journalism?

Reviews for the film haven’t come out yet; it’s not even clear if it has a U.S. distributor. The film’s web site says that Roger Ebert called it a “spellbinding thriller,” but the link doesn’t work.

* Just for starters: It’s written not by a film staffer but the Times’ Supreme Court reporter, meaning that little matters like Lurie’s louche career go unexamined; beyond that, Judith Miller is allowed to appear  forthright, saying she was wrong about her Iraq-has-WMD’s scaremongering in the Times, but the story doesn’t dwell on the years she doggedly defended herself or the substantive criticism leveled against the paper itself, not least from its public editor. Also, Liptak includes bogus bit of PR, that the actress in the film passed a polygraph while in character. Polygraphs sense stress and nervousness, neither of which an actress would be in that situation. She was just working!

A passage in an NY Times story today captured, for me, the vulnerabilities the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame exploits in older rock stars. The story was about a legal fight amongst the heirs of Hilly Kristal, who ran CBGB.

Anyway, the story begins like this:

At the opening party for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Annex NYC on Tuesday night, fans and celebrities rubbed elbows while ogling an exhibition of artifacts from CBGB, the landmark Bowery club that closed in 2006.

Studying the club’s tattered awning, cash register and flier-covered phone booth, Steven Van Zandt of the E Street Band and Handsome Dick Manitoba of the Dictators, a band that was one of CBGB’s 1970s mainstays, nodded in approval. “O.K., we can go now,” Mr. Manitoba said.

Isn’t that a little sad–two fairly cool guys having a barfly moment of sentimentality because Jann Wenner and some of his rich friends have deigned to put up an awning of a club they used to hang out in for the benefit of what I assume will be paying customers?

As for the Kristal family fight, it turns out that the club was actually owned for most of its history by Kristal’s wife Karen, from whom he was divorced before he opened the club. Karen Kristal, the story says, suffers from a disease that disrupts her mental capability.

And a few years ago she signed a document, not witnessed by a third party, giving the club back to Hilly Kristal–and he left her nothing in his will.

His estate is worth some $3 million. Needless to say, none of this came out in all the lugubrious stories about CBGB’s rent problems and its eventual closing–and if what Karen Kristal says is true innumerable stories and rock history books describing Hilly Kristal as the owner need to be corrected.

Lots of comments on A refusal to mourn the death, by downsizing, of the metro daily film-crit corps and The era of the “mom and pop film critic” is over.

Zod writes:

Mourning the newspaper is like mourning the 8-track tape. It’s not that people don’t want film criticism, it’s that they can get it in an easier-to-use format at a time of their choosing. Newspapers as businesses have made the same mistake the music industry made: Confusing the product and its method of delivery. There likely are more people reading now than at any time in human history. It’s a news organization’s challenge to figure out how to monetize that fact.

HV: And Google, for example, did figure out how to monetize it.

Roger Ebert:

Regarding Heidi, Spencer, Amy or Pete…the only one whose name I recognized was Amy. I’m surprised you knew who Suri was. I didn’t. And I may have some sad news. The Village Voice chain is set to go nationally with Scott Foundras and Jim Hoberman as their critics, firing all their local writers. No mention of Ella Taylor. [Roger wrote to say he’d since found out that Taylor remains at the LA Weekly–Hitsville.] I hope it isn’t true. The internet is great at giving you free access to writers someone else has to pay. Manohla Dargis and Tony Scott, for example, are paid by the New York Times to write for your pleasure. I don’t know of a single critic making a living from online work. Well, probably Harry Knowles, who has better critics writing for his site than you might guess by looking at it. I believe he pays for their reviews, but I highly doubt it is a living wage. Oh, also the Salon and Slate critics, although Salon laid off Charles Taylor. In fact, NO ONE can support him or herself off the web alone. Certainly not me. All five of the critics you mention are paid by their papers, if that still includes Ella. The New York Times used to send Canby to Cannes to hang out for a few days and write a couple of pontifications. Now Tony and Manohla do almost-daily blogs and video reports and chats, in addition to their print coverage. Like doing two jobs for teh price of one. When kids tell me they want to be movie critics, I say, “Great! How will you support yourself?” Most of the professional film critics in America earn their living wages and get their health benefits by teaching. Not that it’s a bad thing, just that I’m glad you enjoy the free lunch.

HV: Roger’s last point is an important one; we are getting a free lunch—those folks whose reviews of Australia I cited (Ken Turan in the LAT, Ella Taylor in the LA Weekly, Todd McCarthy in Variety, and Manohla Dargis in the NYT) I got to read for something close to free. (Though all had ads on their pages, and I do pay for the NYT and Variety in print.) And a lot of high profile journos are working harder. (Not all, like Katie Couric, get their blogs written for them by staffers.) All that said, I think there are still things the papers and the writers need to be doing better to adjust to a new world; rightness and wrongness at this point don’t enter into it. There’s a complex set of trade-offs being negotiated now: on the one hand, readers are getting access to more and better criticism; on the other, the vast middle of workaday film critics are seeing their profession evaporate, in the same way, at newspapers, typesetters and paste-up people did. They never got the same outpouring of concern.

Richard Blaine:

When it comes to film criticism, hell, when it comes to just plain writing, Ebert is god. You totally ignored one of his central arguments — the fact that critics are now being limited to 500 words. It’s that USA Today effect. Even Rotten Tomatoes puts online critics in a lesser category — few take them seriously. The age of great film criticism is ending. It’s now all about celebrity gossip and E! The news is being dumbed down, just like in other areas. How sad.

But we’ll always have Paris.

HV: I think this is not true. There’s a great deal of amazing film writing on the web; not only is there more than there ever was, it’s more accessible. Many years ago, living in SF, I remember how hard it was to get to read Jonathan Rosenbaum or Dave Kehr in the Chicago Reader; indeed, if you didn’t actually live in Chicago or, say, LA, where the LA Weekly critics published their writing, it was almost impossible to get your eyes on it. 

As for Paris Hilton, maybe I’m just not trolling the right web sites, but she doesn’t really impact my life. Complaints like this seem to me a little bit received; I hear more people complaining about Paris Hilton than I see or hear her personally.

Zod:

Mr. Ebert also should admit complicity in his perception of the “death” of criticism. He and Mr. Siskel boiled 1,200-word film reviews down to two thumbs. He also is a branded name — a celebrity, if you will — whose criticism moviegoers will seek online over the reviews of their local film critic.

HV: A touch! But seriously, Siskel and Ebert elevated the form, just as Michael Kinsley originally did on Crossfire, for example. (In later iterations, we could see how degraded the form could become.) I don’t think two smart people arguing about movies is a bad thing. As for the thumbs, it was a canny marketing device that has nicely transcended the media upheavals that have made the careers of many of us much more challenging.

Brian:

Across the board, we’re being weaned on an ADD-friendly, short-shorter news item diet.

And RottenTomatoes.com falls into that pattern; though it’s a great gateway to write-ups by critics of all stripes, most people simply scan the RT pages and excerpted blurbs. They don’t read full reviews anymore, for the most part. They plug into a Tomatometer figure, clck through a couple of pages, and that’s it.

HV: This is a cri de coeur about humantity, not criticism. It’s what people want. I don’t care if some people like short or inane reviews. I don’t think there’s a right way to use Rotten Tomatoes, either. I like longer, smarter reviews, and the web gives me more of them than I could ever have dreamed of.

Don Singleton:

I use reviews as an aid in deciding whether to spend the price of a movie ticket on a particular film. Over many years, I have depended on Roger Ebert’s commentary in the making of these decisions. Do I need to know all of Roger’s inner thoughts about a given film? No. In fact, most of the time I can depend on the number of stars he awards the film, but I do enjoy reading the reviews to the end and appreciating his insights and comments. I also consider TV critics’ reviews that run on the news shows I watch, and occasionally I scan the “reviews” section of the movie timetable web site I use.
To me, movie reviews are not to be considered on the level of brain surgery or Ph.D. theses. But for those who do take the issue that seriously, there are plenty of college courses available, and probably more than a few web sites that provide unlimited opportunity for deep thoughts and bloviations.
And as for reviewers in local newspapers, come on, give me a break.

Sammy:

I think you should consider Ebert’s insightful rebuttal carefully. The dilemma here is this: it’s great to have cheap access to the news services the new economy affords us. It is. But, across the board, if we shift the outlay we will make for media and entertainment down, the actual labor behind it is likely to dissipate. This isn’t a universal in economics, of course. In commodity markets, driving costs down with competition can be a very good thing. The concern is whether we are losing a baseline in quality with “online journalism”. As someone well acquainted with the bloggers working for the GawkerMedia empire, I can say their standards simply don’t match a real press outlet. And they know that. That’s why they pay so badly. This directly relates to Mr. Ebert’s point in that the long-term trend here is our criticism might be in the hands of IMDB type posters. If that doesn’t scare you, we just won’t see eye to eye… perhaps the age of elitism is gone, but I know I’ll miss some of it.

HV: I agree with you about a lot of the Gawker folks, though Idolator, for example, is consistently pretty smart. Otherwise, I think you’re idealizing print journalism. The human costs of the layoffs aside, as I said in my original post it’s hard to argue that there’s not more and better film criticism available, by at least an order of magnitude, to virtually everyone in the U.S. Indeed, the real worry might be about an age of super elitism, with, as I said, a corps of supercritics. But the nature of the web means that there will always be an empowered (if, perhaps, unpaid) undercorps.

mjweir:

This amuses me. With the quality of the films a typical viewer has access to, it’s difficult for me to understand why we need critics. I don’t need anyone from the NYT to give me a review of the Pirates of the Caribbean part XXIII. I don’t need anyone to tell me that the latest comedy full of fart humor aimed at 15 year old boys or men who act like them might not be for me.

The declining quality of film and the average joe’s access to it has played a larger role in the lack of critical assessment than has any other factor. With most towns only availability to film being the pablum shoveled by their local nationally owned multiplex conglomerate how can most people even recognize good film let alone have the variety to be critical.

Blame Hollywood. They have dumbed down the offering until like network television, it’s difficult to find anything that isn’t like a huge steaming bowl of gruel. It fills a few hours if you can stand the boredom.

HV: Here again, I feel like I’m living in a different universe from the commenter. Start with two or three dozen film channels. Add Tivo and Netflix … and the world starts looking pretty good. Then throw in ever-cheapening plasma screens, HD cable and Blu-ray, and the dawn of day-and-date DVD releases, and all of a sudden you can see a movie the way it was meant to be seen and not in a foul multiplex. How on earth are we not living in a movie lover’s paradise?

Peter Nellhaus:

“A click or two more and I have at my disposal the collective wisdom of the internets’ collective film writing, the intellectual equivalent of that sandworm in Dune, majestic and slightly nauseating at the same time.”What do you mean by this?

There is some intelligent and even vital writing on film online, if you know where to look. Not everyone blogging on film is a fanboy.

What is not addressed is that simultaneously, how films are viewed has changed. Just as the viewer is not dependent on the newspaper for criticism, the viewer does not have to go to a theater. That I can see more international films and classic films than before on DVD changes both how I see films and what I see.

HV: As I hope I have made clear, the sandworm reference was a respectful one.

karsten:

You mentioned Bosley Crowther with distaste, which naturally led me to look up the reviews of this man whom I’d never heard of. Surprise, surprise–they’re pretty brilliant. He writes with real zest, in that urbane, cyncial, British style that is a delight to read. He also seems pretty balanced in his reviews (e.g., Rashomon), far from a “thumbs up/thumbs down” mentality. It’s wonderful to encounter critical, perceptive, at-the-time reviews of films that have, over time, become sacred cows. He politely applauds “It’s a Wonderful Life,” for example, but pooh-poohs some of its sentimental and juvenile aspects (calling the banker “a parody of Scrooge”–which, let’s face it, he is).

Thanks for leading me to a critic whose work is such a treat. Too bad he retired in the 1960s. I’d love to have heard his opinions about the movies of the 1970s and on, let alone those that are out there now.

HV: Crowther was not entirely hostile to good film, but he was never a real writer; in any case, the 1960s caught him up, and he ended his run a caricature. Mark Harris details his career and its undoing at the hands of Bonnie and Clyde in Pictures at a Revolution.

Albert:

Roger Ebert has a valid point. Even Entertainment Weekly is getting into the act. I don’t think for a second that it’s a profound magazine at all, but over the last few months, it seems to have gotten just a teeny bit smaller. And now, on the review pages of any item, be it a movie, an album, a play, a TV show, a book, or a DVD, the editors actually highlight what they feel is the essence of their review in darker print than the rest of it, as if they were acknowledging that that’s all readers care about - the one basic idea. How convenient! Now we can go straight to the important point in the review without having to bother with the rest of it.

Oh, brother!

When even “Entertainment Weekly” panders to short attention spans, you know you’re in trouble.

HV: The great thing about the modern world is … we don’t have to read Entertainment Weekly.

Cinegeek:

I think you make a valid point that “mourning” the loss of the newspaper film critic is a little over-dramatic. However, I think the real problem is in regard to people like me: young, fanatic about movies, and wanting to get into the film critic business. If newspapers (and possibly other publishing outlets that pay in the future) downsize, then how will I ever make a living off my dream job?

Blogging sure helps, but if you are like me and can’t seem to find the time to blog every day about movies because you are struggling to make ends meet, what is a budding film critic to do if the newspapers that could potentially hire him aren’t interested?

HV: It’s tough out there. Write a blog until you develop a fanatic and loyal audience, and then try to get some larger media company to pick you up.

 A Braunsdorf:

Ebert wasn’t so much bemoaning the death of newspapers as the whole idea of criticism in the media (and that includes the web). And he’s right, mostly. I have many times seen TV shows do little more than show trailers or EPK interview soundbites where, in another time, they may have actually reviewed the film. Remember Leonard Maltin reviewing movies on “Entertainment Tonight”? There hasn’t been anything like a review of anything on that show for years.

For instance, the new “At the Movies” runs down titles coming out on DVD with no mention of the movies being good or bad. Followed by some recommendations, admittedly, but why no commentary on the new releases? Isn’t that the point of the show? Oh, it’s not? That’s what Roger was talking about.

And it’s not just there, it’s all over the media. His example of the “buzz” around Twilight is dead-on. How many articles did we see about the fans versus the movie (or the book) itself?

Where people used to actually discuss things, now they just mention them. “Twilight! Benjamin Button! Star Trek!” There. Can I have my press pass now?

HV: One last time. Don’t watch it! Read Movie City News, or Crazy Nikki, or Jeffrey Wells, or the great Mr. Ebert.

p.s.: Speaking of which, check out Ebert’s takedown of that silly Ben Stein documentary on creationism. 

From Billboard’s Ed Christman:

Music sales were down from 10 percent to 30 percent, and big-name albums released for Black Friday, the post-Thanksgiving kickoff to the holiday retail season, didn’t perform up to expectations, according to merchants contacted by Billboard.

Most interesting in the Billboard story is estimates on the sales of a couple of the releases that were supposed to buoy the industry this season, emphasis added:

Sources said that Kanye West’s “808s & Heartbreak” will sell in the range of 425,000-450,000 units, significantly down from 700,000-975,000 units previously projected.

Guns N’ Roses’ “Chinese Democracy” is expected to clock in at 250,000-260,000, not the predicted 300,000-784,000 units.

The GNR factoid is potentially devastating, because the album is being sold through only one store, Best Buy, and one assumes that Christman’s source can therefore speak with some authority.

The last two bands in this category (’70s or ’80s warhorses cutting remunerative deals with big box retailers that use their artistically tepid comeback product as loss leaders), AC/DC and the Eagles, did 750,000 and just shy of a million. On the other hand, those artists used Walmart, a much larger retailer.

What caused it?

1) Rock fans aren’t particularly bright, but they do know that Slash and Izzy Stradlin helped write most of the original band’s hits; not to many people are under the impression that this is anything but an Axl Rose solo album.

2)  Rose didn’t help matters by being his usual lame self: This is a guy who as far as I know didn’t do a single interview to promote the decades-in-the-making new release.

3) That can’t be making his masters at Best Buy happy; that’s perhaps why there have been reports that the store itself hasn’t gone out of its way to promote its big holiday-season exclusive. Writes Digital Music News:

Best Buy positioned sales towers and end caps as promised, though the push was less than over-the-top.  Best Buy is a big, warehouse-style retailer, and this release was easily missed by those skipping towards iPods, printers, laptops, and flat-screen TVs.

4) And together, those last two factors effectively negated the one thing Chinese Democracy had going for it. Part of the calculations of these arrangements is the oodles of enthusiastic publicity the entertainment press provides. To most people, the fact that a recording artist (i.e., someone who makes records and sells them) has a new CD for sale at a retail venue (i.e., a store that sells things) is not, uh, interesting. But in the weird algebra of such journalism, the equations “Paul McCartney + Starbucks” or “AC/DC + Wal-Mart” are suddenly front-page news.

… or even more, as this Reuters story has it:

“It’s just a remarkable moment in popular culture,” said Blender magazine editor-in-chief Joe Levy, without a trace of hyperbole. “It really is. We never thought we would get here.”

“A remarkable moment in popular culture”! This arrangement had been working well for everyone thus far. Leave it to Axl Rose to fuck it all up.

The fugitive director is continuing to use the HBO documentary that comically distorted the facts of his case as grounds that his child-sex conviction be set aside. A new motion was filed in LA yesterday.  I don’t care about Polanski personally, but the media coverage of the case continues to gloss over what exactly the director did and the crazy stuff in the documentary.

The LAT says he was accused of “unlawful sex with a minor”; the NYT says it was “statutory rape.” That’s the impression you get if you watch Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired, the HBO doc. In reality, Polanski doped the girl with liquor and a Quaalude, had sex with her, and then anally raped her.

The girl, as the papers describe in detail, has forgiven Polanski, and again I personally don’t care what happens to him. But the affair remains a case study in how the bad journalism of that documentary begets more bad journalism.

The LAT is particularly credulous with Polanksi’s attorneys’ claims:

The request to dismiss the charge, which took court officials and prosecutors by surprise, is based on revelations in a documentary broadcast in June on HBO. The film, “Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired,” portrayed the legal proceeding as hopelessly tainted by backroom dealings between a vindictive judge and a deputy district attorney meddling in his colleagues’ case.

Actually, the film tried to smear the judge with extralegal issues and raised one or two actual, if minor, legal points, one notably involving interactions between the original judge in the case and one of the prosecutors. The prosecutor, David Wells, has said the communications were routine. In any case, it’s hard to see how they “hopelessly tainted” a case that featured a 13-year-old girl telling police, “He stuck his penis in my butt.”

Further, the LAT story presents the issue of whether Polanski needed to appear in court (and thus be taken into custody) this way, emphasis added:

Whether Polanski must appear in court to ask for the dismissal appeared to be in dispute. As a fugitive, he would be arrested upon arriving on U.S. soil. A court spokesman said that in past attempts to settle the case — including the failed 1997 negotiation — Polanski’s presence in Los Angeles was required.

“It has been the court’s position consistently for several years that in order to pursue dismissal, or sentencing, Mr. Polanski must personally appear,” court spokesman Allan Parachini said in an e-mail.

The district attorney’s office agreed. “We believe that if he is a party to the action, he should be here,” Gibbons said.

But Polanski’s lawyers suggested in court papers that the judge could toss the charge on his own initiative without ever hearing from Polanski.

“In dispute” doesn’t seem to me to be the bon mot for a situation in which both a court and a prosecutor’s office have taken a position. The Polanski attorneys can wish that a judge will change that position, but that doesn’t make the matter “in dispute.”

—————
Previously in Hitsville:

Roman Polanski: The Ick Factor
The Polanski whitewash continues
P.S. on ‘The Polanski whitewash’

That essay by Roger Ebert—who is, as one commenter below said, a god, and a great guy to boot—got me thinking about the state of film criticism beyond my earlier post below. And there are some good comments to that post here (including one from Ebert himself).

But I think we all have to accept that there’s really not much of a use anymore for a traditional “film critic” at most daily newspapers. The idea of every metro area having its decently paid corps of local film writers is nice, and as someone who used to be a film critic and has written about film on and off for a long time I’d feel better if there were more jobs out there rather than fewer.

Indeed, I think my original post came off as a bit cold—I intended the Dylan Thomas reference in the title to have a little more tragic resonance.

All that said, here is the reality:

1. Newspapers in large part deserve their fates. There are a lot of great writers out there, and they don’t deserve to be out on the streets. But everyone saw this coming. Here’s a question that is almost never asked in all the stories about the decline of newspapers: What did we do to stop it?
2. Papers are confronting a meltdown on two fronts; their ad business model cratered, and their monopoly on readers evaporated. Please forgive the triple mixed metaphor of the melting and evaporating crater, but what did we all do to combat the implications of that second threat?
3. In that second realm, specifically, newspapers got out of the business of provoking thought and kindling debate and into reinforcing the prejudices of its readership, or targeting imaginary readers with the curiosity of a sullen teenager or the sensibility of a doddering grandmother. I once worked at a paper that did a section cover story on calendars. Don’t laugh: Turned out they have boxes for each day of the week, and you can write appointments on them, and they often include cute pictures of kittens, or women in bikinis. And conveniently, they can be purchased easily on those little floating carts at the local mall. Appeals to readers (or advertisers) in that way may have worked in the short term. But no one with an IQ over, oh, 90 wants to pay for that sort of nonsense delivered on their doorstop each day, and as soon as they could get along without it, they did.
4. This is slightly different from Ebert’s analysis, which puts gossip as the culprit. I think if readers want it, a paper should provide it, in print or online. The sad thing is that, enticed by the numbers crap like that generates on the web, papers are contenting themselves with just culling other junk from wire services like AP. What they should be doing is generating their own, good, local gossip that readers can’t get anywhere else. Herb Caen was a gossip columnist.
5. I don’t even think the AP limit on 500 word reviews is an issue. It’s the quality of the 500 words that matters. The AP is just giving its member papers what they want. The bigger problem, when it comes to the fate of our local dailies, is that for too long papers treated coverage of pop culture as an afterthought. Ebert is a rarity. As I’ve written before, I spent significant time in two of what are supposed to be America’s most razzle-dazzle cities, San Francisco and Chicago. Both places, unusually, had two papers. And for extended periods of time in each city, years in both cases, both papers lacked rock critics worthy of the name. As a local alternative paper writer, I liked these circumstances. It made my outfit look better, and gave me (I wrote a lot of press criticism) something to humiliate the local dailies with, on an almost weekly basis. The dailies eventually rectified the situation, to varying degrees (the Sun-Times, Ebert’s paper, eventually smartened up and hired Jim DeRogatis, for example) but in each case only after years of alienating potential readers.
6. Journalists need to accept that most national cultural writing is going to be concentrated in a handful of supercritics. It does seem like the vast middle of a worthy profession (if one of somewhat recent vintage) is going to vaporize. That said, the benefits to readers are enormous. The hegemony of those supercritics will always be threatened by up and coming blogger-critics, who will not be hampered by the delivery monopoly dailies used to have.
7. Advice to kids: If you want to be a critic, concentrate on theater.
8. So… what should be done? In the realm of movies, here’s what I think a self-respecting daily should do:

• A) For most big movies, write up a neutral capsule describing the film, its director and stars and let people know what to expect. Then, whenever possible, run a couple of short reviews with conflicting takes on it. That provides a service to readers (that neutral capsule is important to some folks) and provokes thought. Kind of like Siskel & Ebert in print.
• B) Present it on the web in an open and spacious way that makes it easy for readers to “get” the contrast of the two reviews. Don’t shoehorn the feature into the paper’s reader-unfriendly web template. (And don’t use the same hedlines and subheds on the web that are used in the paper. The gnomic ludicrosities demanded by print publishing and often written by perverse copy editors are unneeded on the web. It is one of the dailies’ biggest vulnerabilities that they have not altered their hedline policy for web publishing.)
• C) Papers should play up iconoclasm and contrariness. You don’t need to have contempt for pop culture to say, stylishly, that Twilight, for example, sucks.
• D) Figure out what your town needs. San Francisco had one of the most vibrant film scenes in the country. At SF Weekly, we hired a guy named Gregg Rickmann to write an amazing column we called “Reps, Etc.” which detailed all the art, underground and odd-location films showing in town, putting films in context of festivals, interesting series and such; letting readers know what to expect at off-beat venues; and including anything else they might need, right down to including cross streets with the addresses. Amazingly, no other publication in town had ever taken such care with one of the dominant interests of the area.
• E) Even in a less adventurous town, maybe the staff film person should spend less time reviewing 10,000 B.C and more time playing up consumer issues; which theaters are jacking up prices, which have poor projection, or which offer digital projection, and making sure to highlight what offbeat product there is in town. Why? To “support the scene”? No! Because it’s a service the paper can provide to its readers that no one else can.

Variety says that NARAS’ monument to itself opens in LA on Saturday. The Grammys are a chaotic and corrupt institution that has missed honoring most great artists of the past 50 years and spent untold time and money lauding the evanescent and dumb. As I noted earlier this year, the Amy Winehart Winehouse show was one of the oddest in the institution’s history, in that it actually gave awards to arguably the best recorded work of the year. But that can’t make up for the decades the group has spent dumping statuettes on the likes of Christopher Cross and Lionel Richie and missing the best work of everyone from the Stones, Dylan, Neil Young, Sly Stone, Led Zeppelin, and Jimi Hendrix in the 1960s to the likes of Nirvana in the modern era.

The museum, of course, won’t mention facts like that. If it did, it would have to build a special hall for one of its most honored acts of the 1960s, the Swingle Singers.

In an effort to prop up support for its annual award show, which has been experiencing plummeting ratings and causing some corresponding plummeting in the group’s bottom line, NARAS is trying out a nomination show, which is scheduled for Wednesday evening on CBS, featuring timeless stars like John Mayer, Mariah Carey and Celine Dion. Hip hop will be represented by the cuddly LL Cool J., and rock by the cuddly, betoothed Foo Fighters.

Roger Ebert mourns the majesty and burning here. He says film critics are being replaced by chroniclers of celebrity gossip:

A newspaper film critic is like a canary in a coal mine. When one croaks, get the hell out. The lengthening toll of former film critics acts as a poster child for the self-destruction of American newspapers, which once hoped to be more like the New York Times and now yearn to become more like the National Enquirer. We used to be the town crier. Now we are the neighborhood gossip.

His conclusion is apocalyptic:

The celebrity culture is infantilizing us. We are being trained not to think. It is not about the disappearance of film critics. We are the canaries. It is about the death of an intelligent and curious, readership, interested in significant things and able to think critically. It is about the failure of our educational system. It is not about dumbing-down. It is about snuffing out.

Ebert is right to characterize the problems newspapers have as self-destruction, but isn’t the rest of his heartfelt eulogy beside the point, even just wrong?

Fifteen years ago, the average American’s exposure to film criticism came from, in rough order of impact and accessibility, a) the critic in one’s local paper, b) some nimrod on local TV, c) Siskel & Ebert, c) whoever might be writing in any general-interest magazines one subscribed to (from Time and Newsweek to any incidental reviews in everything from women’s mags to Rolling Stone), and d) actual serious criticism in magazines like the New Yorker or the New Republic.

Today, if I’m interested in critical takes on, say, Australia, in a click or two I have at hand the writings of Manohla Dargis, Ebert himself, Ken Turan, Ella Taylor and Todd McCarthy on that film. A click or two more and I have at my disposal the collective wisdom of the internets’ collective film writing, the intellectual equivalent of that sandworm in Dune, majestic and slightly nauseating at the same time.

What in the world is wrong with this picture?

For virtually everyone interested in film criticism, today’s state of affairs is great.

Ebert’s vista is the too-narrow one of daily newspapers. That’s an artificial construct that has no resonance to anyone with a computer. And even in that limited sphere film criticism was not a savior. A lot of highly profitable newspapers never had anything but crummy critics covering any arts medium you can think of. (Even the NYT, remember, for decades kept Bosley Crowther, a menace to the evolution of American film tastes, as its chief film critic.)

Now, in the larger sense, many many years ago, obsessed with not digruntling even one subscriber, papers got out of the business of offending anyone, and a long process of self-censorship and overall blanding kicked in. But it’s not clear even the flipside of that approach could have saved papers from the biggest problem the digital convergence has created for them, and that’s the collapse of their advertising business plans.

Now, everyone’s fretting about the dwindling ranks of film critics. It does seem like that the number of paid professionals in this realm is shrinking (a lot of papers used to have two people covering film) , and it’s true they’ve been replaced (before the immediate downsizing era) to some extent by people covering sillier things.

But this has been going on for a very long time. This is a human problem, to be sure; the first real paper I ever worked at closed down. I was young at the time so it didn’t affect me all that much, but I saw a lot of people who’d spent many years at the paper lose their jobs.

And in a case like that, there’s a loss to the community, when local news disappears.

But local film critics? Come on. Most of them, either creations of or blithely accomodated to that blandness, dutifully detailed the charms of the latest blockbuster on the cover of their entertainment sections and tucked their appreciations of what trickle of art product came to town toward the back, where it belonged.

So today, to most folks who want to get a smart take on a given movie, the situation is, as I described above, close to ideal.

Is there cause for worry for us? Right now, for the hypothetical film fan who reads the writers I mentioned, I don’t think there’s a crisis on this count; none of them is in danger of being downsized. (The estimable Taylor, one of the LA Weekly’s stable of critics and now part of the Village Voice chain, will I assume continued to be used by the company, as will J. Hoberman.)

Mourning the daily newspaper is fetishizing a delivery product, and one that, let’s be honest, contributed to its own decline. As Ebert says, the papers trivialized themselves many years ago. There are many many bright and even brilliant writers at them, and I hope they keep their jobs, but there are many many more dingbats, many of them, to be sure, in management, but many others writing film criticism.

For the rest of his piece Ebert rails at celebrity gossip, which is driven not by newspapers but by … people. He thinks that Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie should be able to wait and get their car from a valet unmolested. I think there are other things in the world to be concerned about. (I bet Pitt and Angelina do too.) They know that a lot of the paparazzi swarms are summoned by the celebs themselves or their agents—that there is a celebrity-driven economy behind the scenes that the celebs themselves largely profit from.

This infrastructure—let’s call it the Celebrity Industrial Complex—is built up around the desires of actual people to buy writing on paper about those celebs.

This bothers me only about as much as anchovies do, which is only when they are forced upon me unsuspecting. That almost never happens because the corollary of the instant access to all the critical thinking I linked to above is … that I don’t have to pay attention to the celebrity stuff. Ebert writes:

On one single day recently, I was informed that Tom and Katie’s daughter Suri “won’t wear pants” and shares matching designer sunglasses with her mom. No, wait, they’re not matching, they’re only both wearing sunglasses. Eloping to Mexico: Heidi and Spencer. Britney is feeling old. Amy is in the hospital. George called Hugh in the middle of the night to accuse him of waging a campaign to take away the title of “sexiest man alive.” Pete discussed naming his son Bronx Mowgli.

I’m in the business and I didn’t read any of that (I don’t even know who Heidi, Spencer, Amy or Pete are) because I chose not to. Why did Roger?

What Ebert is pining for is a world in which a genteel journalistic product is deposited on the doorsteps of each of us each morning, something that gives urbane film writing by his and my lights the prominence it deserves and keeps the gossip swept up in a pile on the back page.

But in fact that’s the way the world is today, if you look at the big picture and toss in the little added research it requires each of us.