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.