… was made with some sort of “real time 3-D recording” set-up that doesn’t use an actual camera. I just watched the “making of” video twice, and still don’t entirely understand it, but I like how the buildings vaporize.

Here’s the video:

In lieu of the cameras, the creators used a “geometric information system” with a revolving scanner that has some 64 lasers inside it. Or something; here’s how they put it:

No cameras or lights were used. Instead two technologies were used to capture 3D images: Geometric Informatics and Velodyne LIDAR. Geometric Informatics scanning systems produce structured light to capture 3D images at close proximity, while a Velodyne Lidar system that uses multiple lasers is used to capture large environments such as landscapes. In this video, 64 lasers rotating and shooting in a 360 degree radius 900 times per minute produced all the exterior scenes.

The effect is rudimentary but has some interesting implications. Here’s the making of video:

The band is open sourcing the video as well. Story here. People have begun to fiddle with the footage already; lots of new takes on it here. One of the best:

John Cooper writes:

I’m unconvinced. Bill, you wrote in your first post on this subject that it was irrelevant that the judge had two girlfriends - you even went so far as to say that if the judge were married, it would still be irrelevant. So how are the facts of the judge’s achievements early in life any more relevant?

Likewise, how is it fundamentally dishonest for the film to present what is essentially a defense case for Polanski? You make the point repeatedly that the film doesn’t offer a raw description of what Polanski did with the girl, but your other criticisms seem to center on the tone of the movie, that Polanski is treated with a respect you think he doesn’t deserve, and that figures that you respect, such as the judge, are ridiculed. But there’s nothing dishonest about taking a tone. As for the nature of the sexual act, it’s only relevant if you believe, as you may, that illegal sex that involves the anus is worse than, and should be considered separately from, illegal sex that involves the vagina. That’s something that many would agree with you on, I’m sure, but it’s more of an emotional position than a reasoned one. Let me be clear: sex with a 13-year-old is, and should always be, criminal. But actions that are considered to be aggravating (in the legal sense) should be considered so because of they are cruel and additionally traumatizing, not because they’re outside of the sexual mainstream.

I haven’t yet had the opportunity to see the film, so I can’t defend it. I’ll just say that based on what you’ve said about it, I can’t tell that it’s dishonest. In the legal system, the prosecution presents its case, and leaves out details that could lead the jury to sympathize with the defendant, such as a 60s bomber’s fifteen years of charity work before apprehension. Likewise, the defense omits details that might sway the jury the other way. The case against Polanski has been covered in the media - anybody in the US who’s heard of Polanski knows that he fled the country after having sex with a minor child. Until now, I don’t think the defense case has been presented. I suspect that your great revulsion toward Polanski’s crime, Bill, may cause you to condemn any defense case that’s made for him.

The trouble with having to write about such stuff is that one can sound moralizing, when I really just care about the journalism. My complaint isn’t with Polanksi; it’s with the film and by extension the coverage of it. So thanks for taking the time to write and I’m sorry if it sounded like I was het up about the crime itself.

There are some tonal issues; it’s fair comment to question them. In regards to the judge, the movie seems to be making the comical point that here was a rapscallion ladies’ man sitting in judgment of a randy European. But the issue is the abuse of an under-age girl; in that context, doesn’t the comparison verge on the offensive?

The judge’s qualifications are certainly more relevant than the rather benign details of his personal life; that they are also so interesting makes it even more suspicious that the filmmaker didn’t include them in the film. He goes from high school to the NYU law school at 15, and then goes to Harvard because he’s too young to take a bar exam and it doesn’t make it into your film?

In other words, the director, Marina Zenovich elided the most positive thing about the judge’s life and the most prejudicial thing about Polanski’s.

She is welcome to be on Polanski’s side but there’s a point beyond which a documentary maker can be said to be being dishonest. I think she passed it.
The rest of what you’re talking about, again, has more to do my thinking that the  coverage of the movie didn’t give the full story. It’s not that one sex act is worse than another when the victim is a girl; but it is interesting how, in this supposedly vulgar age, we never seemed to hear what happened. The image of the debonair intellectual shifts radically; that’s why it needs to be mentioned. It’s hiding the facts from readers.

That was the subject of my first post, The Ick Factor. People like Polanksi and R. Kelly end up getting, perversely, a pass because folks just don’t want to think or talk about the facts of their cases.

Brian Lowry has the rundown in Variety. Complete nominees list here.

• HBO’s John Adams gets the most, with 23, joining a roster of previous tedious miniseries whose Emmy campaigns turn out to be more effective than their dramaturgy.
• Mad Men, with The Shield probably the best basic cable series I’ve ever seen, leads drama nominations. Its off-the-charts technical quality aside, the series, after a bravura pilot, grew in confidence and daring with every episode; funny how a show that seemed to be about Madison Avenue turned out to be about the collapse in the confidence of the American Male, and the pyschological emancipation of the American Female. While creator Matthew Weiner came from The Sopranos, the show actually also owes a debt to The Wire, which made sociology sexy.
• Says Lowry:
  

  Key oversights include NBC’s “Friday Night Lights” and the final season of HBO’s critically acclaimed “The Wire.”

• While the Emmys are nowhere near as bad as the Grammys, the gold standard for cockeyed and puzzling awards-giving, there are always oddities. Consider the nominees for best comedy series: Curb Your Enthusiasm, 30 Rock Entourage, The Office and … Two and a Half Men? Curb stopped being funny several years ago, but it still has a lingering critical rep; Emmy’s infatuation with the unwatchable Two and a Half Men is a mystery.
• The continuing fallout from HBO’s inability to create a new Sopranos: The network, while as usual the most nominated overall, got only 85 total, down just about a third from its height a few years back. The collapse this year of The Wire, which long ago people were saying was the best show on TV, in this context hurts doubly.

• I Can’t Believe I’m Typing These Words Dept.: There’s a new category for best reality host. I bet Les Moonves is hoppin’ mad Julie Chen didn’t get nominated.

Roman Polanski is seizing on a scene from the recent documentary about his child-rape case to try yet again to get his case dismissed:

Mr. Polanski and his lawyer have asked the Los Angeles district attorney’s office to review a new documentary in which a former deputy district attorney claims to have coached the judge in the case.

In the film, “Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired,” the former prosecutor, David Wells, describes advising Judge Laurence J. Rittenband to send Mr. Polanski to prison for a psychiatric review, though Mr. Wells was not involved with the case.

I like this story because it demonstrates how bad art can have real-world effects. You can read the story and judge for yourself how farfetched this issue is. (Wells, the former DA, says the exchange happened in open court and was routine.)

The film, which was directed by Marina Zenovich, remains fundamentally dishonest; it portrays the judge in the case as a womanizing spotlight-whore, and Polanksi as a benign continental roue who found himself on the wrong side of a moralizing America legal system.

The documentary elides over the fact that the events were far from a romantic evening at Marlon Brando’s Jack Nicholson’s house. The girl in the case told police that Polanski drugged her, photographed her nude, had sex with her … and then anally raped her.

Polanski wasn’t convicted of those charges, but the film is dishonest by not fully detailing what the girl said at the time. (The film uses the word “sodomy” in passing, but that’s a legally ambiguous term. It quotes from what the girl told police, but bowdlerizes her bluntest testimony—”He stuck his penis in my butt”—and doesn’t dwell on the added trauma for the 13 year old of having to speak publicly on such matters.)

The woman was quoted in recent years saying that she forgave Polanski, but that, too, excuses neither the original act nor the film’s essential expurgation of the contemporary facts of the case.

(The movie is doubly complicit by allowing Polanski’s lawyer, Douglas Dalton, a lot of screen time to tell us how honest he’s going to be with us—”You’re entitled to your own opinion, but you’re not entitled to your own facts,” he intones—though both he and the filmmaker are keeping some of them hidden. Dalton, incidentally, is described as being retired but in fact is still representing Polanski.)

As for the judge, the film systematically ridicules him, right down to playfully numbering the two (!) girlfriends the (unmarried) jurist apparently had. A NYT story about Zenovich and her film last year has a lot of information about the judge that Zenovich shared with the Times reporter but did not, in the end, share with her audience. Like this:

The judge […] was a poor Brooklyn boy who, upon graduating high school at 15, bypassed undergraduate work for New York University Law School; he later attended Harvard, because he was too young to take the New York bar exam, graduating Phi Beta Kappa.

Hard to square that with the cartoon presented in the film. The Times story on Polanski’s latest legal gambit does, however, make this observation:

In general, Mr. Dalton acknowledged, fugitives have little standing to press conventional appeals.

———–

Previously in Hitsville:

Roman Polanski: The Ick Factor

Undaunted by the lackluster music sales, the company now has a new video gambit, the NYT reports:

In a significant step toward vanquishing the local video store and keeping couch potatoes planted firmly in front of their televisions and computers, Amazon.com will introduce a new online store of TV shows and movies on Thursday, called Amazon Video on Demand.

Customers of Amazon’s new store will be able to start watching any of 40,000 movies and television programs immediately after ordering them because they stream, just like programs on a cable video-on-demand service. That is different from most Internet video stores, like Apple iTunes and the original incarnation of Amazon’s video store, which require users to endure lengthy waits as video files are downloaded to their hard drives.

Yes, the story does seem a little breathless, and, yes, that last line is a little snippy—it really doesn’t take that long to download video from the iTunes Store.

Aside from the boring name—not to mention the inescapable feeling of “Jeez, another online media download service?”—the plan has one interesting feature:

It will also let users buy a TV show or movie without actually downloading the video file to the PC’s hard drive. Amazon will store each customer’s selection in what it calls “Your Video Library.” Customers can then watch that show or movie whenever they return to Amazon, even if it is from a different computer or device, a solution that neatly gets around studio concerns about piracy.

Couldn’t that turn into a killer app? I could see buying a season of a TV show and then powering though the episodes wherever I am—at home, the office, a friend’s house, or even on the subway, assuming the service would work with smart phones.

But the last line of that excerpt, the part about easing piracy worries, is problematic as well. As I read the story, the service is offering two options: Downloading the video onto your computer, and (or possibly or) keeping it on Amazon’s server. The fact that one of two options is less vulnerable to piracy doesn’t seem worth singling out for mention, does it?

It makes it sound like a potential pirate is going to say, “Hey, one of the two ways I can get my hands on a digital copy of this movie I want to pirate is more difficult that the other. Curses, foiled again!”

And what the story doesn’t say is that the old “Hey, we’ll keep your copy safe sound and sound on our little servers, don’t you worry about a thing” pitch could well turn into the newer “We’re sorry, we’re shutting down our service and the digital files you thought you owned are no longer accessible, but thank you for shopping with Amazon” switcheroo.

The Silicon Valley Insider, based on speculation from one person, says that it might be 27 million tracks thus far:

[E]Music CEO David Pakman, an Amazon rival, says he thinks Amazon has 4% to 5% of the U.S. digital music market.

That doesn’t sound bad for a store that didn’t exist last fall. But put in unit sales, it looks awfully modest: Nielsen Soundscan says Americans bought 532.7 million digital tracks in the first half of the year. If Pakman’s estimates are right, that would mean Amazon (AMZN) has sold up to 27 million tracks so far this year — during the same period where Apple (AAPL) has sold more than 1 billion (worldwide). Amazon sells each track for up to 89 cents, and the labels take about two-thirds of that, which would leave Jeff Bezos with…perhaps $7 million of revenue.

(Link via The Daily Swarm.) A lot of caveats, though:

Could these numbers be off? Absolutely. Pakman says he gets his estimate by talking to the music labels, who tell him that his company is selling up to 3x as many tracks as Amazon is; he pegs his market share at 10% to 15%.* As we said, Pakman isn’t a neutral observer here, and has been tangling with Amazon for the right to call his company the second-biggest online music store in the business. And beyond that, his sample is skewed: eMusic works primarily with smallish indie labels, not the Big Four labels that almost certainly power most of Amazon’s sales.

And the item has this trenchant comment:

Here’s a data point, I’ve ‘purchased’ more than 10 mp3s on amazon.com. With bottlecaps. Given their target market and the availability of bottlecaps (and it only takes 5), this is probably a large part of their mp3 ‘business’.
[…]
The music industry is killing itself with CD sales (which are DRM free and go straight to hard drives and get sold used for less and less money each year) and trying to kill Apple. You know what a song is worth now? 5 bottlecaps.

This has probably been around for a while, but I just noticed the BOC camp classic being used for Auto Trader magazine:

I was hoping this was an R. Meltzer composition—particularly the deathless lyric “History shows again and again/How nature points out the folly of man”—but the song is credited to Buck Dharma solo.

The single most permeating problem of arts journalism is that the vast majority of it is promotional. In an ideal world, a major news outlet could ignore, say, a new big budget action movie—or even just relegate it to a capsule review—just on the grounds that there was nothing interesting to say about it.

That, of course, will never happen, but that’s the world we live in. In that context, the real test of quality in any newspaper, however, is whether it ever does stories that aren’t promotional.

Do the junket interviews, the big splashy Friday arts-section spread on the new Will Smith movie. But do you ever do a story that in one way or another isn’t tied to a product’s being put on sale to the public?

A good example of what arts sections should be doing is in the NYT today, a story about complaints from passengers on cruise ships that they got ripped off by a company that stages art auctions on board.

(I’d love to hear nominations from readers of stories published in their cities that show reporting and initiative.)

The disgruntled passengers say that the scam is to tell people they are being offered works appraised at some high figure; when they get back on shore, they find they’ve purchased works routinely sold for a fraction of that amount. One case study by the Times centers around a San Diego businessman named Luis Maldonado:

Reached by phone in Michigan, Albert Scaglione, the founder of Park West, said he stood by the company’s certificates of authenticity and its appraisals. “I am absolutely confident that if we had the opportunity to give Mr. Maldonado the history of our pricing, he would have a different view,” Mr. Scaglione said on Monday.

But about two hours after The New York Times asked Mr. Scaglione about Mr. Maldonado’s case, Park West phoned Mr. Maldonado to offer him a full refund.

The Times story notes that the Arizona Republic, the metro daily in Phoenix, did a similar investigation of the company last year. I had to search a half-dozen ways before it came up on the paper’s web site—and then only to tell me I had to buy it. No sense in letting people know about the paper’s investigative journalism!

An apparent reprint of the story, published in the Arizona Daily Star, in Tucson, is here. It deserves mention as well; reporter Dennis Wagner describes an aspect of the way the company does business that isn’t mentioned in the Times story:

If [the customer] had read the invoice on his purchase, he would have found a disclaimer: “No verbal agreements or representations (by Park West agents) shall be of any force or effect unless set forth in writing.”

If he had read the certificate of authenticity, he would have learned that it does not apply to guarantees about the work’s title, lot size, rarity, provenance or importance.

And if he had inspected the appraisal, he would have seen that Park West “assumes no liability for claims that our appraisal is inaccurate.”

Ben Crair in the New Republic lashes out at the poor abused creature, but he’s not following the conservative line. His thesis:

The film is indeed charming and as visually stunning as its enthusiasts claim, but WALL-E’s conservative critics are right to identify a problem with its message. Unfortunately, they’ve misdiagnosed it. There’s nothing wrong with the film’s anti-corporatism, which is just a variation of the anti-totalitarianism that’s requisite to the genre. More troublesome is the film’s complicity in the commodified culture it ostensibly critiques. This isn’t about Disney, whose external merchandise and marketing are extraneous to the film’s artistic vision. Within the movie itself, WALL-E betrays its true corporate overlord, and it isn’t Mickey. It’s Apple.

Crair sites any number of Apple references in the film to buttress his point. (Eve sort of looks like an iPod, for example. His conclusion:

A movie about the triumph of authenticity over artificiality shouldn’t also be an exercise in brand identification.

From the Times:

The independent label Global Music Group confirmed that it has bought Death Row Records for $24 million, The Associated Press reported. Global Music Group, based in New York, purchased the hip-hop label, including its current roster of artists and back catalog, on June 24. The company takes ownership of albums like “The Chronic” by Dr. Dre, “All Eyez on Me” by Tupac Shakur and “Doggystyle” by Snoop Dogg. Death Row was previously owned by Suge Knight, but was fraught with management problems.

Emphasis added. The last sentence is the rough equivalent of “Mr. Capone’s tenure was fraught with legal problems,” or “Mr. Nixon’s last months in office were marked by disagreements with Congress.”

Global Music could be getting a deal. Hard to believe the records mentioned and others in the company’s catalog aren’t selling a million copies a year.

… here is Public Editor Clark Hoyt, nattering on about the Times’ decision not to use the word “nuts” in reporting on Jesse Jackson’s colorful comment, accidentally caught on tape, about Barack Obama. (”I want to cut his nuts off.”)

Talking about bad words is of endless interest in some quarters. On the left, people can mutter darkly about censorship. On the right, there’s an opportunity to play to the cheap seats with talk about the rising tide of vulgarity. For newspaper ombudsmen, there’s an opportunity to both tut-tut and get a little racy.

Hoyt would have served his readers better if he had simply explained how jejune this discussion is, rather than jump into it like a drunk at a dinner party. There’s a spectrum of things Jackson could have said, from “Boy, I’m rootin’ tootin’ mad” (which most papers would print) to, I don’t know, something like “I’m going to fuck him in the ass” (which most papers wouldn’t).

The Times has a clearly articulated policy of how it deals with vulgar and obscene words, and the paper followed it in this instance.

Too many ombudsmen think that it’s their job to give their opinion about editorial decisions the paper’s editors made. “I would have done something different,” they sniff. Who cares?

What more does Hoyt want? He disagrees with the policy? Let him go edit his own paper.

The rest of Hoyt’s column is intellectually incoherent. He doesn’t even have a consistent position on the matter. Here’s his wimpoid conclusion:

Although I would have quoted Jackson[, …] I think the newspaper is wise to preserve its character and adapt slowly and carefully to the language around it. I use some of Carlin’s dirty words, but I do not want to read them in The Times unless it is essential, and I do not think I am alone.

Speaking of George Carlin, the late comedian, the same thing goes for his overrated and silly “seven dirty words” routine.

There’s no law against saying the seven words, or printing them. It was merely TV practice at the time not to use them, for obvious reasons.

Carlin has a reputation as a radical, but wasn’t this kind of a dumb observation? “Hey—I just realized you’re not allowed to show a filmed murder, rape, act of bestiality or suicide on TV. Why, that’s censorship! I’m going to do a comedy routine about it!”

After a radio station played Carlin’s routine on the subject, the FCC got involved. The resulting case went up to the U.S. Supreme Court and… the FCC prevailed, and the government’s ability to punish broadcast outlets that did broadcast the words was codified.

Nice work, George.

More evidence that Errol Morris is one of the world’s biggest blowhards is in his ponderous op-ed piece in the Times.

His subject was the widely seen photo of an Iranian weapons test. It transpired after the photo was published around the world that it was apparently altered; parts of the image seemed to have been duplicated. Reports said that it was possible one of the four missiles in the launch had misfired, and the image had been photoshopped to hide the incident.

For Morris, this is a ready-made occasion to proffer mundanity …

The alteration of photos for propaganda purposes has been with us as long as photography itself; it is not an invention of the digital age.

… after mundanity…

But while digitally altered photographs can easily fool the eye, they often leave telltale footprints that allow them to be unmasked as forgeries.

In Morris’s mind, however, this are deep thoughts—so deep that they require, as you can see in the second one, some four clashing metaphors to get across.

He predictably digresses into the distortion of photographs by Communist regimes. Morris then writes:

We understand Stalin’s intentions by removing comrades, but what is the purpose of these Iranian missile photographs? They are clearly altered. The question remains: Why, and to what end?

The portentous emphases are Morris’s own. As I’ve noted before, it is one of the filmmaker’s tics to ask questions with an air of profundity. But when you examine the questions you realize they aren’t very profound. The ones here, for example, are almost risible.

But now Morris is on a roll:

The danger here is not in three missiles versus four.

What does that mean? Who said it was?

We do not understand the intentions behind the photograph—real or digitally manipulated.

Yes, we do. We understand why they were released, and have a pretty good idea why they were altered.

Is it a threat? A warning? Or a bluff?

What do those questions mean?

All we really know about the photograph is that the government of Iran wanted to get the attention of the world, and it succeeded.

No—they got our attention with their missile launch. The photo is a sideshow. It wasn’t even released officially by the Iranians; it was taken, reports said, from a military web site in Iran by Agence France-Presse.

Why is this guy taken seriously?

From Stephanie Zacharek’s review of a Godard biography in the Times Book Review from Sunday:

[Author Richard] Brody is hardly blind to his subject’s foibles: he calls Godard on his flimsier political ideas, particularly his devotion to Maoism (a trend among French intellectuals in the late ’60s that Brody identifies, rightly, as thinly veiled fascism) and, later, the anti-Semitism that repeatedly surfaced in his work. It’s also worth noting that Godard, the committed Maoist and spewer of anti-capitalist, anti-American rhetoric, made two commercials for Nike in the early 1990s. They were never broadcast, though presumably Godard cashed the checks.

Emphasis added. I was delighted to work with both Zacharek and her husband, Charles Taylor, at Salon, back in the day. The first graf of Zacharek’s book review reminded me why:

Richard Brody’s “Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard” is a story of transformation, a painstaking account of a lifelong artistic journey. Now we know how one of the greatest of all filmmakers—the man who so radically changed cinema in 1959 with his debut feature, “Breathless”—became an intolerable gasbag.

The Guardian frets about disappearing critics. It’s disappointing, coming from this source; unlike the commentary in the U.S. on this subject, like the one I discuss below, you expect a bit more sophistication from the Guardian. Instead, it’s the same old droning on about the allegedly disappearing critics and unfocused, oddly unenlightened appreciation of what’s available on the web.

Consider this passage, emphases added:

The old media have, predictably, been outraged [about the cutbacks in fulltime critics at some papers].  After all, their jobs are on the line. ‘People who make these decisions,’ says [Salt Lake City film critic] Sean Means of the host of sackings, ‘get it into their heads that people who want to read about new movies have lots of places to do so, from fan sites, through blogs to critical aggregators, but they are being short-sighted. The reason people buy newspapers is to hear that particular voice.’

So is he saying that the opinions expressed for free on blogs are not of value? Not necessarily, he says. ‘The truth is, though, that there are very few amateurs who are better than professionals. If you really are good at it you figure out some way to get paid for it. At the risk of sounding elitist, everyone has an opinion, but not everyone has an informed opinion.‘

Both these points are completely incorrect. For the first, while the changing role of the American newspaper is due to a lot of things, many of them business related, at least part of their decline has to do with their timidity and arrogance.

Most daily film critics are timid; few have distinctive voices; over the years almost all have had larger-than-life personalities or opinions beaten out of them. Means is, ironically, right on this point: Readers would like a particular voice. But they have rarely, if ever, existed in any number at daily papers in the U.S.

At the same time, the service part of the papers’ mission has been ignored as well. This is where the arrogance comes in. The typeface of listings started small and got smaller. Papers didn’t care about being comprehensive. (Indeed, most local alternative papers helped find their niche by providing not just better film criticism, but also with more complete and fuller coverage of all the local movies playing, including art films and those showing at small venues.)

And they rarely wrote about consumer issues involving movie-going: What theaters had good projection, increases in tickets prices, the rise of commercials before the showings, and many other related things.

To this day, I find Google’s Showtimes feature to be the easiest and most useful way to find out where a movie is playing. It’s not perfect*, but it’s better, clearer and easier to use than any local paper’s service I’ve seen. Only institutions as hidebound and arrogant as daily newspapers in the U.S. could have lost the captive audience they once had for this most basic service.

As for Means’ second point—”At the risk of sounding elitist, everyone has an opinion, but not everyone has an informed opinion”—he is at risk only of sounding like a nut. The idea that informed opinion is the prerogative of the American metropolitan daily is … quaint.

Beyond that, his understanding of the media world is mired back in the previous century. Today, the audience gets to decide for itself who has the informed opinion it wants. There’s no longer one local institution making that decision for it.

Far too much of the rest of this very long Guardian piece consists of interviews with UK critics in various fields, most of whom confess they don’t look at the web much. I’m not sure those are the horses the paper should be backing at this juncture.

The paper never says the obvious: That for the vast majority of people there is more convenience and more information—more by orders of magnitude—about everything in the cultural sphere. Once the shakeout in the information industries resolves itself, the world will right and there will be normal jobs again for critics, hopefully based on their writing and less on their ability to get along in the timid confines of the (very much changed) American newsroom.

————

Another lament on the alleged disappearing film critic, this one from Craig Lindsey at the Raleigh News & Observer.

It’s not irredeemable. I didn’t know all of this, for example:

As for film critics, they’ve been around since the creation of film print. Revered Midwestern poets Vachel Lindsay and Carl Sandburg did time as silent movie-era critics, churning out reviews and essays in the early 20th century. Esteemed novelists Graham Greene and James Agee began writing movie reviews in periodicals in the ’30s and ’40s. Former Winston-Salem resident Bosley Crowther was at one point the country’s most-known newspaper critic, filing reviews for The New York Times from the ’40s to the ’60s.

(Lindsey diplomatically doesn’t say that Crowther was a buffoon.)

But, like most of the sloppy writers addressing this issue, Lindsey is hung up on the status of daily newspaper film critics, which he, like the Guardian, romanticizes. There is, he allows, some film writing on the internet, but tries to dismiss it as hack work:

In the past two decades, there has been such an abundance of film criticism that even a Web movie-review haven such as Rotten Tomatoes had to put a kibosh on accepting new critics. This boom not only has given us writers and commentators who can offer a valid opinion on a flick but also hype machines with feet. They don’t review movies so much as cheerlead for them, penning enthusiastically hacky write-ups just to appease movie studios so they can get invited to future press junkets.

With so many people ready to voice their opinions on movies—some not fully qualified to do it in the first place—it’s no wonder that publications don’t mind thinning the herd.

But of course, there’s far more good writing on film on the net (and much more sheer information) than there ever was in local dailies. And those dailies also paid (and pay now) living wages to more hacks than the web ever will.

As I’ve said before, the real problem here is that what’s really disappearing is free advertising for films in local dailies, which is what most local film criticism is. Since there are ever more movies being released and more ways for the audience to see them, this is a problem only if it is your job to actually market films in this challenging time.

Even Elvis Mitchell, who isn’t an idiot, is quoted saying this:

“We all think about that world of 30 years ago, when it was The New York Times and The New Yorker and Time magazine. And they could really, if not dictate policy, then keep a film director working. A great review could get somebody another movie, and those days have sadly disappeared. But the world of that kind of filmmaking has disappeared too. I mean, I think we have to bemoan that more than this demise of film criticism.”

Hmm … So film criticism isn’t what it used to be, and filmmaking isn’t what it used to be, either!

May I say that commentary on the demise of film criticism and filmmaking is what it used to be?

By which I mean that there will always be some guy affecting world-weariness in the corner moaning about the good old days. Again, just last week everyone in the mediasphere was clucking agreeably about Mark Gill’s speech about that there were too many movies being made.

Who isn’t getting to make movies? Who isn’t getting to write about movies?

The answer? No one.

But wait, what about the poor consumer, the reader of film criticism?

They, of course, have access to more good writing about film, from both national news outlets and independent writers on the web, than they ever did before.

So what is the problem?

* Google hasn’t figured out yet that it needs to weight art houses and unusual venues when folks are searching for local showtimes. A user wants to know where Iron Man is playing at the closest megaplexes, but also wants to know what unusual moves are playing in a different part of town.

——–

Previously in Hitsville:

Film critics—still missing!
The year of the disappearing film critics
More on the disappearing film critics 

Lots of comments on Hitsville’s item on how the obits on Tony Snow didn’t mention the harsh, Fox News side of the man.

A selected few are below. For another example of the expurgated commentary on Snow, see today’s Wall Street Journal editorial page ($), which lionizes him as someone who was “principled but never nasty.” For a bit of the nastiness the Journal was apparently unfamiliar with, see my original item on the coverage of Snow’s death.

1. Jim Strong aka Stormy

   Jeez, get a life, Wyman, whoever and whatever you are. You and the mopes that get off peeping into keyholes for scraps of quotes to fashion PC scandals or worse sound like justice department creeps on the conspiracy beat. Racism is a pretty serious charge in my book and shouldn’t be tossed around so casually. By your standards Mark Twain makes Jesse Helms sound like Jesse Jackson.

2. Al Cross

   I seriously doubt that Tony Snow “had contempt for his hometown audience,” but Mr. Wyman’s comment should make us wonder if HE does.

3. hitsville

   Thanks to all for taking the time to comment. Racism is a serious charge. Making fun of peoples’ names is a buffoonish, schoolyard form of it, but it’s clearly in the park. On what level, “Stormy,” is what Snow said fair comment, or even defensible?

   I think it’s worse because Snow was not able to couch the accusation in acceptable language, because it could have quickly been refuted by the facts. You’ll note he didn’t say something that would have made his point plain and irrefutable: “Over a period of a year I watched NPR’s hiring practices and, in nine out of the ten hires I followed, a non-white male was given the position. I myself was passed over x number of times by a lesser-qualified person of color” or whatever.

   He didn’t say that because … it didn’t happen. He was lying.

   As for the contempt for his audience issue, I think it’s obvious Snow would never have said that on TV or in Washington. He would know he couldn’t get away with it. But he knew that he could play to the cheap seats at home. He had a lower opinion of the intelligence and tolerance for racist comments of the hometown crowd.

4. Independent

   Your omniscient revelation of Snow’s motivations leads me to believe you’re at least a little paranoid and holier-than-thou. Have you ever been to Cincinnati? Its population is 52.5 percent white; African Americans make up 42.9. Do you really think he expected his comments to play well there? It was a stupid thing to say, but I doubt it was premeditated.

   Snow had his bad side; it was out there for everyone to see. I think I’ve just seen yours. If that comment was his most offensive, then much of the world isn’t in a position to judge him — especially now, when he’s not around to defend himself. I think that’s what is called “cheap.”

5. Charlie Sanders

   The people who rejoice over a person’s death are very sick. Mr. Wyman, there is plenty of time as the mourning passes to complete the obituary if necessary. I cannot even listen to NPR because of its obvious bias. Having Bill Moyers on the team is all the proof anyone needs. The racist card is worn out from misuse. Seems like Mr. Wyman’s views are worn too. Despite my disagreement with your views, I wish you a happy and fulfilled life. It is OK to disagree in this country!

6. melissa

   To be specific, the “Kipling” remark was a smarmy reference to a couple of NPR reporters who have South Asian backgrounds. To any observant person, Indian names are NOT exotic anymore, even in Ohio … infantile, indeed.

Again, thanks to all for contributing.

Independent: I think the magazine Cincinnati Gentleman was not directed at the area’s black population. And if it were you and I both know Snow wouldn’t have said that.

Charlie Sanders: Again I would like to note that I was talking about the articles written on his death. When you are in the public arena, you leave a public record. Snow had a lot of perks in his life; one of the few downsides is that, when you die, the people have a right to hear about the bad as well as the good, and the obits should have included both sides of the man.

In reading some of the other encomiums in the days since his passing I have only come to feel this even more strongly. So many people said Snow “loved his country.” If he loved it so much, why would he speak so disparagingly about immigrants?

As you probably know, when a song is played on old-fashioned radio, a small fee goes to, not the artist, but the songwriter of the song in question. It’s only a nickel or so, on average, but over time that can really add up.

But radio stations have never had to pay money to the nominal artists of the songs they play. So-called “performance royalties” were excluded, on the thinking that radio play helps sell records. (Songwriting royalties are called “publishing.”)

This has always grated on some in the industry.

Jeffrey Yorke in Billboard has been following the behind-the-scenes political maneuvers to change the current law. The industry doesn’t have an easy way of it; the National Association of Broadcasters, which has an influential lobby in D.C., not to mention an entire country full of broadcast outlets, to press its case, is unalterably opposed to the idea, on obvious grounds. (It would cost radio stations an enormous amount of money.)

In his most recent story ($), Yorke notes that, while it is very unlikely Congress will do anything about the matter this year, the issue has moved to a new level:

A resounding voice vote June 27 by the House Subcommittee on Courts, the Internet and Intellectual Property in favor of the legislation sent the Performance Rights Act to the full House Judiciary Committee. A vote by the Senate Judiciary Committee on a similar bill is also possible. But the legislation doesn’t seem poised to get much further in this election year, as Congress is scheduled to adjourn for a summer recess after the first week of August and faces a full agenda after it reconvenes following the Labor Day weekend.

I’ve always been reflexively against the matter, on the grounds that the music industry doesn’t deserve any more money until it cleans up a few of its own scandals, which over the years have included not paying artists royalties; price-fixing; raising prices; payola; and, more recently, the file-sharing legal assaults.

But I think there’s an argument or two to be made for it today.

1) Radio isn’t the primary course of artist exposure these days. With music available everywhere, radio doesn’t make and break careers any more. It’s just another industry making money off of music. Why should it get its goods for free when internet radio, for example, doesn’t?

2) The way the industry is evolving, the law could be written to not make the labels the primary conduit for the performance royalties. An arm’s length nonprofit organization mandated to perform fiduciary duties in channeling the money to the correct rights-holder might, over time, be a force for protecting artists’ rights in this area.

(By which I mean: Right now,there’s no way to stop a label from pilfering performance royalties, because the label could make the argument, a legitimate one, that its promotional muscle contributed to the airplay. But as the industry evolves, and artists who are not tied to labels emerge, the set-up would make survival in that area more likely. In the past, if you were an independent artist and you had a fluke radio hit, you made no money off of it; you were practically forced to go to a label to monetize it.)

3) It’s a great time to screw over terrestrial radio. Nuff said!

Erik Childress, at efilmcritic.com, has a nice takedown on ultrahack Peter Travers, Rolling Stone’s utterly useless film critic.

Childress zooms in on one of any lame critic’s most annoying tics: Using a bland assertion of contemporary mediocrity to overly praise a new piece of corporate product.

The evidence is this blurb, taken from Travers’ review of The Dark Knight, in the current ads for the film:

“A thunderbolt is about to rip into the blanket of bland we call summer movies. FEVERISH ACTION? Check. DAZZLING SPECTACLE? Check. DEVILISH FUN? Check. Just hang on for a shock to the system. Every actor brings his “A” game to show the lure of the dark side. The haunting and visionary Dark Knight soars on the wings of untamed imagination.”

I suppose it’s a minor thing, but it’s not a bland summer of movies. Last year, it was all sequels, threequells, fourquells. This year, there’ve been a lot of relatively novel entrants, from Iron Man to Speed Racer to The Incredibile Hulk to SATC to Wanted to Hellboy II.

Childress then goes back and notes that Travers own reviews of that summer of bland have been … pretty darn enthusiastic.

Check out this interesting look at a case study of an LA exhibition war, by Hollywood Elsewhere’s Jeffrey Wells.

Wells noticed that an amicable working relationship between multiplexes on the west side—a Landmark arthouse on Pico, and a large AMC near Century City—is falling apart, with the Landmark now running more blockbuster fare.  At the end, Wells includes this passage:

Before they altered or broadened their identity by letting mainstream popcorn movies in, Landmark had been…how to say it? The term is either “suffering” or “somewhat hurting,” but then so has everyone else in the indie exhibition sector. It’s not a flush time right now. The Landmark has been plugging along, but the biggest indie films they’ve been showing have been The Visitor, Mongol and Guillame Canets’ Tell No One. That’s fine as far as it goes, but an operation like the Landmark needs more grease on the axles.

As someone else put it, “There’s so much good product around now. Why not just just give people what they want?”

You’ll remember Hollywood was abuzz a few weeks ago, after former Miramax prez Mark Gill said the sky was falling in the art film world because of too much product.

If there are so many art films out there, why are none of them playing at the film capital of the world’s premiere art house?

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Previously in Hitsville: