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.

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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.

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Previously in Hitsville:

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

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Manohla Dargis and A.O. Scott of the NYT, in a joint bylined article from Cannes, give a shout-out to those disappearing film critics. Speaking of the fest, they say that “the excitement is tempered by a sense that those films are facing unusually difficult prospects back in the United States.”

Tempered excitement on the Riviera! Those poor people. Anyway, here’s one of the things doing the tempering:

The number of film critics writing for traditional print outlets has thinned dramatically in the last year as media companies face shrinking revenues and uncertain futures. Whereas big-budget commercial releases can almost always buy a solid opening weekend at the box office with wall-to-wall publicity and advertising, smaller films depend greatly on the support of critics to find their audiences. That’s especially true these days, with so many films opening theatrically — more than 600 titles in 2007—and competing for a seemingly shrinking audience.

The disappearing film critic is one of those memes that’s been floating around for the past year or so. But all the commotion about it doesn’t make sense. There are a number of things going on.

1) Critics have been disappearing for a long time. Dailies across the country have been cutting back on both film-writer positions and film coverage newsprint space for a decade. The New Times chain, now totaling nearly 20 alternative papers, has moved almost entirely to national critics. (I helped set up the beginnings of that system more than 10 years ago.) Yet art films have been doing quite well in that period; look at the Academy Award nominations for the last three years.

2) This doesn’t take into account the tsunamis of writing about film on the web. Some of it is silly, but a lot of it is substantive, but by any measure there are oceans more intelligent writing about film available to normal people than there was ten years ago.

3) With the rise of companies like Amazon and Netflix, more indie and art films are available to more people than ever before as well. (And let’s not forget the effects of the intermittently useful reader reviews on Amazon and elsewhere.) But of course, that (and No. 2) brings up the difficult issue of …

4) … consumer choice. Life is great for movie fans… you can get the movies you want when you want them, and there’s a lot of places to get advice on what to watch. What Dargis and Scott are talking about is one teeny-tiny slice of the pie right now: The slice, from the studios point of view, that used to feature folks in de facto monopolistic positions (i.e., daily newspaper film critics) speaking to voluntary recipients of hegemonic information delivery systems (i.e., daily newspaper subscribers) via actual recommendations published on pressed paper pulp (i.e., free publicity on newsprint).

Yes, those days are indeed gone, but who cares? Indeed, as the pair say in that same paragraph, there are oceans more traditionally released films in the U.S. as well. Kind of a puzzle, isn’t it? You gotta figure the distributors are trying to make a buck; it’s counterintuitive that they would they release more movies if, as Dargis and Scott imply, the audience is shrinking. (I’m sorry— “seemingly” shrinking.)

This really comes down to a minor marketing problem for the folks in the art film publicity game. Tell them to call Starbucks; over time they will learn how to market their films effectively to an empowered audience. The rest of us are doing fine.

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Previously in Hitsville:

The year of the disappearing film critics
More on the disappearing film critics 

1 comment

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

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

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

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

Consider what Music City News‘ David Poland says:

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

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

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David Ansen has accepted a buyout at Newsweek, one of more than 100 staffers at the newsweekly to do so.* Variety’s Anne Thompson has been surveying the damage:

The current harsh publishing climate has been hard on film critics. Gone from newspaper staff reviewer ranks are The Chicago Reader’s Jonathan Rosenbaum, Newsday’s John Anderson, The Village Voice’s Nathan Lee, The New York Daily News’ Jami Bernard and Jack Mathews, The Chicago Tribune’s Michael Wilmington and The Atlanta Journal Constitution’s Eleanor Ringel Gillespie. Some have retired and some have been pushed out.

There’s two ways to look at this, of course; on the one hand it seems like a massive shakeout in the critical corps is going to leave a handful of top and ever-more-influential critics at some national or quasi-national outlets, and then an ever-dwindling number of nominally professional practitioners at the local venues that can afford them.

That’s bad, right? Yes and no. From the point of view of newspaper economics, at a time of massive financial contraction, it’s possible that metro dailies, particularly, don’t need film critics. They should instead invest their entertainment budgets covering the things that only they can do: Local theater, the music scenes, the local performing arts. That’s something the paper can provide that no one else can.

The quality of movie coverage in those papers has always been dicey. First of all, there aren’t enough good writers in the universe to produce decent copy for many hundreds of dailies. Even for decent ones, there’s often pressure not to be too mean about crummy but high-profile films. As for features, it get worse: There’s a tradition for, say, weekend entertainment sections, of simply taking whatever the biggest celebrity face that can plausibly be used and splashing it across the cover. For film, that might be a feature on some new film, which nine times out of ten is based on a junket at which the ostensible subject of the article was interviewed in a round-table setting. (Sometimes the actual writing is done by a stringer the paper might use occasionally out of Los Angeles.) Finally, if the paper deigned to take notice of smaller films, you might find details printed in tiny agate type buried in smudged listings.

It’s pretty sad. Why do they keep doing it? The answer to that question is interesting. The paper is basically just looking for filler to slip around the movie ads, a huge income stream for a typical daily. It’s not often commented on, but over the past five or ten years there was a big movement in dailies to split the weekend art sections in two: Friday, the day of the traditional big daily weekend art section, was given over almost entirely to films and DVDs. The rest of the weekend arts coverage was moved up to Thursday.

That gave the paper two chances to sell movie ads. At the same time, many of them were experimenting with selling folks subscriptions from Friday to Sunday. (”You obviously don’t want to get our crummy paper seven days a week; how about just three?”) The Thursday section gave them something to use to try to coax folks up to four days a week.

Now, note that very little of what I’ve been writing about has anything at all to do with readers—what they might like, or what they might find useful. (The alternative press built their own little financial empire partially out of providing readers better film coverage, both in terms of writing about films and also having comprehensive and easier-to-use listings.)

In the newsweeklies, their main job is to supply the studios with one or two film covers a year; since the concern is solely increased newsstand sales, the only consideration is the film’s blockbuster potential, and to promote cover those, folks like Ansen were trotted out to supply breathless behind-the-scenes detail and carefully not let on that the film in question was dreck.

And the punchline to all this is, of course, that for readers, for folks who just want some good writing on film, the internet is a candy store. The real problem is whether the great critics of the future—the Jonathan Rosenbaums of the next generation—will be vulnerable. Right now, it looks like the digital world will provide them many opportunities.

* The economics of Ansen’s departure don’t seem to benefit Newsweek much. He’s three years from retirement; Thompson says he’s staying on for the rest of the year, picking up two years salary, and a sweetened pension, and getting health coverage until he turns 65. If he weren’t leaving, the mag would get two more years of work out of him for the same amount of money—and not have to fatten his pension.

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