Jon Swift’s disquisition on derrièrism is funny enough* that you almost forget to chase the links to investigate the news that prompted it, namely that Andrew Beitbart is starting a web site to collect writing about culture that isn’t um, written by people who write about culture.

Now the politically conservative Breitbart, 39, will debut his own collection of original material in his Big Hollywood group blog, a new home for right-of-center voices that want to sound off on the interplay of popular culture and politics.

Breitbart has already signed several big names, including House Minority Leader Rep. John Boehner (R-Ohio), incoming Minority Whip Rep. Eric Cantor (R-Va.) and Reps. Thaddeus McCotter (R-Mich.), Mary Bono Mack (R-Calif.) and Connie Mack (R-Fla.), to post entries on the site. He has also landed former senator and GOP presidential candidate Fred Thompson, MSNBC correspondent Tucker Carlson and a slew of other conservative thinkers from the National Review, The Weekly Standard and Commentary magazine to contribute.

It gets better:

And to jolt liberal Hollywood, Breitbart says he has wooed conservative screenwriters, comedy writers, classical musicians and alternative singer-songwriters to contribute to the blog. Celebrities who risk being blacklisted if they come out as conservative can write under pseudonyms, Breitbart says.

“I want it to be such a mixed group of people that people’s minds will be blown,” he says. “They’ll go, ‘This is not your mother’s conservative moment.’ ”

Emphasis added. With Breitbart buddy Matt Drudge routing traffic his way (which may be Breitbart.com’s chief means of support), the site might not be as evanescent as one might oppose, and for a time will undoubtedly provide some amusement for those who enjoy red state film criticism, or maintain a morbid interest in the parabola of Tucker Carlson’s career.

The site has as yet nothing up but a message promising a January 6 debut date.

* Since it is funny I feel churlish pointing out that Swift misread the comments on Wall-E I made that earned Hitsville inclusion amongst the derrièrists. I was writing about the film not to discuss its ideas nor to agree or disagree with them. My point was that, at a time when everyone reflexively says pop culture is degraded, here was a film with a fairly developed and, not incidentally, blisteringly ironic message whose ideas were largely unengaged with by terrestrial critics. Once acknowledged, people are welcome to get all derrièrist on the ass of those ideas, as far as I’m concerned, but they needed to be recognized and processed first. I may be the first post-derrièrist.

The fan boys are incensed with some embargo enforcement from Lucas World for the release of a new Star Wars animated film, Clone Wars. One strain here, wherein Ain’t It Cool News had to take down an early review. Slashdot is also going on about it here; a dopey blog item from the Guardian here.

As the Guardian item shows, embargoes aren’t always understood, even by the press. I think they are fair. The studio has a film; it shows it to journalists early, on condition that the reviews not run until the day of release. There’s nothing wrong with that; the journalists are free not to agree to the embargo, and to wait until the film is released to review it*.

For smaller films, the screenings are held in empty theaters, often in the afternoon. For most major releases, though, these are often in the form of early-evening screenings, for which free tix are distributed to the public.

From the studio’s perspective, this can make for a better reviewing environment (with an audience pumped up to see a “special” early showing) and beyond that hopefully can give the film some “word of mouth” early buzz.

Since the whole point of the latter is to get people talking about the movie, the phenomenon of internet-era early reviews magnify the potential to either help or harm a particular film.

Ain’t It Cool got invited ex officio to an early Clone Wars** screening, posted a review, and then was asked by Lucas to take it down. The site did it, but didn’t like it:

Does this whole thing stink? Yep. Sorta does. They’re having public screenings of the film, like yesterday’s show at the Egyptian, and if I’d gone to one of those, no one would be able to embargo anything.

*In practice this never happens. With the increase in Thursday midnight screenings, more and more papers are reviewing major films a day early. National outlets like Time and Newsweek have always been given a pass on this, not so much because their reviews are so influential but because they can, once in a while, provide slobbery cover-story PR bonanzas for hard-hitting skeptical journalism about big-budget product like your Da Vinci Codes and Harry Potters. Peter Travers of Rolling Stone (which is a biweekly) is a reliable blurbmeister and gets a pass as well. The trades, Variety and the Hollywood Reporter, generally review at the first public screening, often prior even to film festivals.

** The film, a collection of the first three episodes from an upcoming TV series, is not getting good early reviews in any case. Variety:

Leaving behind the traditional animation employed on the three-season, similarly combat-oriented “Star Wars: Clone Wars” series aired on the Cartoon Network 2003-05, Lucas & Co. here employ a computer-generated anime/manga style that results in somewhat more dramatic compositions and color schemes. But the movements, both of the characters and the compositions, look mechanical, and the mostly familiar characters have all the facial expressiveness of Easter Island statues.

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 

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.

Slate’s Daniel Engber takes a whack, arguing that the film’s equation of overweight Americans with global destruction is incorrect:

The desire to link obesity and environmental collapse seems to have more to do with politics than science.

I suppose he makes his case, but it’s tangential to the film, I think. It’s a little willful to read the movie necessarily saying that overweight people cause environmental problems. Indeed, some people have said that Hitsville’s contention that the movie is a broadside on American food consumption is wrong because the people on the spaceship have become blobs only in their exile.

Two, I think he’s underappreciating how unusual the bluntness of the societal critiques in the film are. Taken individually, it’s hard to argue with the points. Americans are overweight. Companies do foist unnecessary trash on the culture and don’t take responsibility (or have not been forced to take responsibility) for, more obviously, the recycling of dangerous materials. (They also exercise political muscle to squelch social attempts to make them.) The film is careful to make plain both sides are complicit.

And G-rated movies are, as a rule, a little more … sympathetic to the concerns of large companies, I think it’s fair to say. I don’t agree with all of Pixar’s critiques. The Incredibles, for example, had a preposterous (and fairly right-wing) framing trope*. But it’s hard to gainsay what Pixar pulled off in this instance.

p.s. And anyway, Hitsville’s main concern isn’t with the film at all. It’s that critics didn’t bother to consider the political implications of its tropes. 

p.p.s. Engber ends his piece with this poignant scene:

What happens when the movie ends and the lights come up? Does the rest of the audience stare at the lone fatty as she waddles her way toward the theater doors? Do they see in her body a validation of the film’s “darker implications”—a signpost for what we might become if we don’t change our ways? Or do they just scowl at her, convinced that she’s part of the problem?

I would like to note again that this is a somewhat sensitive issue and repeat what I’ve said in previous posts: That I don’t want to make individual judgments about folks’ lifestyles. That said, the picture Engber presents in that graf is a bigger carton that Wall-E is. We’re not talking about a “lone” person. Wall-E’s ferocity comes from the way it essentially holds a mirror up to its audience.

* If I remember correctly, Father Incredible is driven out of the superhero business in the face of lawsuits stemming from one of his heroic rescues. You can read this is a clever sendup of the nonsensicality of the plotting in the superhero genre generally, but it has a far greater resonance in terms of the right-wing talking points about abuses of the legal system.

—————

Previously in Hitsville:

The “Wall-E” debate continues: The far right attacks!

The critical conundrum of “Wall-E” 

What if Pixar released a ferocious broadside attacking the American way of life and the movie reviewers didn’t notice? 

Ken Turan has a typically striking take. “Asking critics about what they got wrong, or for that matter what they got right, is to fundamentally misunderstand what it is we do and how we do it,” he says:

What criticism offers, ideally, is informed, thoughtful, well-written opinion, an expression of personal taste based on knowledge, experience and insight that helps readers both decide what to see and understand what they have seen. And the closest I’ve come to making a mistake has been when I haven’t trusted my own instincts about a film.

Wall-E is now officially a political football, with conservatives attacking it for it the premises of its environmental messages.

Patrick Henry Press News aggregates some of the commentary. (Link via Hollywood Elsewhere); Dan Abrams, on MSNBC, had a segment the other night on it as well.

The objections seem to be that the film portrays humans as having been responsible for filling the earth with trash. (Glenn Beck, waxing sarcastic: “I can’t wait to teach my kids how we have destroyed the earth.”) The Washington Times goes farther:

[…S]uffice to say the film treats our capitalist system as the Earth’s ultimate sin.

On balance, the attacks strike me as legitimate; the film is a polemic, about a Wal-Mart-like company that fills the earth with trash and then takes the remainder of the human race on board a flying spaceship, on which it induces them to lie back and watch videos and grow ever fatter. There’s nothing wrong with criticizing a film whose political premises you disagree with.

The Abrams show, however, was more interesting. He was ridiculing what he called the “paramoid far right” for their criticisms, but he was doing it on the basis that it was crazy to accuse a family movie of having such themes: “This is a movie, primarily about a robot in love, seven centuries from now,” he said incredulously.

You can watch the video from a link on this page; look for the link, “Wall-E’s hidden agenda?”

Abrams, like the critics I wrote about in my two previous posts, is part of the degraded middlebrow majority who would do anything to pretend that art doesn’t mean anything, in between decrying how culture today isn’t like the good old days.

—————

Previously in Hitsville:

The critical conundrum of “Wall-E” 

What if Pixar released a ferocious broadside attacking the American way of life and the movie reviewers didn’t notice? 

Slate’s Erik Lundegaard deploys a lot of calculation and a spreadsheet or two in an attempt to quantify the effect good reviews have on the bottom line of film box office:

It’s almost a given these days that movie critics are elitist, while moviegoers are populist. When the highest-grossing films get panned by critics, what good are critics? As publishers across the country dump their reviewers, this is not exactly a rhetorical question.

Believe it or not, though, critically acclaimed films generally do better than critically panned films at the box office—if you measure their performance in the right way.

I think he makes his case, though it is to some extent tautological. (I mean, of course published articles in papers across the country saying, in effect, that people should go see a particular film will induce people to do just that, just as the amount of ad money spent on any particular film will do the same thing.) The issue is also made murkier by the way film criticism is actually practiced at most mainstream print outlets*.

But there’s a gem in Lundegaard’s piece, in the penultimate graf:

If I were a publisher, though, I’d hire the best critic I could find and have him or her write two reviews: a short one, to be printed the day or week the movie opens and that gives away little of the plot but tells readers whether it’s good or bad (the service aspect); and a longer, more in-depth review that discusses the entire film, to be posted online (the critical aspect). Then I’d put a message board beneath the in-depth review and sit back. Most people don’t want to hear about a movie before they’ve seen it but would love to discuss it afterward. Boy, would they ever.

This sort of thing is becoming more prevalent, as increasing numbers of daily critics take up blogging, but isn’t it a smart idea to institutionalize some variation on Lundegaard’s scheme as part of the paper’s struggle to remain relevant in the sphere of covering national cultural product? As I’ve written before, why should residents of a particular town pay any attention to the local film critic, who is going to suck in comparison to the national-level criticism now easily obtainable through the web?  A local critic, however, who is the de facto arbiter of the film discussion in a particular town, who could provide some kind of personal response to commenters and could even salt the comments with local references, might be a potent tool for a particular paper to hang on to some part of the readership it will inevitably lose for coverage of non-local art events.

* By which I mean a couple of things. For one, in local dailies, still a powerful force, critics long ago gave up giving blockbuster actioners bad reviews. Faced with the prospect of reiterating, week after week, “Well, here’s another frenetic, senseless action movie” and the resulting suicidal tendencies, critics eventually give in, looking for a few nice promotional things to say and saving the (tepid) criticism for the last grafs. (”Joe Blow’s screenplay won’t win any Oscars, but it’s serves its purpose here. …”) Secondly, even when the reviews for a big-budget film are unequivocably bad, the papers typically undercut the criticism with front-page refers (complete with little photos of the film’s star, be it monster or human) and big play on the fronts of the entertainment sections, all with headlines that as a rule give little hint of the opinions in the review.

————

Previously in Hitsville:

The year of the disappearing film critics

Lots of comments on and criticism of Hitsville’s post on how most mainstream (which is to say, hard-copy) film reviewers didn’t pay much attention to the social politics of Wall-E, the latest Pixar film.

(What if Pixar released a ferocious broadside attacking the American way of life and the movie reviewers didn’t notice?)

Comments here. Observations:

1) I noted that a few serious reviewers did mention, for example, the tableaux of human corpulence in the last half of the film. (n.b.: Here as before, I want to disassociate myself from making fun of overweight folks per se; but I think it’s fair for social commentators to take the issue on without being judgmental in the individual sense.) (n.b.b.: This does not apply to SUV drivers, however.) Sean O’Connell comments that I missed this comment from Variety:

“One can’t help but speculate about the perverse prospect of plus-sized multiplexers laughing while digging into their popcorn and slurping their sodas.”

That insight is a testament to the overall quality of Variety’s reviews, but it still qualifies as little more than a passing mention. As I responded in one of my comments, we hear constantly about the degradation of culture these days. But here’s a case where a work of pop culture is built around a transparently discernible social broadside of no little irony. More reviews should have taken explicit note of it—specifically (as the NYT and Variety but not too many others did, and again I’m talking here about mainstream print reviewers, not bloggers) the fact that the future didn’t look too much different from a typical movie-theater crowd.

2) Anne Thompson in her Risky Business blog has this to say:

Meanwhile, Hitsville runs down various critics who are are avoiding dealing with what happens to the human race in Wall-E. Bill Wyman seems to be missing the fact that some critics decided to keep back some of the reveals in the last part of the movie. What happens to humans in Wall-E was a big surprise when I saw the movie; I didn’t know that part of the story, so I was delighted and amazed by much of what I was seeing.

O’Connell makes a point similar to Thompson’s:

Consider this. Maybe critics were protecting some of the film’s second-half secrets? Virtually all of WALL-E’s promo material (trailers, commercials, etc.) reveal the scorched-Earth first act. Because the social commentary arrived once on the Axiom, maybe some critics wanted to leave a lot of that to be discovered by opening-week audiences?

I’m sure more articles will surface with deeper discussions of Pixar’s political and social statements in WALL-E. I, for one, didn’t want to let too many cats out of this overstuffed bag. I wonder if others writing about the film felt the same way.

(He’s referring to his review of Wall-E at filmcritic.com, which is here.)

That’s a fair point but it also is a bit convenient. (“I didn’t want to really get into all the prison stuff in The Gulag Archipelago because it gave away too much of the plot.”) It’s a reviewer’s job to take on the meaning of the film. I’m more radical about this than most people; critics should have something interesting to say and the chops to say it with, and that is where their responsibilities to audience or artist end.

Sometimes criticism involves discussing the plot in detail, and the internets spoiler police can bite me.

I’d argue, though, that the phenomenon I discuss in my original post hasn’t really anything to do with this. Many reviewers mentioned the portrayal of humanity; they just didn’t bother to take five seconds to think about it or engage with the ideas (too much of the time critics make references to “themes” or “ideas” in films and then never explain what they are), or if they did they didn’t want to make their audience uncomfortable.

3) O’Connell and Thompson are seconded, with vigor, by Lou Lumenick, film critic of the NY Post:

What a self-serving crock. Any careful check would reveal lots of critics, including me, who didn’t “ignore” the fat people/Wall-Mart angle. Anyone who suggests this should have been in the lead in reviews in mainstream papers doesn’t understand the function of movie reviews.

I didn’t give the Post the time of day in my original survey of the reviews, which was a mistake; Lumenick, in his take in the paper, stresses the film’s dark side as few other daily critics did:

Every time I think the studio that gave us “The Incredibles” and “Ratatouille” can’t possibly top itself, Pixar comes up with a masterpiece like “WALL-E,” which smuggles barbed political satire into a charming, hilarious robot love story aimed at the entire family.

Arguably the darkest animated feature ever released by Disney (after “Pinocchio”) and certainly the most political, “WALL-E” presents a bleak and brilliantly detailed vision of the future that puts most post-apocalyptic live-action movies to shame.

Later he takes on the implications of the film’s message as well:

This is a hugely ambitious theme for a G-rated family flick, and “WALL-E” takes risks that must have given Pixar’s consumer-oriented corporate overlords at Disney pause.

Foremost is a Swiftian take on the future of the Wal-Mart nation (no, I don’t think the movie’s title is a coincidence), where everyone has grown hugely fat and lazy, literally unable to walk as they pass their days in a semi-catatonic state at a resort/shopping mall aboard the spaceship.

(He’s also the only critic I noticed who forwent the clumsy Chaplin comparisons of Wall-E’s first forty or so minutes for the much-more-revealing reference to Tati, whose balletic and blithe wordless choreographies are the obvious inspiration for Andrew Stanton’s in Wall-E.)

4) Still, I stand by my original point: Wall-E will be remembered for a caustic worldview the implications of which few of the first-line mainstream reviewers addressed. It should have been in the ledes. Finally, I think this is true as well: If, for whatever reason, Pixar had decided to base its publicity campaign around the social satire issues in Wall-E—if the EPKs and junkets had featured Stanton ruminating on the themes of the film—it would have been in the lede of every review.

If Michael Moore, or Oliver Stone, or, God forbid, some effete French director, had crafted a feature film that was a thinly disguised political broadside portraying Americans as recumbent tubbos who moved around on sliding barcaloungers with built-in video screens and soft drinks always at the ready, don’t you think there’d be some sort of notice taken?

But Pixar does it and …

… the reviewers barely mention it. The new Pixar film, Wall-E, does indeed, as you have heard, tell the story of an adorable robot working alone on a depopulated earth. There’s an obvious ecological lesson here, and this has been duly noted, along with mentions of unspecified “themes” and “messages.”

But what was rarely analyzed in the reviews is that the earth is deserted because a Wal-Mart-like company called “Buy n’ Large” has filled it up with trash, and the departed humans, expanded to Big Gulp size, are contentedly gorging themselves amid the comforts of a flying Club Med, where they slide around on those carts, on which they watch TV continuously without even having to sit up completely. While some of the better reviewers mention the beglotted humanoid forms, I found it odd that most mainstream reviewers didn’t bother to point out what the film was saying.

I’m no film theorist, but I think what director Andrew Stanton is trying to tell us is that we humans eat so much and limit our movements to such a degree that we will soon become immobile whales unable to focus past the video screens permanently affixed in front of our field of vision.

(And not subtextually, either; as my friend Michael Sragow says about such obvious material in films, “It’s not subtext. It’s text text.”) What what are those wide-bottomed, view-screen laden SUV’s that cog our highways these days but early versions of the portly trams of Wall-E? I don’t want to be judgmental about people’s lifestyles, but it’s hard to look at the rotund, popcorn-barrel-toting silhouettes in a typical suburban movieplex and not notice that Stanton’s vision of the future isn’t all that exaggerated.*

The Hollywood Reporter doesn’t even mention the human sequences**.

Entertainment Weekly breaks the news gently and doesn’t discuss the implications***:

WALL-E himself is the movie’s mascot and unlikely hero; it’s up to him to save a spacebound colony of humans who’ve ”evolved” into hilariously infantile technology-junkie couch potatoes. Yet even as the movie turns pointedly, and resonantly, satirical, it never loses its heart.

Roger Ebert, too, goes easy on the bad news:

We meet a Hoverchair family, so known because aboard ship they get around in comfy chairs that hover over surfaces and whisk them about effortlessly. They’re all as fat as Susie’s aunt.

This is not entirely their fault, since generations in the low-gravity world aboard the Axiom have evolved humanity into a race whose members resemble those folks you see whizzing around Wal-Mart in their electric shopping carts.

Claudio Puig in USA Today mentions the engorged humans, but doesn’t make the obvous connection.

Joe Morgenstern in the WSJ mentions the trope in passing late in his review:

But I will tell you that humankind’s evolution, as foretold by Mr. Stanton and his colleagues, is a blissfully inspired reductio ad absurdum—or more accurately inflatio ad absurdum—of the ethos of consumption that now sustains the economies of prosperous nations.

Ken Turan tangentially mentions the humanoids. He’s better on the corporate angle:

Not to put too fine a point on it, our planet is a disaster, a bleak and disheartening ruin where every available surface is covered by towering skyscrapers of trash. It got so bad that Buy n’ Large, the conglomerate that has somehow taken charge of the planet, leaned on the entire human population to leave with a “space is the final fun-tier” campaign that featured slogans such as, “Too much garbage in your face? There’s plenty of space out in space.”

The only mainstream review I saw that made the obvious point (emphasis added) was A.O. Scott in the NYT:

Rather than turn a tale of environmental cataclysm into a scolding, self-satisfied lecture, Mr. Stanton shows his awareness of the contradictions inherent in using the medium of popular cinema to advance a critique of corporate consumer culture. The residents of the space station, accustomed to being tended by industrious robots, have grown to resemble giant babies, with soft faces, rounded torsos and stubby, weak limbs. Consumer capitalism, anticipating every possible need and swaddling its subjects in convenience, is an infantilizing force. But as they cruise around on reclining chairs, eyes fixed on video screens, taking in calories from straws sticking out of giant cups, these overgrown space babies also look like moviegoers at a multiplex.

They’re us, in other words. And like us, they’re not all bad. The paradox at the heart of “Wall-E” is that the drive to invent new things and improve the old ones—to buy and sell and make and collect—creates the potential for disaster and also the possible path away from it. Or, put another way, some of the same impulses that fill the world of “Wall-E”—our world—with junk can also fill it with art.

I disagree with his point, but it’s his perogative to make it. But why was he the only reviewer to take the film’s message at face value and address it head on?

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* Compare, for example, the trenchant comments of Hollywood Elsewhere’s Jeffrey Wells: “I understand the impulse on the part of director Andrew Stanton to call it a robot love story and leave it at that, but it’s a lie, of course—a disinforming of pig-trough moviegoers who might think twice about going to a ‘green’ movie that satirizes their lie-around, fat-ass lifestyle.”

** The standards of the Hollywood Reporter, incidentally, seem to be declining week to week. The review of Wall-E, by Kirk Hunnycut, is a piece of utterly mundane writing and doesn’t appear to have been edited. This is the review’s second graf:

The film is so clever and sophisticated that you worry, slightly, that it might be too clever to connect with mainstream audiences. But like those worries last year that having a rat for a hero in “Ratatouille” might throw off audiences, surely “WALL-E” will make that connection. It’s so sweet and funny that the multitudes undoubtedly will surrender to its many charms.

*** Owen Gleiberman in EW, incidentally, finally goes completely off his rocker into Spielberg lapdogism:

For a while, WALL-E is nearly wordless, and the director, Andrew Stanton (Finding Nemo), stages the early scenes with a gentle, unhurried mystery that is unabashedly Spielbergian.

Yeah, the beginning of Wall-E is a lot like the beginning of War of the Worlds: Outside of the fact that the former is deeply moving, cinematically poetic, daringly political, gracefully imagined, and executed with such taste and grace it makes you want to cry, and the latter is a loud, heavy-handed, mind-numbing, senselessly plotted crapload of thuddingly unsubtle filmmaking mechanics, they are very similar.

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 

A.O. Scott lauds Mr. Roger Ebert in the NY Times today; Ebert hasn’t died, of course—he’s just leaving his TV show and focusing on writing after a grueling years-long fight with cancer of the salivary glands has left him unable to speak—but the piece has a faint but unavoidable eulogistic feel. Scott gets at one thing that it too-infrequently appreciated about Ebert:

For his loyal readers Mr. Ebert’s resumption of reviewing (April 1 happened to be the 41st anniversary of his debut in The Sun-Times) is a chance to pick up an interrupted conversation. For those who labor beside or behind him in the vineyards of criticism it is an incitement to quit grousing and pick up the pace.

Not that any of us could hope to match his productivity. Nor could we entertain the comforting fantasy that the daunting quantity of the man’s work—four decades of something like six reviews a week, as well as festival reports, learned essays on classic films and the occasional profile—must entail a compromise in quality. As A. J. Liebling said of himself, nobody who writes faster can write better, and nobody better is faster.

Indeed, Ebert’s output always has been prodigious. His other secret is something subtler: a lack of dogma  that carries with it an implicit willingness to change his mind. On those infrequent occasions when he did, in the critical sense of the term, err—denouncing, most deliciously, “Blue Velvet” on its release—you can see him, in later pieces, grappling with the critical problems such films raise. You can also see him pointing out, quite perceptively, that even the film’s supporters weren’t really making the case for it.

Finally, the great variety of the work Scott notes includes one special pleasure—Ebert’s accounts of the shot-by-shot analyses of films he occasionally holds with film students. They are hard to dig up on his own web site, but here’s one, for “Pulp Fiction,” I found elsewhere on the web.

There’s a certain species of critical comment that combines ennui and sophistry. When a critic can shake his head at the terrible state of things these days, he is happy. Anthony Lane, in an appreciation of Davin Lean on his centenary, notes that Jon Stewart had made a joke at the Oscars about watching Lawrence of Arabia on an iPhone; Denby continued:

The glory of Lean was that, with “Lawrence,” he summoned his earliest memory of awe and, perhaps for the last time, restored our illusion that a mass medium could be a miracle. And the sadness of Lean is that he went on clinging to that belief while the rest of us watched it drift away. He died in 1991. Thank heaven he was not around for the iPhone.

I doubt I’m the only person under the illusion that there has been a scrap or two of miraculous mass media since 1963. But let’s think about that iPhone remark. Twenty years ago, we watched Lawrence, if at all, on a 20-inch TV, panned and scanned by a sociopath at Columbia Home Video. Today, we’re well on our way to making widescreen TVs available to most folks; they can easily approximate something close to the quality of the experience of watching a good film in an auditorium.

I didn’t say it would replace that experience—just that, for the first time ever, most films can be enjoyed by most people in a way that largely preserves their aesthetic integrity. It’s a fascinating development—I can’t imagine Lean, who did indeed believe in mass-market miracles, wouldn’t agree—and one too little noticed by those who wax reflexively nostalgic about the good old days that weren’t necessarily.

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.

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.