THB #743: "Critic!"

I wanted to write about film criticism in light of Michael Phillips taking the buy-out from The Chicago Tribune, which follows Rich Roeper taking the buyout from the Chicago Sun-Times earlier this spring. In recent weeks, Vanity Fair decided not to have a film critic anymore and Richard Lawson was let go.

Amy Nicholson has the job at the LA Times now… but the LA Times is a shadow of its former self, hidden behind a paywall, marginalized by a right-wing owner in a left-wing town.

Manohla Dargis is still Chief Film Critic at the New York Times and my first read when I am looking for the smartest voice on any film, whether I agree with her like or dislikes of a film. She’s reviewed about half of the major studio films this summer. And I have nothing against Alissa Wilkinson (who seems to be the undefined #2 at this point) or Brandon Yu or Glenn Kenny or others who fill the role for the paper of record when it’s not Manohla. We’re about 2.5 years out from A.O. Scott’s exit as the co-chief film critic (though someone needs to tell whoever manages the Google content for the paper)…

Here’s the thing…

I grew up in the era of newspapers (and magazines). When I came of age to care about movie criticism in any way, I read the local critic. Bill Cosford in Miami back then. Siskel and Ebert and Jonathan Rosenbaum in Chicago. Janet Maslin at the New York Times, when I moved there, Manohla Dargis at The Village Voice, Rex Reed, Jack Mathews, David Edelstein, Andrew Sarris, who I always preferred to Pauline Kael… not to mention the always irritating Anthony Lane.

Long before the internet existed, there were these critics at print outlets. And as we looked toward a weekend of new movies, critics with whom we had a long-standing intellectual relationship were a form of word-of-mouth, same as friends we actually had in the real world. Agreement wasn’t the goal… the same way you have friends and family with tastes that you can judge as you listen to them judge art.

Roger Ebert’s favorite critic, as he repeatedly told me back when, was Stanley Kauffmann, who was 26 years his senior… a generation older than Roger, but still young enough to shine brightly in his reviews in The New Republic for most of Roger’s life. Kauffmann passed away just 6 months after Roger tragically died too young at the age of 70. They served together on the National Society of Film Critics for a least a couple of decades.

Roger was deeply committed to doing every single review at the Chicago Sun-Times during his tenure there… and he wasn’t picking his spots. He reviewed pretty much every film that opened in Chicago. Kauffmann picked and chose, writing for a weekly. I wouldn’t say their tastes matched. For instance, Roger considered Scorsese the best American filmmaker and Kauffmann tended to pan him every time out. But there was a connection for Roger… a clarity he respected and enjoyed. That was the idea.

In the late 90s, I created the Quote Whore Scoreboard at Roughcut.com to keep track of all the writers/critics who seemed to love everything and who always seemed to say something that would fit perfectly in an ad. It was funny. And mean. But it became something else altogether when Columbia got itself in the ringer with David Manning, the quote whoring critic for The Ridgefield Press in Connecticut… because David Manning didn’t exist. John Horn, who was once a great journalist, sniffed Manning out. A lawsuit followed. And every studio’s sphincter tightened a bit, none more so than Columbia, where the tension around quoting continued well into the new millennium.

At Movie City News, in the 2000s, we followed a less amusing phenomenon with critics… the steady removal of the job of full-time film critic from newspapers across America. The number had dwindled from something like down below 90 when it finally was too sad to continue.

Of course, as the number of paid gigs was narrowing, the internet was becoming a part of everyone’s life. And with it, a certain democratization of critical voices, about movies and everything else.

The authoritative voice was dying.

I would love to spend 10 hours with a varied group of smart people talking about whether the death of the authoritative voice was/is a good thing or a bad thing. The power of getting a job at a major outlet - which is still a thing - not only didn’t define The Best Critic… it didn’t necessarily define a decent or professional critic. Newspapers often assigned writers from almost any other area of expertise to be The Movie Critic. Some grew into the job beautifully while other remained supercilious fucks. Kael, famously, started her career as a critic by loudly ripping into a movie at a coffee shop in San Francisco, overheard by an editor and offered a chance to print her thoughts (back when being printed was a rarity). Others, like Ebert, were waist-deep in movies from his high school and college days. There was never a real baseline for the job. There were ways of qualifying yourself… but basically it has always been a job that required the critic to claim their own value and worthiness to have a opinion. And at the highest and lowest levels, there are plenty of people happy to claim you have no business offering your opinion out loud.

Of course, with the internet, the baseline evaporated altogether, the primary standard becoming doing the work, having it seen, and having the right following. Ebert, who was a huge supporter of the internet from early on, not only embraced people from the web - from Harry Knowles to James Berardinelli to myself - and actively promoted them. A few years into his “Overlooked Film Festival,” he developed The Far-Flung Correspondents, embracing the work of critics from across the globe and bringing many of them together in Urbana-Champaign, Illinois for a week each year to build a culture. Many of them still write for RogerEbert.com, but even more so, planting their flags in their home nations to great success.

There are more than 3,000 "Approved Tomatometer Critics” on Rotten Tomatoes, according to the site. There are 329 reviews of Weapons on Rotten Tomatoes. 58 are from what RT has defined as “Top Critics,” about half of which seem to have the distinction for unknown reasons. (shrug)

But the problem with Rotten Tomatoes is not that less than 15% of its approved critics review pretty much any movie or that it is giving too much juice to some without a clear standard. It’s that the platform - now owned by Fandango, which is owned by NBC Universal and Warner Bros Discovery - is best known for an aggregated score, marking films as Fresh or Rotten. The only Major releases this summer marked as “Rotten” were Jurassic World: Rebirth, Smurfs, and I Know What You Did Last Summer. At least 2 of those 3 films will be profitable. Others, including some with pretty high ratings, will lose money. Of course, money doesn’t define quality. Neither does Rotten Tomatoes.

Don’t get me wrong… I love Rotten Tomatoes because I love having a platforms that allows me to find and source films critics, old and new. To read. In full. That is the value of the format. It is my failure that I have not found more critics to become a fan of via RT. The work is there to be read (though some is paywalled). I should be making more of an effort to cultivate those who I don’t already know and would think are a step above.

But there is soooooo much to read…

Is Spiltsville (85%, Fresh) twice as good as Honey Don’t (48%, Rotten)? Probably not. But it’s worth mentioning that the former has just 33 reviews and the latter, 60.

What do these ratings mean? I have discussed before that the tipping point for Rotten vs Fresh is 60%. So when I have to choose - and most of the critics on the site do - that is the standard that I use. Would I tell people not to pay to see a movie? But I don’t find that to be the general standard of reviews when I read a bunch of them. It’s much more “thumbs up” and “thumbs down.” I found Fantastic Four flawed… but not a grade of 60% flawed.

A. movie like Ari Aster’s Eddington can be very divisive. It’s now at 70% on RT. What does this mean? Can one interpret that score without reading reviews on both sides of that line? How many critics are reviewing their sense of Ari Aster and their expectations for the film rather than the film itself? How many critics walk into any Marvel film with a “prove it” attitude and into an art film from an indie filmmaker they respect with a “trying to find the positive” attitude?

There is no answer for these questions?

And there is a lot of variation in opinions about how to value any given answer to each of those questions. The old joke was that if you want 10 opinions, but 6 Jews in a room. (expressing my jewish privilege) But I find this to be even more true of a group of film critics.

That said, I have long argued that there is a kind of groupthink that happens a few times a year. Not a conspiracy. Not widely discussed. But there is almost always a summer film that gets over-pilloried because critics are just exhausted by putting a relatively happy face on movie after movie that they know will be popular with audiences, making them look wrong-spirited if they kick too hard. And there are always 3 or 4 films a year that, as a friend of mine says, are “just good enough to be overvalued.

Of course, this is tricky too. There is a reason I see films that I consider important more than once. I am uncomfortable with the idea that my “forever” feelings about a movie can be twisted by my mood or the mood of those around me. I feel compelled to check my own sense of things. But I have been fortunate to live in Los Angeles, where the next screening is usually possible, and being my own editor for most of my work life, therefore not feeling the traditional pressure of a deadline.

When I wanted to see Eddington a 2nd time before writing and the publicity company in LA couldn’t care less, I just waited until it was in a theater, writing about it on opening day instead of weeks earlier like most of the rest of the kids. Not every film critic feels that freedom.

The sex movie - in America - that was never a sex movie

But when we look at, for instance, the Kael & Sarris question, they often published after films opened, creating, intentionally or not, some space for reflection. This generally doesn’t matter with bad movies. It matters a lot with great movies. It took viewing 5 or 6 of Eyes Wide Shut, a plus reading the originating novella, to crack the code of the movie. I didn’t have the film on DVD or a stream, so if I was trying to figure out, for instance, the most fundamental element - that everything the first night of Dr. Bill’s dream is reversed in the second night - I needed another viewing to make sure that my sense of this was accurate. The color coding required more views. Figuring out the orgy sequence required a DVD of the international release, which hadn’t been obscured with digital bodies blocking the sex, which is almost all artificial in the sequence… but I couldn’t know that until I could see the other release. And once I had that, the language of the characters at the orgy became critical, as I realized they were not warning about him being in danger from the event, but that every line is about his marriage and that his dreams are, simply, about whether to cheat on his wife, who confessed she wanted to cheat after the Christmas party and a joint.

But I digress…

The point it, as some have put it to me, is that most people don’t want to have to examine a film to fully experience a film… or “Is it actually good if it takes multiple views to show its full self to you?”

I am not anywhere near as focused on studio-system film (pre-1965) as someone like Karina Longsworth or international film as someone like Bob Koehler. There are a lot of critics of my generation who have worked had to become experts in areas in which I often feel undereducated. I consume the full range of commercial American cinema in a way a guy like Glenn Kenny will, on occasion, mock as wasted time.

Mike Wilmington, who was a gloriously mad genius, saw movies old and new in a way that often surprised me, but was almost always interesting. (Editing the man, a job I unloaded much of onto Ray Pride when Mike worked for MCN, was challenging.) He was a generation older than me, so he had a natural memory of a decade or two of films that in my youth were unavailable pre-cable/pre-physical media. Did this make him more insightful or more stuck in the past than myself? In some ways yes and in some ways, no. Every critic is faced with themselves as the see and discuss enough films.

More information, whether about films or in watching the films themselves, can be a double-edged sword. If you want to write for Gen Z, callbacks to the past might make you suss. But knowing about older films and how most films work should inform how you see any film, from Marvel to Neon.

But deeply educated on film or barely educated on film, for the price of admission - or access through a studio invite - everyone can see most movies and have their own opinion. And if they don’t see them in a theater, they can see them on a TV through various means. The theatrical experience compared to the couch experience is another often major variable.

More people will see F1 on TV than saw it in theaters. But I pity anyone who sees it on TV, like it at all, and missed seeing it not only on a big screen, but an IMAX or Dolby quality/size screen. It’s a different movie. No character will win/lose a race in the film on TV that they didn’t in theaters. But it’s a different experience. This is one of the great ironies of the Apple Movies theatrical Hamlet experience… to be or not to be. They have made a lot of movies, equal in number to most Major studios, that play much, much better on the biggest screen possible. Beanie Bubble, CODA, Causeway, docs on Steve Martin and Michael J Fox… perfect for your TV. The Tragedy of MacBeth, Napoleon, Killers of the Flower Moon, The Gorge, Argylle, Blitz… all significantly richer experiences on a big-to-huge screen.

Then there is the way in which some Major studios treat critics, preferring these day to count on what was always understood to be media that wasn’t made of up of critics - junketeers - to establish a positive media word-of-mouth weeks before showing these films to the majority of film critics. who are then writing on short deadlines and, like it or not, in reference to the buzz that has always been created.

It’s gotten to the point where, in spite of a lot of media attention, I just disregard “the first takes” on movies. It is not meant as an insult to those writers or the movies. But seemingly every movie can find voices that LOVE whatever is coming. And I, as a critic, should never go into a theater with any kind of bias based on what has already been written/posted… not to support or push back.

This, of course, brings us to another huge problem in the “democratized” critical universe… living in bubbles of our individual creation. I don’t really need to explain this.

Except that it brings us all the way back to the good ol’ days of criticism when we were not only in a bubble with a critic or two, but in which we were truly stuck on those bubbles. There was very little way to access anything else. Maybe your family got the Sunday New York Times, but most likely not the daily for Friday reviews. So why should any of us be nostalgic or concerned about that version of the film critics forum?

Habit, maybe?

Part of this, for me, is that the limited spectrum of voices on film forced me, as a fan, to consider the writers with whom I disagreed in a real way, week after week, year after year. I always hated Anthony Lane as a film critic. But I read him every week (or every other week) and I thought about it seriously. Many others dismissed him. Some loved him. But I never laughed him off. He was a voice in a unique position to influence others about a form I love. And what, in all of his attempt to be witty while pissing over things, he offered an idea that, aside from his tone, enriched my thinking on this film or that? It happened.

I have told the story of Manohla Dargis’ Alien 3 review (Village Voice, June 30, 1992) many times. I was already living in Los Angeles, but I still read the Voice from here and I have the clipping in my boxes of memorabilia. In it, Manohla offers an argument for the real meaning of the film, David Fincher’s debut, as an AIDS allegory.

It’s worth noting that Dargis references other critics in her piece and specifically, Peter Travers, who also hooked into the AIDS metaphor.

As life works out, I got the opportunity to ask Fincher about this take on his film in an unexpected encounter in a Sunset Plaza restaurant. He denied it completely. And I tried again to take a run at it by asking one of the people who work with him on the film, who told me they asked and he denied it again.

The likelihood in 2025 World, is that a piece like this by a name critic would launch 1000 heated comments, both in professional and social media. It would bounce around for weeks, Film Twitter lining up on every side, Variety’s Tatiana Siegel chasing an expose on Fincher’s sex life, and Matt Belloni demanding that theatrical was over, Fox would be sold by Disney to Apple because of the controversy, that no one would never make another Alien movie, and that Fincher would be sent back to making music videos if Madonna would have him.

Punchline being… it would get more attention than it got then or in the 33 years since.

But is that good attention?

At least in 1992, we wouldn’t have to listen to Donald Trump explain that AIDS only exists in criminals (and that the 13-year-old in the limo was a friend of Ivanka’s).

Film Criticism can do magical things. It can change how you see a movie and seeing a great movie can change how you see the world.

And oh, the spectacular irony that as our televisions are loaded with people talking about everything else in the world, intentionally both-siding every issue, professional film criticism is an endangered species. The internet offers a bunch of podcasts in which passionate movie fans (some professionally so) argue about movies or simply offer their opinion as though it was somehow carrying the imprimatur of the movie gods.

Discussion of the work of movies, something I was an originator of on video in America, has been reduced to bite-sized clips on Tik Tok and other short-form platforms, access most often based not even on the size of the audience, but the ease with which the interviewer works with the personal publicists and serves the marketing desires of the distributor. Let them eat chicken!

There are, of course, exceptions. There are some serious people out there doing good work. There’s just a lot more circulating about that time the talent farted unexpectedly.

It’s funny (in a strange way) that one film critic still won’t talk to me because I suggested they were too much themself on camera and that they would be more successful if they portrayed themselves differently for TV. I’m pretty sure they read that as me saying that the character I was suggesting was their reality. I wasn’t saying that. But there are few journalists more thin-skinned than film critics.

One who is not is Leonard Maltin, who has been around at least a decade longer than me, and has represented a lot of different things to a lot of different people. He has managed to stay open and earnest and focused on the work through thick and thin. He, like Ebert, is one of the hardest workers in film criticism ever. He remains generous of spirit. And he still loves films.

I don’t quite know how to end this piece. I mourn the ongoing loss of professional film criticism. I am frustrated by the huge number of people who have simply declared themselves film critics, but I can’t say that I was not so birthed as a critic - to the degree I am one - in the same way. Longevity is not really a mark of quality. Some of our best deteriorated as they got older, more anxious to maintain their positions. But others have fought and produced until there was no more of them left. (Like all of show business, ageism is the more profound ism of this era… and there is a lot of competition.)

My only answer, really, is hope. My hope that it all works out in the best of ways.

Every generation has its history to make. Better and worse almost always feels like false markers. My measuring has to start, for better or worse, with myself. Am I contributing or and I just sucking of the teet of a segment of the film and tv industry that tends to operate on habit? And that goes for criticism, analysis, whimsical moments, and even the real life stuff.

Honestly, my first concern about losing the critics jobs at the Sun-Times and Tribune in Chicago is whether this will make it harder for the still-working critics to see all the movies they should be able to see. Roger and Gene were a huge part of nailing down Chicago as the 3rd stop on any domestic publicity plan. Are they booking the screening room to get that Maxwell Rabb review in The Reader or words from Ray Pride in New City or the many others in Chicagoland?

David Mamet was certainly not the first to write it, but he seems to have been the first to name a movie, “Things Change.”

Things change.

Please keep your hands and feet inside the cabin as we move on. We know we have to go, but we don’t want to lose any of what has been so precious to us.

Until tomorrow…